The Elephant and the Law: The Medieval Jewish Minority Adapts a Christian Motif

Abstract

Jewish art, often regarded as derivative of its cultural milieu, can, in fact, be demonstrated to illuminate the internal religious and sociopolitical landscape of its creators. By documenting the odyssey of the “bestiary elephant,” an iconographic device with unequivocally Christian associations, in medieval through mid-eighteenth-century Jewish art, this study illustrates the manner by which the negative Christian topos of the lumbering, cumbersome, and deliberative Hebrew Law was creatively reread into an iconography of lex militans in a Jewish context. The essay explores what it meant for a minority group to borrow cultural idioms, and how Europe's preeminent medieval minority transformed images appropriated from Christian art into meaningful Jewish motifs.

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Notes on contributors

Marc Michael Epstein

Marc Michael Epstein teaches Judaic studies in an interdisciplinary context at Vassar College. He writes on the relationship between texts and iconography bearing on the mentalités of the medieval Jewish minority, and is completing a book titled “If Lions Could Carve Stones”: The Uses of Jewish Art in the Context of Minority Culture [Department of Religion, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 12601].