Visual Imaginations and Modern Jewish History

Establishes the centrality of visual culture within Judaism and Jewish history.

Visual Imaginations and Modern Jewish History traces how visual experience reflected and shaped Jewish life from the late seventeenth century onward. Richard I. Cohen shows how images, spaces, and objects were central to the making of modern Jewish identities and how the act of seeing itself became a site of cultural negotiation. Cohen claims that the prominence of visual art in modern Jewish life cannot be overlooked. Visual expression has become such a significant factor in Jewish life that it serves as both a mirror and an agent of Jewish modernity.

Cohen engages with a range of artists, figures like Moses Mendelssohn, Uriel Da Costa, and Baruch Spinoza, and such topics as the visual imaginings of the Mishnah, Jews in the military, and the motif of the Wandering Jew. Taken as a whole, the studies in this book argue that approaching modern Jewish history through images is not to replace the written word, but to restore to it the world of sight that Jews inhabited, created, and transformed.