| In 1609 Leon Modena, the enigmatic Venetian alchemist, gambler and rabbi, edited a haggadah, the liturgy for the Jewish festival of Passover, at the press of the Christian Hebraist Giovanni di Gara. Populated with images of messianic redemption, necromancy and infanticide, the Venice Haggadah presented its readers with an irresistible invitation to imagine, remember and reenact the Israelite Exodus from Egypt. Describing the function of the images in a preface to the volume, Modena argued that the haggadah's visual program was intended to engage the eyes and imagination just as the book's text engaged the intellect.;This project offers a radical reinterpretation of Jewish visual and material culture, arguing that the modern academic assumption of a contest between Jewish texts and the technology of image making is both ideologically suspect and factually false. While modernity has become comfortable with the notion of an aniconic Jewish past, I argue that early modern Jewish visual culture was constructed by continuities between phenomena previously taken to be in conflict: reading and seeing, intellect and affect, text and image.;The Venice Haggadah serves as an appropriate backbone for this study. The book not only exerted a tremendous influence on early modern Jewish visual culture, but also poignantly signals an awareness of the combined interpretive virtues of visual and verbal material that I argue is a defining characteristic of Jewish visual culture in the early modern period. The text of the Passover haggadah is largely a conventional one. It redacts biblical passages, traditional hymns, and ancient rabbinic sources to narrate the redemption of the Israelites from enslavement in Egypt. Haggadah decoration, however, is historically specific and culturally idiosyncratic; it is largely in its decoration that one book is meaningfully distinguishable from others. At its printing in 1609, the Venice Haggadah contained the most elaborate visual program of any text printed for a Jewish audience. Its program of original woodcuts, including narrative images and architectural frames, span its forty pages and demonstrates the presence of a vibrant Jewish visual culture in early modern Italy. |
