Book contents
- Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
- Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- Part I The Imperial Context
- Part II After Imperialism: Orientalism and its Resistances
- Part III Post-Colonialist, Old Colonialist and Nationalist Fantasies
- 11 Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State (1948)
- 12 Whose History Is It Anyway? Contests for India’s Past in the Twentieth Century
- 13 Acculturated Natives Who Rebel: Revivalist, Ottomanist and Pan-Arabist Engagements with Early Islamic Art (1876–1930s)
- 14 Barbarians at the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion
- Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
11 - Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State (1948)
from Part III - Post-Colonialist, Old Colonialist and Nationalist Fantasies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 February 2020
- Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
- Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- Part I The Imperial Context
- Part II After Imperialism: Orientalism and its Resistances
- Part III Post-Colonialist, Old Colonialist and Nationalist Fantasies
- 11 Jewish Art: Before and After the Jewish State (1948)
- 12 Whose History Is It Anyway? Contests for India’s Past in the Twentieth Century
- 13 Acculturated Natives Who Rebel: Revivalist, Ottomanist and Pan-Arabist Engagements with Early Islamic Art (1876–1930s)
- 14 Barbarians at the British Museum: Anglo-Saxon Art, Race and Religion
- Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Subjects
Summary
The traditional view of late antique Jewish art is that there was none. Or, insofar as there was some, it ought not to have existed.1 This represents a deep cultural reflex about ‘Jewish aniconism’ whose origins in Judaic Scripture itself were replicated in ancient Graeco-Roman accounts of the Jews.2 In this sense both within antiquity and also in modernity, Judaism has been associated with a resistance to images by contrast with the aesthetically paradigmatic heritage of Hellenism. In terms of the complex of difficulties about, and reluctances to, images experienced by the religions which emerged in part in the wake of Judaism – namely Christianity and Islam – the idealized model of a prior Jewish aniconism and of simple worship, scripturally informed, by contrast with the risks of pagan idolatry that many Christians and Muslims long suspected to lie in art, has been a powerful factor in shaping religious ideology throughout late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the era of the Reformation and into modernity.3
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- Empires of Faith in Late AntiquityHistories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland, pp. 293 - 319Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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