Visual Imaginations and Modern Jewish History

Richard I. Cohen is emeritus professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include The Burden of Conscience: French-Jewish Leadership During the Holocaust; Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe; and, with Mirjam Rajner, Samuel Hirszenberg 1865–1908: A Polish Jewish Artist in Turmoil. He has also co-curated and coedited From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power, 1600-1800 and Le Juif Errant: Un témoin de temps.

“How rare that a historian so thoroughly, meticulously, and rigorously analyzes imaging—and not just images—for insights into major moments in the history of European Jews. Deft and eloquent, detailed and insightful, and above all erudite, Visual Imaginations and Modern Jewish History is a fascinating journey through the highways and byways of Jewish visual culture. Cohen explores Jewish visual culture in its own right and as a lens, as a way of looking at history. A tour de force in the reading of images for what they can tell us about themselves and about those who made and consumed them.”

• Introduction 1. Imagining Visually the Mishnah: From Wagenseil to Surenhusius 2. Seeing Moses Mendelssohn 3. Jews and the Military: Visual Discourse in the Long Nineteenth Century 4. The Visual World of an Orthodox Schoolteacher in Germany: Israel Wiesen (1835–1900) 5. Reclaiming Baruch Spinoza and Uriel Da Costa in Jewish Visual Culture 6. The Wandering Jew in Uncertain Times 7. The Visual Challenge to the Text in Modern Jewish Culture Epilogue Acknowledgments Bibliography Index Illustration Credits