In this episode, MMA series producer and host Reed O'Mara chats with organizers of and participants in Cosmic Ecologies: Animalities in Premodern Jewish Culture, a recent symposium held at Northwestern University and the Newberry Library. The conversation explores medieval Jewish art and culture, particularly cosmic ecologies and their continuities across the animal-human-divine-demonic spectrum.
Reed O'Mara is a fifth-year PhD candidate and Mellon Foundation Fellow in the joint art history program between Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She focuses on the arts of medieval Germany, and her primary research interests lie in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and Gothic architectural sculpture. Reed's dissertation considers the complex histories of Hebrew and Yiddish in late medieval Europe through an examination of text and image relationships in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and Christian prints from Ashkenaz and Italy, ca. 1200-1500.
Elina Gertsman is Distinguished University Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Medieval Art at Case Western Reserve University, where she currently serves as an interim chair of the Art History and Art Department. She writes on a wide variety of subjects, from image theory to polyfunctionality of objects. Her books have tackled macabre murals, manipulable devotional sculpture, and unrepresentability in illuminated manuscripts. Anthologies have addressed questions of liminality, emotion, performance, abstraction, and animation. Recent articles have explored manuscript absences and erasures, materiality & semiotics of medium, figurations of despair, sensorium & imagination, and animality. Her work has been supported by the Guggenheim, Kress, Mellon, and Franco-American Cultural Exchange Foundations as well as by the ACLS.
David Shyovitz is Associate Professor of History and Director of NU's Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies. His research focuses on medieval European intellectual and cultural history, with a particular emphasis on Jewish history and Jewish-Christian relations. He is the author of A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (Philadelphia, 2017), which was awarded the John Nicholas Brown Prize for best first book in Medieval Studies by the Medieval Academy of America. His current book project, "O Beastly Jew!" Jews, Animals, and Jewish Animals in the Middle Ages, explores the overlapping ways in which Jewish and Christian authors and artists distinguished humans from animals, and Jews from Christians, over the course of the Middle Ages.
Julie A. Harris is a specialist in the art of medieval Iberia. Among other topics, she has published on ivory carving, the fate of art and architecture during Reconquest warfare, and illuminated Hebrew manuscripts. She has participated in three of Therese Martin’s international research projects: “Reassessing the Role of Women as Makers” the “Treasury of San Isidoro in León,” and the ongoing “Medieval Iberian Treasury in Context: Collections, Connections, and Representations on the Peninsula and Beyond.” Her recent publications have appeared in Ars Judaica, Gesta, the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, Medieval Encounters, Journal of Medieval History and Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament, edited by Elina Gertsman (AUP, 2021). She was recently awarded a Center for Spain in America fellowship at the Clark Institute for her project on the decorative Carpet pages of Iberian Hebrew Bibles.
Sara Offenberg is the head of the Department of Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She has published articles in a number of journals and edited collections and is the author of two books. From 2014 to 2017, she served as co-editor of the journal Ars Judaica: The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art, and since 2021, she has been the managing editor of Mabatim: Journal of Visual Culture. Her research focuses on various topics, including chivalry and warriors in Hebrew manuscripts, German Pietists, Hebrew illuminated prayer books, and Jewish-Christian relations in art and literature.
Beth Berkowitz is a scholar of Jewish and Religious Studies with a specialization in classical rabbinic literature. She is the author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006); Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). She is co-editor with Elizabeth Shanks Alexander of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current writing is on the experience of pleasure in animals as the Babylonian Talmud conceives it, and her next book project will be a “biblical bestiary” that profiles the reception history of various animal characters in the Hebrew Bible.
Resources discussed in the episode:
"Cosmic Ecologies: Animalities in Premodern Jewish Culture" conference website and program
V&A (Victoria & Albert Museum) Conference mentioned by Elina Gertsman, taking place 26 November 2024
The Hebrew Bible discussed by Sara Offenberg is Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. hébr. 8-9-10. The image of the two donkeys climbing the ladder can be found here (Ms. hébr. 9, fol. 157r).
The Tripartite Mahzor image mentioned by Elina Gertsman is from London, British Library, Add. 22413, vol. 2, fol. 3r.
Many Jewish manuscripts are digitized on Ktiv, The International Collection of Digitized Hebrew Manuscripts.
David Shyovitz's first book, which is alluded to several times, is A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (available through University of Pennsylvania Press).
Rafael "Rafe" Neis's recent book, also mentioned in the episode, is When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (available through University of California Press).
The author mentioned by David Shyovitz is Lynn White, Jr., who authored "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): pp. 1203-207.
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