Jewish Art

by Gabrielle Sed-Rajna

Covering nearly 4000 years, this extensively illustrated study traces the history of Jewish art from its origins - the Temple in Jerusalem, circa 2000 BC - to the work of the 20th-century artist, Marc Chagall. It offers a survey of the art produced within, and inspired by, Jewish civilizations on five continents, incorporating religious painting, sculpture and architecture, mosaics, frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, silver, textiles, and other decorative...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810935147
• ISBN13: 9780810935143
• Release Date: February 1997
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Length: 635 Pages
• Weight: 8.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 10.0" x 12.0"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Jewish Art in all its glory

There are quite a few coffee table books on the market that focus on one or another aspect of Jewish art, e.g., calligraphy, medieval illuminated manuscripts, synagogue architecture, ritual objects, paintings especially in the modern period, and so on. Some are more than coffee table books, with scholarly articles of real value. But none that I have seen can even come close to the breadth, scholarly depth and excellence of this volume. Even the number and very high quality of the color plates make this work stand out. In fact, the irresistable impulse of every first reader will just be to page through the over 900 actual large-size pages (635 of text) of this volume for hours, savouring the extraordinary beauty, richness and detail of the 272 full page color plates, which wonderfully reproduce pages from medieval illuminated manuscripts, interiors of synagogues, mosaic floors of antiquity, Torah crowns, chanukah lamps, paintings from the third century C.E. on to the present, and much else. The reproductions are intense and vivid, fully up to the best standard of the Abrams publishing house (famous for the high quality of its art books), and just by themselves make this book a valuable purchase. But there are also 523 black-and-white illustrations to document the full range of every category of art, and to support the articles. The articles themselves survey the entire history of Jewish art, and are written at a high level of scholarship while remaining clear and lucid. They make consistently enjoyable and informative reading. They reveal that simply by focussing on art, much else in Jewish history is revealed in a new light. The editor presents a sane and useful definition of Jewish art in the opening pages, which allows her to include discussion of, and reproduction of, beautiful Renaissance Torah manuscripts or modern synagogues that were the products in part of non-Jewish masters. But it becomes clear from this book that a great deal in non-Jewish art had its origins in fully Jewish circles. Influences went both ways. It is not maintained that there is only one set of artistic conventions that define something as "Jewish" in world view, for, as is pointed out, the art of no major civilization can be understood in any static fashion. Yet there are thematic continuities running through the whole sweep of Jewish art, which spans millenia. Certainly no one will be able to maintain any further that there is very little to talk about in connection with Jewish art, and the old cliche that Rabbinic Jewish beliefs prohibited all depiction of the human figure is obviously disproven here, even for the late Talmudic period. The reader will come to appreciate that discovering the full richness of Jewish art is like discovering a whole lost continent, unjustly ignored and well deserving extended exploration. There is a very full discussion of the archaeology of the synagogue, and the significance of the arti