Artless Jew

Kalman P. Bland is Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Duke University. He is author of Epistle on the Possibility of Conjunction with the Active Intellect and has published widely in scholarly journals.

• Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 One Modern Denials and Affirmations of Jewish Art: Germanophone Origins and Themes 13 Two Anglo-American Variations 37 Three The Premodern Consensus 59 Four The Well-Tempered Medieval Sensorium 71 Five Medieval Beauty and Cultural Relativism 92 Six Twelfth-Century Pilgrims, Golden Calves, and Religious Polemics 109 Seven The Power and Regulation of Images in Late Medieval Jewish Society 141 Notes 155 Bibliograpby 201 Index 229

"The research for this work reflects a great and careful scholarly effort...Highly recommended."--Choice "Bland has shown that the whole question of whether Jews are 'rtless' is a construction of modern thought, and has little to do with pre-modern Jews... An excellent counterweight to the vast literature that claims that Jews and Judaism are visually handicapped."--Steven Fine, Baltimore Hebrew University and the University of Cincinnati, for CAA.Reviews "A highly recommended building-block text for further study into the relationship between Judaism and visual art."--Religious Studies Review "Bland's carefully researched book offers an erudite riposte to post-Kantian aesthetic theory and an unusually useful account of the image in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish culture... [It] unsettles many received ideas and unearths many buried texts that change our notions of Jewish visual culture."--Adam Bresnick, Times Literary Supplement "Bland does an excellent job of convincing us ... of the high status of visual production in ancient, medieval and early modern Jewish societies."--Pamela Kachurin, The Art Book