Judaism and the Visual Image

by Melissa Raphael

It is now widely agreed that the biblical Second Commandment neither limits Jewish art to the production of ceremonial artifacts nor to abstract or distorted images. Raphael goes further and argues that while creation and revelation are inherently aesthetic moments both for God and the world, the assumption that Jewish religious tradition is nonetheless mediated in words, not pictures, has left Jewish art with no significant role to play in Jewish theology and ethics. Despite a substantial body of literature on the history and diversity of Jewish art, almost nothing has been published on the role of the visual image in Jewish theology, historiography, and gender studies. In conversation with modern Jewish theology, Jewish historians' recent re-evaluation of the role of the visual in Jewish culture, and with the growing body of Christian theological aesthetics, Raphael engages several areas of contemporary debate relevant to students, scholars and the general reader. Arguing that the cr