Jewish Craftspeople and Their Material E

Recent research has shown that there is more evidence for Jewish craftspeople in medieval Europe than it had been previously assumed. Jews worked in different professions-not only within their community-and with a wide range of materials: kosher parchment sheets were needed to create Torah scrolls and codices for the synagogue service, shofarot were made from ram's horns and goldsmiths handled such precious materials as gold, silver or pearls. The sessions will focus on a number of topics from an interdisciplinary approach and discuss questions dealing with legal conditions, ritual requirements and interactions with the Christian environment. Methodology from the disciplines of art history, history, archaeology and applied natural sciences will be employed to gain new insight into the roles of Jewish craftspeople, their objects, their techniques, and materials used.

Recent research has shown that there is more evidence for Jewish craftspeople in medieval Europe than it had been previously assumed. Jews worked in different professions -not only within their community -and with a wide range of materials: kosher parchment sheets were needed to create Torah scrolls and codices for the synagogue service, shofarot were made from ram's horns and goldsmiths handled such precious materials as gold, silver or pearls. The sessions will focus on a number of topics from an interdisciplinary approach and discuss questions dealing with legal conditions, ritual requirements and interactions with the Christian environment. Methodology from the disciplines of art history, history, archaeology and applied natural sciences will be employed to gain new insight into the roles of Jewish craftspeople, their objects, their techniques, and materials used.

Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art, 2013

Middle Eastern Studies, 2018

This study analyzes the social history of Jewish entrepreneurs in the gold-thread craft of Fez from its high point to its lowest. Initially, it presents the traditional arrangements that turned the making of gold threads into a proper Jewish craft by the Middle Ages. The turning point marking the decline of this craft was between the two world wars. The passage from a pre-industrial economy to the industrial system was expressed through the automation of the means of production, and the capitalistic approach of the government as well. Consequently, the great entrepreneurs replaced the small producers with machines bringing the handmade craft of gold-thread to near collapse. Thus, my research also describes the methods of protest and struggle employed by the producers against the new economic order, adding insights into the impact of modernization on the internal solidarity among different social classes in the Jewish community of Fez.

Jews and Christians in the First and Second Century: Mapping the Second Centuryturies Mapping the Second Century, 2024

This article presents Jewish and Christian household material culture of the second century CE and compares them within the parameters of the 'parting of the ways'. Not only were the material ways of Household Judaism and Christianity parted, but they were never even entwined. Jewish householders and Christian householders might have used the same objects, but those objects were neither Christian nor Jewish. However, in the Jewish home, household objects could become Jewish things. In the Christian household, objects remained objects. While it might be possible to map aspects of Jewish or Christian material culture, often it was not a question of shared territory or overlapping boundaries, but of different maps entirely.

In the present article I would like to discuss a unique phenomenon in the material culture of ancient Israel during the biblical period: the lack of painted decoration on pottery. Unlike their neighbors in Philistia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Ammon, Edom and others, the Israelite did not decorate their pottery. In the following, I will present the phenomenon and will examine it within the historical context in which it developed.

Ritual Objects in Ritual Contexts (Erfurter Schriften zur Jüdischen Geschichte 6), hg. von Claudia D. Bergmann und Maria Stürzebecher, Jena/Quedlinburg 2020, S. 110-117, 2020