People of the Image

A revealing examination of how medieval Jews understood themselves, the world, and God through visual art.

The Middle Ages provide us with one of the richest repositories of art in the West. Yet the rise in the production of art made for and by Jews—especially in the form of illuminated manuscripts—is often neglected in general surveys or viewed as a mere emulation of Christian art during this period.

In People of the Image, Marc Michael Epstein demonstrates how medieval Jews transformed their visual art into a vital site of critical commentary. Through bold speculation and radical interpretation, Epstein considers how viewers might have empathized with depicted emotions, how they envisioned the relationship between the monstrous and the human, and how they could effectively perpetrate subversive acts merely by anticipating what might occur next in a given image were it to be set in motion. Examining these artworks and imagining the circumstances of their production and reception, Epstein uncovers otherwise inaccessible social, political, and theological perceptions among Europe’s major medieval minority. He goes on to illuminate the afterlives of medieval Jewish art in its reimaginings by postmodern Jews struggling to establish a conceptual as well as a political space for themselves as a minority in majority Christian society.

Bringing together diverse currents from various fields and bodies of literature, People of the Image reveals how medieval Jews understood themselves, the world, and God. Provocative and engagingly written, the book will appeal to audiences across medieval studies, cultural studies, art history, and Jewish studies.