or personal liturgical use were not spared. Thus, though the Jews were avid consumers of
books, we are left with only a fragmentary remnant of what is presumed to have existed.
The surviving illuminated manuscripts produced by and for Jews indicate the magnitude
of the loss of 1242: though relatively few in number, they can rival the best of the
productions of the Latin manuscript workshops of the High Gothic. At the same time,
such works remind us that the cultural production of medieval French Jewry was rich,
almost as if in defiance of the difficulties under which it flourished. They also testify to
the pervasiveness of literary culture among the Jews. Books were not restricted to the
elite or to synagogue functionaries, as is evinced by the considerably cruder and more
provincial manuscripts that have survived.
A variety of books were illuminated: liturgical works, legal codes, miscellaneous
volumes, and presumably marriage contracts as well. The Scroll of the Law itself, read in
the synagogue, was required by the legal tradition to remain unadorned, but the majority
of surviving French illuminated manuscripts are liturgical—festival prayer books and
manuals for the home ritual of Passover. In all of these, the pervasive themes of the
Jewish tradition, as dictated by those texts, are illustrated in a distinctively French style.
Stylistic content reflects the influence on the illuminations of shifting Jewish
demography: manuscripts bear evidence of the assimilation of stylistic conventions from
northern and northeastern France, England, and the Germanic lands. The figures depicted
in some are replete with the courtly contrapposto of certain Paris schools, or with the
stylized hair, beards, and drapery typical of the workshop of Master Honoré. Some
examples are so fine that researchers have been moved to assert that they were in fact
illuminated by Christian artisans, a view that has both its supporters and detractors among
prominent scholars in the field.
Initially, the Hebrew manuscripts may seem surprisingly similar in their iconography
to Latin manuscripts. The details seem to devolve from a Christian rather than from any
distinctively Jewish milieu. We see a bare-headed Moses, a Solomon bedecked in the
trappings of a medieval French monarch, an Aaron whose priestly garb is the typical
dress of a medieval French Jew, haloed angels. A depiction of the three Hebrews before
Nebuchadnezzer and in the fiery furnace is remarkably similar to a scene from the
chronicle of the life of St. Denis (Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève 782, fol. 129v);
the clothing is the typical “biblical” garb in which figures in Latin Bible illustrations
appear, and the architecture is Gothic.
These manuscripts, however, are not mere offshoots of or borrowings from the
Christian tradition of illumination. The very fact that the clothing of the figures is the
typical garb of Latin Bible illumination is unremarkable in a Christian context, but
interesting here. That these clothes are based in some cases upon contemporary Jewish
dress heightens the association of the viewer with the figures. The Jews were not merely
a minority in medieval France. They were a minority viewed with a mixture of
fascination and hostility as the remnants of the ancient Jews. They were occasionally
despised, sometimes envied, usually misunderstood. In times of active persecution and
relative toleration alike, they felt both ambivalence and defiance toward the majority
culture. When “read” against the historical background, the iconography of these works
reveals the desire to utilize traditional motifs and even motifs from the dominant
Christian culture to protest the circumstances in which the artists and their patrons find
themselves and to express eschatological hopes, often for triumph over the persecutors.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1100