Judaism and the Visual Image
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 creation story in Genesis 1 mandates a Jewish theology of image, Raphael asks how and why images of Jewish women as religious subjects appear to be doubly suppressed by the Second Commandment and absent from modern Jewish culture, when images of observant male Jews have become legitimate, even iconic, representations of Jewish holiness. Against a tide of scholarly opinion that argues against the aestheticization of the Holocaust, she further suggests that ‘devout beholding’ of images of holocaustal suffering can correct post-Holocaust theologies of divine absence that have been skewed by the sub-theological aesthetics of the sublime. Raphael concludes by proposing that the relationship between God and Israel ultimately composes itself into a unitary dance or moving image by which God’s presence in the world can be represented to witness.
