Publisher:
University of California Press, Berkeley
;
EBSCO Industries, Inc., Birmingham, AL, USA
With the help of over one hundred illustrations spanning three centuries, Richard Cohen investigates the role of visual images in European Jewish history. In these images and objects that reflect, refract, and also shape daily experience, he finds...
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With the help of over one hundred illustrations spanning three centuries, Richard Cohen investigates the role of visual images in European Jewish history. In these images and objects that reflect, refract, and also shape daily experience, he finds new and illuminating insights into Jewish life in the modern period. Pointing to recent scholarship that overturns the stereotype of Jews as people of the text, unconcerned with the visual, Cohen shows how the coming of the modern period expanded the relationship of Jews to the visual realm far beyond the religious context. In one such manifestation, orthodox Jewry made icons of popular tabbis, creating images that helped to bridge the sacred and the secular. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the study and collecting of Jewish art became a legitimate and even passionate pursuit, and signaled the entry of Jews into the art world as painters, collectors, and dealers. Cohen's exploration of early Jewish exhibitions, museums, and museology opens a new window on the relationship of art to Jewish culture and society.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 319-348) and index
1. The Visual Image of the Jew and Judaism -- 2. Ceremonial Art, Patronage, and Taste -- 3. The Rabbi as Icon -- 4. Nostalgia and "The Return to the Ghetto" -- 5. Self-Exposure, Self-Image, and Memory -- 6. Images of Jewish Fate
With the help of over one hundred illustrations spanning three centuries, Richard Cohen investigates the role of visual images in European Jewish history. In these images and objects that reflect, refract, and also shape daily experience, he finds new and illuminating insights into Jewish life in the modern period. Pointing to recent scholarship that overturns the stereotype of Jews as people of the text, unconcerned with the visual, Cohen shows how the coming of the modern period expanded the relationship of Jews to the visual realm far beyond the religious context. In one such manifestation, orthodox Jewry made icons of popular tabbis, creating images that helped to bridge the sacred and the secular. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the study and collecting of Jewish art became a legitimate and even passionate pursuit, and signaled the entry of Jews into the art world as painters, collectors, and dealers. Cohen's exploration of early Jewish exhibitions, museums, and museology opens a new window on the relationship of art to Jewish culture and society
