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The watching night: print, power and Jewish vision in early modern Italy

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The watching night: print, power and Jewish vision in early modern Italy

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The Watching Night: Print, Power and Jewish Vision in Early Modern
Italy

Jeremy Glatstein

University of Southern California
Department of Art History

ii

For My Parents

iii

Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Abstract iv

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1
Jewish Vision in Early Modern Italy 30

Chapter 2
A Messiah at the Threshold: Imagining Redemption in the Venice Haggadah 67

Chapter 3
“In Your Blood, Live”: Jewish Difference and the Fate of Children in the Venice Haggadah 102

Chapter 4
Moses and the Golem: Necromancy and the Politics of Unbelief 148

Conclusion 183

Images 188

Bibliography 233

iv

Abstract

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
v
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.

vi
Acknowledgements

Primary research in Venice was supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation,
the Patricia Labalme Grant from the Renaissance Society of America, as well as a travel
grant from USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. The Luce Foundation funded
Institute in Jewish Art and a travel grant from the J. Paul Getty Museum funded training
at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. Writing was supported by
a yearlong fellowship from the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
This study was initially conceived while a student at the Institute in Jewish Art at
the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, a program designed to open dialogue
between Jewish visual culture and the traditional history of art. I am immensely grateful
to Vivian Mann and David Kraemer at the JTSA for their participation in this vital
program. Chapters were presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference,
the Early Modern Workshop at the Radcliffe Institute, Stanford University, the
University of Toronto Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, the Renaissance
Society of American Annual Conferences in Los Angeles and Montreal, and the
University of Southern California.
If the critic Jerome McGann is correct, and "the universe of literature is socially
generated," a dissertation is doubly so. Consequently, I have many people to thank for
their contributions to this study. At Occidental College, I would like to thank Amy
Lyford, and Damian Stocking, and single out the extraordinary Eric Frank, who provided
me with an exceptionally rich foundation for exploring the Renaissance. At Syracuse
University, I thank Gary Radke and Dennis Romano, and in Florence, Jonathan Katz
vii
Nelson. At the J. Paul Getty Museum I am grateful to my colleagues and friends, Peggy
Fogelman, Peter Tokofsky, Tuyet Bach and Mary Beth Carosello. The chapters began as
papers for seminars taught at USC by Deborah Harkness, Daniela Bleichmar, and
Cynthia Herrup, and without their positive reinforcement, the papers would never have
become chapters. I am profoundly grateful to my dissertation committee, including Tita
Rosenthal and Eunice Howe, for their attention to detail and support for this project. No
one could wish for a better instructor in the world of rare books than David Brafman at
the Getty Research Institute. Among my colleagues at USC, I am particularly grateful to
Ellen Dooley and Sean Nelson and for years of commiseration and inspiration.
This dissertation was completed while serving as a stay at home father to two
wonderful children. These chapters were written in between diaper changes, schlepping
to and from school, cooking, cleaning and hours of playing with Star Wars action figures.
To Ari and Nili, the pride I take in completing this dissertation is nothing compared to the
joy I have found in being your father.
Ben and Gabe, thanks you guys.
Mom and Dad, you can finally stop worrying about when I will finish my
dissertation. Now you can start worrying about when I will get a job. Thank you for
teaching me what is important. Thank you for everything.
Finally, this project would not exist without my friend and mentor Sean Roberts.
Academia is populated with brilliant scholars, but very few kind ones. I feel immensely
grateful to have found an advisor who is both. Whatever sparks of insight are found here
would never have been written without your guidance and unwavering support.

To my wife and my best friend of thirteen years: Allison, beshert.
1

Introduction

“The sensory capacity for sight belonging to the Jews was never such as to allow them to
produce visual artists; their eyes are preoccupied with matters much more practical than
beauty and the spiritual content of things in the phenomenal world.”
1

Richard Wagner, Der Judenthum in der Musik (1888)

Despite its strategic lacunae, the innuendo is articulate enough, evoking images of
usurious Shylockian misers, encased within windowless stone and mortar ghettoes,
slavering over stacks of golden ducats while the dynamic world of images flourishes
behind their backs, unacknowledged. For Wagner, Jews suffer from two interrelated
pathologies. Among all the peoples of the earth, Jews are unique in their lack for the
fundamental desire to create visual art, an impulse Alois Riegl seminally described as the
kunstwollen.
2
But, according to Wagner, this lack of artistic creativity is only
symptomatic of a broader problem: the disengagement with the phenomenal, sensual
world, in favor of more prosaic and vulgar activities. The polemicists who promote this
view gesture emphatically to the biblical Second Commandment, which prohibits the

1
Richard Wagner, Der Judenthum in der Musik (Leipzig, 1888), 72-3. Translated in
Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the
Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 27. See also Kalman Bland,
“Antisemitism and Aniconism: The Germanophone Requiem for Jewish Visual Art,”
Jewish Identity in Modern Jewish History, ed. Catherine Sousloff (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999), 41-66.
2
The term is traditionally translated as the “will to art” or perhaps “will to form or
shape.” Progressive for his time, Riegl even included Islamic decorative art and
architecture as a significant manifestation of the kunstwollen. For recent work on the
concept, see Jas Elsner, “From empirical evidence to the big picture: some reflections on
Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 741-66.
2
creation and worship of idols.
3
This early hostility towards the visual, so the argument
goes, was institutionalized and essentialized in a self-imposed blindness. There in the
very origins of the religion is the mandate to turn away from the visual and toward insular
worship.
Kalman Bland has demonstrated the outstanding continuities between the ancient
and modern polemical conceptions of Jewish vision.
4
The tradition holds that Jewish
vision is ossified, unchanging, preserved in its biblical state.
5
While it is easy to dismiss
this historiographical prejudice as relic of a bygone era, as recently as 2007, the British
art historian John Onians declared,

“In many ways the most impaired in their self-awareness were those Europeans
who during the last two and a half thousand years were most influenced by Jewish
and Greek thought...The Jewish belief that they alone were made in God's image
denied them the wisdom that might have come from studying other creatures.”
6

Collapsing the distinctions between ancient Israelite, rabbinic teaching and modern Jew,
Onians suggests that Jewish eyes have perpetually been consumed with pedestrian
business, too occupied to attend to the careful looking that constitutes a legitimate art

3
Joseph Gutmann, “The 'Second Commandment' and the Image in Judaism,” Hebrew
Union College Annual 32 (1961): 161-74. See also the collection of scholarly articles
published in Joseph Gutmann, No Graven Images: Studies in Art and the Hebrew Bible
(New York: Ktav, 1971).
4
Bland’s essential argument is that modern notions of anti-Semitism draw substantially
on earlier discourses of Jewish artlessness or hostility towards the visual, see Bland,
Artless Jew, 3-13. Also see Kalman P. Bland, “Defending, Enjoying and Regulating the
Visual,” Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period
ed. Lawrence Fine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 281-297.
5
Such is the infamous claim of Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1934-1961) Volume 1, Section VII, 135-139.
6
John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 16.
3
historical audience.
7
Clifford Geertz reminds us, however, that “the mere use of terms
such as ‘Islam,’ ‘Buddhism’…and so on, tends to make us think of a religion as a kind of
block, an eternal object that is always the same—somehow outside of the historical
process.”
8
This trans-historical treatment of Jewish vision is closely paralleled by the
historiography of Islamic visual culture. Christiane Gruber has revealed an early modern
Islamic visual culture engaged in the type of affective piety practiced both in Counter-
Reformation Catholicism and contemporaneous Jewish mysticism. Gruber finds that
even when all figural imagery is removed from objects, visualizing God remained a
crucial aspect of devotion. Ottoman hilya panels, for instance, which present ekphrastic
descriptions of Muhammad correspond closely to calligraphic Lutheran Catechism
panels, and the Jewish devotional texts explored here.
9
The scholarly treatment of both
of these visual cultures suffers from the assumption of historical stagnation, the claim that
the commandment against idolatry was culturally universal, trans-historical and
absolute.
10

Separated by more than a century, the words of Wagner and Onians are
remarkable for their unity of spirit. Indeed, the resonance between the nineteenth-century
polemic of a virulent anti-Semite and the twenty-first century scholarship of an

7
It should be noted that not all scholars have been sympathetic to Onians’ work,
Raymond Tallis, for instance, dismisses the scientific evidence for Onians; work as
“ludicrously tendentious,” see Raymond Tallis, “The Limitations of a Neurological
Approach to Art,” The Lancet 372 (2008): 19-20.
8
Clifford Geertz, “The Discussion,” in Religion and Progress in Modern Asia, ed. R.N.
Bellah (New York: Free Press, 1965), 155.
9
Christiane Gruber, “Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nur): Representations of the
Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Painting,” Muqarnas 26 (2009): 1-34; and for Lutheran
examples, see Joseph Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), 362-376.
10
Finbarr Barry Flood, “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and
the Museum,” The Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 641-659.
4
established art historian in a volume published by a canonical university press is at the
very least provocative. In the case of Onians it is productive to consider how such a
patently polemical claim permeated the institutional layers of editorial policy and peer
review to appear in print. The explanation, I believe, is not some found in some vast
editorial conspiracy. Rather, Onians’ unreflective rhetoric testifies to the pervasive and
comfortable conception of Jewish artlessness in the discipline of art history. The notion
of Jewish visual poverty is autochthonous to the field, and several influential studies have
charted its historiography.
11
While it is increasingly possible to recognize the discourses
that construct this conception of Jewish artlessness, it is challenging for art historians to
provide concrete counter-examples.
12
To a great extent art historians have failed to
provide objects of study that might disrupt, intervene, or otherwise enter into dialogue
with the art historical cannon.
If early modern Jews occasionally turned away from their towering stacks of
ducats, a question confronts scholars: what did they see? Robert Bonfil, the preeminent
scholar in the field has characterized the early modern Jewish sensory world as one
composed primarily of dark colors, oppressive sights and offensive odors.
13
While the
bleak tone is appropriate in many ways, this portrait is also unnecessarily lachrymose.
Surely visual experience was more nuanced than an endless parade of brown. If not

11
Catherine Sousloff, ed. Jewish Identity in Modern Art History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999). Margaret Olin, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern
Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).
12
The major exception is the 3
rd
century CE synagogue of Dura-Europas. For the
“Jewish” historiography of this monument, see Margaret Olin, “’Early Christian
Synagogues’ and ‘Jewish Art Historians’, The Discovery of the Synagogue of Dura-
Europos,”Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 27 (2000): 7-28.
13
See Chapter 9, “Colors, Tastes and Odors” in Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in
Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 243-246.
5
immersed in a baroque world of gilded visual splendor, Jews still experienced a visual
world. It is this visual world that the title of this study invokes.
On the night before the circumcision of a Jewish boy—traditionally on the eighth
day of life—the community gathered in the home of the parents to stand vigil over the
child. According to the ancient scholar Ben Sira (2nd century BCE), it was on this night
that the boy was most vulnerable to attack from the demon Lilith.
14
In the early modern
period, the ritual was formalized; sober prayers were pronounced, biblical passages read,
and a new life celebrated.
15
And through the power of a collective and vigilant Jewish
gaze, the demon would be repelled, and the child would remain safe. In his record of
Jewish customs in early modern Italy, the seventeenth-century Venetian Rabbi Leon
Modena (1571-1648) identified the custom as the veglia—a word with etymological
references both to watching and to waking. Translating Modena’s writings into English
in 1650, the Jacobean Orientalist Edmund Chilmead evocatively described the ceremony,
“The Night before the Day of Circumcision they call the Watching Night: because that all
the people of the house watch all that Night, to guard the young infant.”
16

Few material objects survive to document this ephemeral ceremony. One of these
is a silver amulet, designed for suspension on the cradle of an infant (Figure 1). The
amulet consists of a repoussé image of the sacrifice of Isaac, surrounded by an ornate

14
Joseph Dan, “Samael, Lilith and the Concept of Evil in Early Kabbalah,” AJS Review 5
(1980): 17-40.
15
Elliot Horowitz, “On the Eve of Circumcision: A Chapter in the History of Jewish
Nightlife,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 23 (1989): pp. 45-69. For all references to the
ceremony in broader historical context, see Ivan Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle: rites of
passage from biblical to modern times (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004),
pp. 30-82.
16
Leon Modena, Leon Modena, Historia de' riti hebraici, vita ed osservanze de gl'Hebrei
di questi tempi (London, 1650), translated by Edmund Chilmead (London, 1650), p. 201.
6
border.
17
A schematic design of an open book is positioned directly above the central
image. The book, however, contains no words. The text has been replaced by the
eloquence of an image, reflecting and reinforcing a culture considerably invested in the
efficacy of the visual to communicate with God.
18
It suggests the complex visual and
textual relationships implicated in the watching night, and, I argue, in early modern
Jewish visual culture.
But despite the absence of text on the amulet, words still surrounded it. Consider
Modena’s description of the ceremony:

When a male child is born to any one, his friends come to him, and make merry
with him, Some of them use to set up certain scrolls or billets, in the four quarters
of the chamber, where the woman lies in with these Four Words written in
Hebrew, Adam, Eve: Out Lilith. And they also write the names of the Three
Angels: conceiving this to be a means of defending the Child from the Strix, or
Night Witch.
19

Indeed, on the watching night the home would have been filled with the written word.
Calligraphic inscriptions on parchment, and talismanic chalk graffiti on the walls of the
birthing chamber were composed of words that invoked the protective power of the
amulet, and amplified the apotropaic power of Jewish vision. Print too was marshaled
during the watching night; a broadside announcing the birth of the child and displaying
the circumcision prayers would be posted in the home, and distributed to community

17
For this object see, Vivian B. Mann, Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in
Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), no. 223, 305.
Although the artist responsible for the object is unknown, Mann finds evidence of Jewish
employment in non-Jewish workshops, and even Jewish-owned manufactories, such as
Simon de Levis in the Veneto in the late sixteenth century. See Mann, Gardens, 126-133.
18
For the history of this and other childbirth amulets, see Shalom Sabar, “Childbirth and
Magic: Jewish Folklore and Material Culture,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History,
ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken, 2002), 671-722.
19
Leon Modena, Riti hebraici, 201-2.
7
members. These objects suggest that a symbiotic juxtaposition of word and image was
familiar and comfortable to Jewish viewers.
For early modern Jews, the ritual performance of watching consisted not only in
an active visual engagement with the world, but with other sensory phenomena. The
watching night prescribed not only words and images, but sounds, tastes, and tactile
experiences that drew attention to the location of the body within space. In the context of
its ritual use, the silver amulet cannot be understood as a discrete visual and material
object without referring to the other interpretive practices that shared its space and
informed its function. Like the objects in a princely studiolo, this collection of
phenomena demanded of its users a “semiotic virtuosity,” a prescribed and highly
referential set of readings embedded in objects and experiences that were intelligible only
to a privileged audience.
20
Whatever its particularities, the watching night is not an
aberration. Rather it is exemplary of the relationships between image and viewer that
define Jewish visual culture in early modern Italy. Such evidence describes a culture that
attributed considerable spiritual efficacy to vision and to the objects designed for its
consumption.
This study takes the practice of watching as a conceptual construct and applies it
to an object: a book, a haggadah—the liturgy for the celebration of Passover—printed in
Venice at the press of the Christian Hebraist Giovanni di Gara in 1609. Edited by Leon
Modena, the prolific and enigmatic Venetian Rabbi, the book will be shown to have
exerted a tremendous influence on early modern Jewish visual culture. The text of the

20
Stephen Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the
Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 46. As Campbell
notes, he borrows the term “semiotic virtuosity” from Arjun Appadurai.
8
Passover haggadah was, and remains today, a conventional one. It redacts biblical
passages, traditional hymns, and rabbinic sources to describe the redemption of the
Israelites from enslavement in Egypt. Haggadah illustration, however, is historically
contingent 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.
The original woodcuts, including narrative images and architectural frames, span its forty
pages and argue for the presence of a vibrant Jewish visual culture.
The Venice Haggadah is one object in a constellation of objects and practices.
While its content frames this study, the book cannot be understood in isolation from the
broader visual and material culture of its readers. By vigorously pursuing the
relationships between the Venice Haggadah and its visual and material context, this study
destabilizes three entrenched, and interrelated, historiographies. The first is the “myth of
aniconism,” the contention that Jews neither produced nor participated in a visual
culture.
21
Second, this study evaluates the relationship between Jews and the printing
press, arguing that the contested nature of print fundamentally informs the reading of
books like the Venice Haggadah. Finally, I treat the historiographic debate between
opposing conceptions of Jewish power and powerlessness in the early modern world, a

21
The phrase is borrowed from David Freedberg’s study of the transcultural and
transhistorical compulsion to create visual images. See David Freedberg, The Power of
Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991), 54.
9
dispute that has proven tremendously polarizing both for scholars of Jewish history and
historians of art.
22

Towards a Jewish “Period Eye”: The Venice Haggadah in Context
Few connoisseurs of print would mark the Venice Haggadah as a technological
milestone or aesthetic masterpiece. Executed by anonymous artists, in a style charitably
described as crude, and in a medium increasingly considered obsolete by the early
seventeenth century, the book is hardly an object likely to appear in the pages of
traditional histories of art.
23
What marks the Venice Haggadah as extraordinary is how
eloquently it constructs, challenges and communicates the devotional culture of Venetian
Jews in the early modern period. The book offers exceptional insights into what can only
be described as a Jewish “period eye.” In his formulation of this seminal concept,
Michael Baxandall argued that vision is socially constructed, and the experience of the
visual world is substantially informed by prior experience and cultural meaning.
24
In the

22
For an excellent summary of these debates see the introduction to David Nirenberg,
Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 3-17. Nirenberg has updated and expanded this
analysis in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013),
particularly 183-216, and 300-324.
23
On the division of labor between the painter or draughtsman who conceived the images
on paper, and the sculptor or engraver who cut the blocks, see David Landau and Peter
Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470-1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994),
7-12. On the waning fortunes of the woodcut technique in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, see Antony Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History
and Techniques (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 13-22. Parshall and
Landau, have argued that woodcuts have traditionally been accorded “second-class
status,” see Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 169. For the recent
historiography of woodcuts, see Peter Schmidt, “The Multiple Image: The Beginnings of
Printmaking, between Old Theories and New Approaches,” in Origins of European
Printmaking: Fifteenth-century Woodcuts and Their Public, ed. Peter Parshall
(Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 37-56.
24
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in
the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 29-40. The
10
tradition of Wagner and Onians, past historiography has assumed that Jews
fundamentally lack a period eye.
25
This study reconstructs it.
The Passover haggadah occupies a unique space in Jewish liturgical history.
Unlike other texts that were canonized and distributed through a regulated system of
scribal reproduction, the haggadah accreted over a number of years, perhaps even
centuries. The text itself is also a compilation of historically diverse passages: biblical
texts, Talmudic anecdotes, rabbinic commentaries and even traditional hymns and folk
songs.
26
No individual text in the Haggadah post-dates about 200 CE, so certainly the
compilation of the haggadah took place no earlier than the Talmudic period, from about
200-400 CE, the centuries following the destruction of the second temple.
27
Indeed, Adi
Ophir has argued that the haggadah emerges from this specific context of Jewish exile,
“The Haggadah was originally composed by a more or less oppressed minority culture to
commemorate its (already lost) triumph over its enemies and its (by then gone) liberation

theory of the period eye is more fully developed in Michael Baxandall, The Limewood
Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). On the
legacy of the period eye, see Allan Langdale, “Aspects of the Critical Reception and
Intellectual History of Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye,” Art History 21
(1998): 479–497.
25
Increasingly, the concept of the period eye has come under scrutiny for its seemingly
monolithic conception of the audience for early modern art. Adrian Randolph, for
instance, has pointed to the possibilities of multiple period eyes in the early modern
period, Adrian W.B. Randolph, “Gendering the Period Eye: Deschi da Parto and
Rensiassance Visual Culture,” Art History 27 (2004): 538-562.
26
Yosef Yerushalmi,. Haggadah and History: A Panorama in Facsimile of Five
Centuries of Printed Haggadah from the Collections of Harvard University and the
Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society,
1975), pp. 16-17.
27
Baruch M. Bokser The Origins of the Seder: The Passover Rite and Early Rabbinic
Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and Baruch M. Bokser,
“Ritualizing the Seder,” Jounal of the American Academy of Religion 56 (1988): 443-
471.
11
and sovereignty.”
28
The emphasis in the Passover ritual on symbolic foods also fits in as
a proxy for, and tribute to, Temple sacrifice.
29

More recently, the influential historian Israel Jacob Yuval has argued that the
Passover haggadah is also a product of the medieval world. By exploring the earliest
extant examples of the haggadah from the eleventh century onward, he suggests that
many of the haggadah’s texts were compiled as a response to Christian doctrine and to
the pressures faced by the Jewish community during events such as the crusades.
30

Yuval’s compelling arguments highlight a fundamental reality of the haggadah; it is
primarily a set of texts that concerns itself with the relationship between the Jewish
community and a more dominant and oppressive surrounding culture.
Significantly, unlike other Jewish rituals, which were temple-based and facilitated
by priestly authority, Passover is a domestic ritual, which does not require the mediation
of a rabbi. The recitation of the Exodus narrative is prescribed in the biblical account of
Passover itself, “And thou shalt tell thy son in that day, saying: It is because of that which
the Lord did for me when I came forth out of Egypt” (Exodus, 3:18). In its very origins,
Passover is conceived as an intergenerational, didactic, and narrative ritual. After the
publication of vernacular editions, such as the Venice Haggadah, performing the
Passover seder did not even require knowledge of Hebrew. Because of its evolutionary

28
Adi Ophir, “From Pharoah to Saddam Hussein: The Reproduction of the Other in the
Passover Haggadah,” in The Other in Jewish Thought and History: Constructions of
Jewish Culture and Identity, ed. Laurence Jay Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn (New
York: New York University Press, 1994), 205-235, 209.
29
Joseph Tabory, “Towards a History of the Paschal Meal,” in Passover and Easter:
Origin and History to Modern Times, ed. Paul Bradshaw and Lawrence Hoffman (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 62-80.
30
Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in
Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
12
character and domestic orientation the haggadah is extremely adaptable. The
bibliographer Abraham Yaari counted thousands of editions, both manuscript and printed,
by 1960.
31
In the post-modern period, haggadah publication has proliferated, with
feminist, atheist, vegan and countless other adaptations of the traditional haggadah and
Passover ritual.
Many factors distinguished one haggadah from another in the pre-modern period.
Clarity of the text, language, inclusion of rabbinic commentaries, and of course images
are all cited as significant innovations by the publishers of haggadahs. The Venice
Haggadah is not only innovative in its presentation of the Passover seder in the
vernacular, but should also be legitimately understood as extraordinary for the
sophistication of its visual program. The title page proudly declares that “special images
have been made for all that is written in the Torah.”
32
Previous printed editions of the
haggadah exemplified the tendency of Hebrew print shops to improvise with imagery.
The Mantua Haggadah of 1560, for instance, presents a combination of occasional
original woodcuts interspersed with borrowed and reused decorative woodblocks, a
practice that often proves graphically disorienting to the viewer (Figure 2).
33
Here there
is a spatially ambiguous relationship between the soldier and the central image. Because
the soldier was printed from a separate wood block, perhaps recycled from another

31
Abraham Yaari, Bibliography of the Passover Haggadah: From the Earliest Printed
Edition to 1960 (Jerusalem: Bamberger and Wahrman, 1960).
32
The statement is a bid misleading. Many of the images engage not with the biblical
text precisely, but rather with the Jewish history of biblical exegesis. This includes
sources such as the Midrash, a collection of rabbinic anecdotes, and the corpus of Jewish
law, the Talmud.
33
The Mantua Haggadah was edited by Isaac ben Samuel Bassan, a sexton at one of the
synagogues in Mantua. For more on the Mantua Haggadah, see Vivian Mann, Gardens
and Ghettoes: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1989), 244 and Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History, 37-39, plates 22-26.
13
project, it does not communicate with the central image in terms of proportion or spatial
continuity. While individual images are visually striking, the emphasis was undoubtedly
placed on the clarity of text, rather than the development of a cohesive visual program.
The origins of the Venice Haggadah and the personalities involved in its
conception and publication are fortunately well documented. On the haggadah’s title
page, Giovanni di Gara is identified as the book’s printer. Historians have traditionally
attributed the role of publisher to Israel Zifroni, the son of a noted printer, who traveled
extensively throughout Italy, working as an editor and proofreader. He is mentioned as
early as 1567 working as a corrector in the workshop of Vincenzo Conti in Sabbioneta, as
well as for presses in Cremona and Mantua. Between 1578 and 1580, Zifroni compiled
an edition of the Talmud in Basel, likely to circumvent the ban on printing the Talmud
that was strictly enforced in Italy.
34
By 1588, Zifroni had returned to Italy and worked
for the remainder of his career in Venice, primarily for Giovanni di Gara.
35
As the most
active Hebrew publisher in Venice in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, Di
Gara specialized in printing Rabbinic literature, responsa, and exegetical works,
including some of Leon Modena’s early publications.
36

34
Since 1550, printing the Talmud had been explicitly banned in Italy, but printing
elsewhere continued, see Marvin J. Heller, “The Bath-Sheba/Moses de Medina Salonika
Edition of Berakhot: An Unknown Attempt to Circumvent the Inquisition's Ban on the
Printing of the Talmud in 16th-Century Italy,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 87 (1996):
47-60.
35
For a more detailed account of Zifroni’s work in individual workshops, including
inventories of projects completed, see David Amram, The Makers of Hebrew Books in
Italy (New York: Hyperion Press: 1909), 291-356. For a broader biographic sketch of
Israel Zifroni see Raphael Posner and Israel Ta-Shema, The Hebrew Book: An Historical
Survey (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1975), pp. 163.
36
For a current bibliography on Di Gara, see Marvin J. Heller, ed., The Seventeenth
Century Hebrew Book (Leiden: Brill, 2010), Vol. 1, xvi. See also Jean Baumgarten,
“Giovanni di Gara, imprimeur de livres yiddish à Venise (milieu du XVe-début du XVIe
14
An expanded role for Zifroni in producing the Venice Haggadah has occasionally
been asserted, but supporting evidence for such a claim has never been provided.
37
I will
argue that expanded responsibility should more appropriately be attributed to Leon
Modena as the primary author for the book’s visual program, rhyming captions, and
Italian translation. Although it is a problematic term, I will describe Modena as the
Venice Haggadah’s “editor” throughout the course of this study. Modern labels such as
editor, publisher, and printer can describe a wide variety of professional and financial
responsibilities in the early modern print shop and their use in scholarship is often
misleading.
38
This confusion is exacerbated in the case of Hebrew and Jewish vernacular
texts, since after 1548 Jews were banned from operating printing presses. So too, Jews
were legally prevented from formally working for Christian printers, although this latter
employment ban was only partially enforced, and Jews were routinely contracted to
correct and proofread Hebrew texts.
39

Unfortunately, relatively few documents exist that clarify these arrangements.
One of these describes a relationship between the Cremonese printer Vincenzo Conti and

siècle) et la culture juive de la Renaissance” Revue des Etudes Juives 159 (2000), 587-
598. For a complete inventory of Di Gara’s publications during this time, see Amram,
360-363.
37
Yerushalmi, for instance, describes him in passing as the book’s “planner.” The
documentary provenance for this assertion is unclear because Yerushalmi’s text is not
specifically footnoted. See Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History, 40-41.
38
For problems with the term “editor” see Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers and
Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 151-153,
and Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470-1600
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-18.
39
Amram, 324-325.
15
two local Jewish publishers in 1558.
40
The contract is extremely complex, because it was
specifically designed to subvert the ban on Jewish printing.
41
In essence, Conti was
responsible for negotiating the text through the layers of religious and civic censorship,
and in return the Jewish publishers could print their text under Conti’s license. The
arrangement was beneficial for the printer, because the publishers paid for the cost of the
printing and raw materials in advance, and supplied all of the intellectual work.
Consequently, the printer assumed no risk for the project’s commercial success, and
could even profit from an unsuccessful publication.
42
Conti himself assumed no
responsibility for the intellectual content of the book, and was not literate in Hebrew.
Like the publishers who worked with Conti, Israel Zifroni would have been responsible
for the organization of a number of complicated tasks, from setting type and proofreading
to coordinating the actual intellectual content of the volume. These are exactly the kinds
of generally administrative tasks that Zifroni had specialized in throughout his career, and
he would have been well-suited to the task of publishing the Venice Haggadah.

40
The document is published in Shlomo Simonsohn, ed. A Documentary History of the
Jews in Italy: The Jews in the Duchy of Milan, 4 vols. (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of
Sciences and Humanities, 1982-1986), Vol. II (1982), p. 1328, No. 3050.
41
For an unpacking of the document and greater contextualization of the economics of
Hebrew printing, see Zipora Baruchson, “Money and Culture: Financing sources and
methods in the Hebrew shops in Cinquecento Italy,” La Bibliofilía, Vol. 112 (1990): 23-
40.
42
Because Cremonese and Venetian printers labored under similar administrative
restrictions and competitive challenges between printers, there is good reason to assume
that the Conti contract offers broad insights into the relationships between Jewish
publishers and Christian printers in general. For the situation in Cremona, see Amram,
306-337, and for Venice, 338-371. On competition between Hebrew printers, see also
Horatio Brown, The Venetian Printing Press (New York: Putnam, 1891), 99-104.
Brown’s monograph is still an excellent resource for primary documents on early modern
Venetian printing.
16
In his own autobiography Modena takes responsibility for his role in producing
the Venice Haggadah. The event is cited in a list of publications that included works for
which Modena wrote “poems and prefaces,” rather than original scholarly works. In his
list he records “the Passover Haggadah with illustrations and complete translation.”
43

This seems to indicate that he assumed responsibility for both the visual and textual
program. It should also be understood that as one of the earliest printed editions of a
Jewish liturgy in the vernacular, providing the translation was a significant
accomplishment. But the most compelling evidence for attributing a broader agency to
Modena is found in an acrostic poem at the end of the Venice Haggadah’s Italian
translation column (Figures 3-4 ). The poem reads:
Celebrate he who reads and sees the words of the haggadah, and appreciate he
who produced its illustrations. May our savior and son of David come to us now,
and bring harmony within ours walls.

The letters printed in bold in the poem spell Modena’s name in Hebrew (Yehuda Arye
Mi-Modena). The poem, which we might helpfully understand as Modena’s personal
colophon, is printed in Rashi script, a typological innovation that was intended to more
closely resemble the scribally executed words of the Torah, rather than the mechanically
mass-produced type of the printing press.
44
As such, we can understand this as a kind of
mechanical signature, a proxy for Modena’s own signature. The suggestion that Modena
should use his own name to celebrate the work of another, conflicts with both early
modern conventions and Modena’s characteristically healthy ego.

43
Haye Yehudah, fol. 20a, p. 126.
44
For a discussion of the development and use of Rashi script, see Mordechai Glatzer,
“Early Hebrew Printing,” in A Sign and a Witness: 2,000 Years of Hebrew Books of
Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. Leonard Singer Gold (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988), 89.
17
The captions that accompany the images also seem the natural domain of the
young Modena. Each caption consists of a rhyming couplet composed in Judeo-Italian, a
dialect indigenous to Italian Jews which consists primarily of Italian words written in
Hebrew characters. These passages are often designed to cleverly exploit the particular
pronunciation of Judeo-Italian, which was limited by the phonetic palette of the Hebrew
alphabet. Modena’s earliest works, which he claims launched his career, were exactly
this kind of hybrid verse. For instance, in 1584 Modena published an elegy for his
teacher Rabbi Moses della Rocca that consisted of an octet written in Hebrew characters
that made sense when read in both Italian and Hebrew.
45
Modena claims that when he
wrote this, “I was then thirteen years of age. All the poets saw it and praised it; to this
day it is a marvel to both Christian and Jewish sages.”
46
The most persuasive evidence
for Modena’s role in originating the Venice Haggadah’s visual program emerges from the
book’s often innovative combination of text and imagery. The entirely distinctive stance
toward tradition the book describes is a defining presence elsewhere in Modena’s work,
even invoking identical obscure Talmudic references. An examination of the Venice
Haggadah makes clear that the captions and images are complementary; the work of a
single personality that is both idiosyncratic and deeply familiar with the devotional
culture of early modern Venice. Leon Modena occupied a role parallel to other early
modern artistic advisers who provided an intellectual apparatus for canonical Renaissance

45
For this poem and the conventions of this format, see Dan Pagis, “Baroque Trends in
Italian Hebrew Poetry as Reflected in One Unknown Genre,” Italia Judaica 2 (1986):
263-277.
46
Haye Yehudah, fol. 8b, p. 87.
18
artists.
47
But unlike a painting or sculpture, the Venice Haggadah emphasizes clarity of
visual communication over aesthetic accomplishment, making Modena’s intellectual
agency more transparent and appropriate for interpretation.
Leon Modena is extremely well known to scholars of the early modern Jewish
world.
48
He has left a massive impact in the historical record, including a number of
published works, hundreds of surviving letters and sermons, an autobiography, and an
inventory of his possessions (including his library) recorded at his death in 1648. These
documents have hardly helped to clarify the man himself, however. Modena practiced
alchemy and bibliomancy, but was also bitterly critical of mysticism. Appreciative of
Catholic preachers and deeply sympathetic to English Protestants, Modena also
composed blistering polemics against Christianity. Professionally, Modena made money
working for Hebrew printers, teaching students, and preaching in synagogues—in short,
he made money by promoting and teaching Jewish thought. But Modena was also a
compulsive gambler who saw his fortunes devastated by his inability to distance himself

47
Charles Hope, “Artists, Patrons, and Advisers in the Italian Renaissance,” Patronage in
the Renaissance, in Stephen Orgel, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982),
293-343, Georgia Clarke, “Ambrogio Traversari: Artistic Adviser in Early Fifteenth-
Century Florence?” Renaissance Studies 11 (1997): 161-78, and Dennis Geronimus,
Piero Di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006), 87.
48
Howard Ernest Adelman, “Success and Failure in the Seventeenth Century Ghetto of
Venice: The Life and Thought of Leon Modena, 1571–1648,” (PhD diss., Brandeis
University, 1985), Talya Fishman, Shaking the Pillars of Exile: ‘Voice of a Fool,’ an
Early Modern Jewish Critique of Rabbinic Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997), Cristiana Facchini, “Una insinuante modernità: Note su Leone Modena e
l’ebraismo nel seicento, Rassenga bibliograica,” Annali di storia dell’esegesi 19 (2002):
467–97, David Malkiel, ed., The Lion Shall Roar: Leon Modena and His World
(Jerusalem: Magnes Press and Ben-Zvi Institute, 2003), Yaacob Dweck, The Scandal of
Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011).
19
from games of chance.
49
He remains an enigmatic and conflicted character. In an early
study of Modena’s work of rabbinic criticism, Kol Sakhal (Voice of a Fool), the scholar
Ellis Rivkin describes Modena’s Venice quite evocatively

Here provincialism and cosmopolitanism, urbanity and crudeness, tradition and
enlightenment, science and superstition, Jewish and Christian thought
intermingled. The very air was filled with paradoxes, contradictions, and
conflicting ideologies.
50

Modena emerges as a creature of this unique atmosphere, and so does the Venice
Haggadah.
The Venice Haggadah is not an unmediated documentation of one man’s unique
approach to Jewish liturgy. Indeed, books such as the Venice Haggadah were highly
regulated objects, far more so than books printed for a non-Jewish audience. Recent
scholarship has argued that early modern Jewish books must be viewed as responsive to
the pressures of censorship, which is increasingly understood as a process of negotiation,
rather than absolutism.
51

Jewish texts passed through multiple layers of scrutiny and redaction before
reaching their audience. The Inquisition, ever sensitive to the dangers of Jewish heresy,

49
For an account of Modena’s life, see Howard E. Adelman, “Leon Modena: The
Autobiography and the Man,” in Mark R. Cohen, ed. The Autobiography of a
Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: a translation of Leon Modena’s Haye Yehudah
(Princeton: Princeton University, 1988), 19–49. For a biography of his early life, see Ellis
Rivkin, “Leon da Modena: Part I,” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1946). Also by
Rivkin, “The Sermons of Leon da Modena,” Hebrew Union College Annual 23 (1950–
(1951): 295–317; Leon da Modena and the ‘Kol Sakhal’ (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union
College Press, (1952).
50
Ellis Rivkin, ‘Leon da Modena and the “Kol Sakhal,”’ The Jewish Quarterly Review 38
(1948): 227-265. For a more recent study of the Kol Sakhal, see the critical edition
included in Talya Fishman’s, Shaking the Pillars of Exile.
51
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, The Censor, the Editor, the Text: the Catholic Church and the
Shaping of the Hebrew Canon in the Sixteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 91-2.
20
maintained an active presence in Venice and supervised the printing of Hebrew books.
52

Along with the constant vigilance of the Church, civil authorities such as the Council of
Ten and the Esecutori contro la Bestemmia, were also active in the regulation of Hebrew
print.
53
Censorship of Hebrew books was executed through a number of processes. Most
frequently, censorship was enforced prior to a manuscript’s publication.
When Giovanni di Gara sought to publish Isaac Abarbanel’s Mif’aloth Elohim in
1592, the printer submitted it for approval to the Christian Hebraist Sebastiano
Tagliapietra, who summarily rejected it and outlined its heresies in the most vehement
terms.
54
Works that were not submitted to the authorities prior to publication were also
routinely censored once in print. The consequences of violating regulations were swift,
uncompromising, and often violent. In 1568, the Inquisition burned a huge number of
Hebrew books, as many as 30,000 volumes, in Venice alone.
55
The books, mostly
volumes of the Talmud or similar exegetical works, were not submitted to the authorities
in advance of publication, evidently since censors would not have approved their
publication without significant expurgation, if at all. Besides the censorship of the
church and state authorities, the Jewish community also adopted self-censorship
measures, partly as a defense against such widespread destruction of Hebrew books, and
partially to avoid the appropriation of Hebrew by Christian Hebraists for conversionary

52
William Popper, The Censorship of Hebrew Books (New York: Ktav, 1969), 35.
53
On the structures of censorship and the Inquisition see Brian Pullan, The Inquisition of
Venice and the Jews of Europe: 1550-1670 (London: Blackwell, 1997), 85. Also see,
Roberto Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice (New York: Evans, 1987), 84-6.
54
Pullan cites the incident, 84. Raz-Krakotzin describes in more detail the interactions
between Jewish authors and Christian editors, see note 10.
55
Paul F. Grendler, “The Destruction of Hebrew Books in Venice, 1568,” Proceedings of
the American Academy for Jewish Research 45 (1978): 103-130 and Kenneth Stow “The
Burning of the Talmud in 1553, In the Light of Sixteenth Century Catholic Attitudes
Toward the Talmud,” Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 34 (1972): 435-59.
21
purposes.
56
Self-regulation, which often emphasized orthodoxy, added yet another layer
of control to the production and distribution of Hebrew books. Some of the most
vociferous opposition to the publication of Jewish scholarship came from the Jewish
community itself.
The restrictions imposed on Hebrew printing necessitated subversive practices.
A number of options were available to the Jewish community. One was directly violating
the law. These regulations may have been disregarded, but not without consequences.
When Leon Modena sought to publish his Beit Yehudah, a compendium of Talmudic
anecdotes, he entrusted the manuscript to his grandson Isaac, who was working for an
illegal press in Venice.
57
In August of 1634, the print shop was closed-down by the
authorities, and all production ceased for nearly six months. The following May, police
raided the print shop again, this time arresting the employees, including Modena’s
grandson, who was imprisoned for sixty-six days.
58

Printing at an illegal press was only one of the tactics adopted by Jews wishing to
publish subversive material, and was well suited to modest projects such as Modena’s

56
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Censorship, Editing and Reshaping of Jewish Identity” in
Hebraica Veritas: Christian Hebraism and the Study of Jewish Texts in Early Modern
Europe, ed. Allison Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson (Philadelphia, University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 125-158. See also Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government
in the Middle Ages (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1964), 156 and
Kenneth Stow, “Conversion, Christian Hebraism, and Prayer in the Sixteenth Century,”
Hebrew Union College Annual 47 (1976): 217-36.
57
Printing at an illegal press was undoubtedly a necessary recourse for Modena. Since
Beit Yehudah relied so completely on glossing the Talmud, it would not have been
granted license by the Venetian authorities. See Benjamin Ravid, “Prohibition Against
Jewish Printing and Publishing in Venice and the Difficulties of Leone Modena,” in
Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge:
Harvard University, 1979), 142-145.
58
Modena reports that the arrest happened under the authority of the Cattaver, and that
Modena’s grandson and the others were released after an appeal to the Quarantia
Criminal, Haye Yehudah, fol. 23b-24a, p. 141-2.
22
collection of glosses. But unlike Modena’s volume, the printing of the Venice Haggadah
was a massive project published under license of Church and civil authorities. Printed
simultaneously in four languages, and containing the most lavish illustration of any
Hebrew book then in existence, it was a project that required more subtle strategies to
polemicize its contents.
The literary critic Ross Chambers has argued that certain texts operate between
these apparent alternatives. Chambers has described these texts as possessing
“oppositional resilience,” particularly suggesting that literary texts maintain an
interpretive ambiguity—or “readability”—that allows them to exist in the space between
repression and rejection.
59
In this more subtle act of transgression, polemical attitudes
were expressed, but not overtly so. I will argue that images functioned very similarly in
the Venice Haggadah. This is suggested by the easily observable fact that printing the
words of the Talmud was restricted in the most forceful terms, but images which visually
represent episodes described in the Talmud appear prominently in the Venice Haggadah.
This remarkable inconsistency indicates the “oppositional resilience” of the visual—it is
precisely its emphatic “readability” that provides the image with oppositional power. By
expressing polemical messages through the readability of images, Jews could distribute
and receive subversive content while circumventing censorship.
The notion of Jewish art has always been notoriously complicated. Richard
Cohen’s capacious definition, describes Jewish art as any object that “reflects the Jewish

59
Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 3.
23
experience.”
60
The inclusiveness reflects not a lack of critical thought but the inherent
incommensurability of Jewish visual culture and the traditions of art history. Cohen’s
definition—and the study that follows it—productively allows scholars to eschew the
question of artistic production and focus on the experience of viewing images, rather than
the deification of artistic accomplishment. By focusing on images as one aspect of the
materiality of Jewish religious experience, this study shares a particular sympathy with
the view that “religion is not regarded as something one does with speech or reason
alone, but with the body and the spaces it inhabits.”
61

That space is the ghetto of Venice. I argue that the purpose of the ghetto was to
reduce its population to a state of abjection. Under such conditions, converting to
Christianity would have served as a considerable material enticement.
62
While forced
conversions—particularly the baptism of children—proliferated in early modern Italy,
Papal policy still formally forbade such tactics.
63
The Jews could not be physically
coerced to convert, for such conversions would be intrinsically insincere, and

60
Richard Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998), 7.
61
See the “Editors’ Introduction” in Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and
Belief 1 (2005): 4-9, 5.
62
This study follows a major claim by Kenneth Stow, and reinforced by Robert Bonfil
that “the chief purpose of every attitude taken with regard to the Jews was that of
converting them to Christianity,” Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 25, and
Kenneth Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 1550-1593 (New York: Jewish
Theological Seminary of America, 1977). See more recently, Kenneth Stow, Theater of
Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2000). Here Stow argues that although the purpose of the ghetto was
to facilitate conversion, to a great extent it failed because Jews formed a subversive,
oppositional culture in response.
63
Benjamin Ravid, “The Forced Baptism of Jewish Minors in Early Modern Venice,” in
Studies on the Jews of Venice, 1382-1797 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
24
consequently invalid; a fact that apparently did little to curb the practice.
64
Repression,
then, was more typically a matter of enthusiastic encouragement through economic and
physical confinement, rather than threat of direct bodily harm.
Regardless, such policies leave little room for the pleasant myth of “exuberant
multiculturalism” that recent scholarship has chosen to read in early modern Europe’s
fraught ethnic relations.
65
This polarized historiography is larded with contemporary
political significance. As one British scholar has recently claimed, deconstructing the
myth of early modern Jewish suffering is instrumental in deconstructing Zionist
ideology.
66
If Jews never suffered as Theodore Herzl claimed, then the foundational
explanation for the modern state of Israel is fallacious. Thus, scholars such as John Rose
can speak of “liberating Jewish history from its Zionist stranglehold,” by recuperating
and sanitizing early modern Jewish history.
In emphasizing assimilation, tolerance, and shared culture, scholarship can, in
Rose’s view, redress this myth of universal suffering and chip away at the foundations of
Zionist imperialism. Undoubtedly exciting to academics that share Rose’s fashionable
political commitments, such histories omit countless documented moments of brutal

64
For instance, in 1615, Paolo Sarpi ordered that an abducted Jewish child held at the
Casa dei Catecumeni should not be returned to her family. See Calimani, The Ghetto of
Venice, 124-5.
65
Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Norton,
1998), 34. For studies that are generally sympathetic to this view from the Jewish
perspective, see David Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and
Thought of Abraham Ben Mordecai Farissol (Cincinnati : Hebrew Union College Press,
1981, 1996); and in a similar vein, David Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri, eds., Cultural
Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
66
John Rose, “Liberating Jewish History from its Zionist Stranglehold: Rediscovering
Abram Leon,” Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal 5 (2006): 1-20. Rose’s
view is expanded in the controversial, Myths of Zionism (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
25
repression.
67
Rose’s excessively optimistic view of cultural exchange ignores the very
issues that readings of early modern primary texts make evident.
68
Polemics, communal
records, and material remains document a constant, daily antagonism between Venetian
Jews and the Christian world that surrounded them. As Fernand Braudel would have it,
Jews remained incessantly “one civilization against the rest.”
69
And yet, the historical
reality of Jewish survival and opposition resists complete conformity to the “lachrymose”
conception of Jewish history, which fetishizes histories of Jewish suffering and
hegemonic, irredeemably unbalanced power relations.
70
The situation requires a new
model.
The answer, I contend, is a close examination of the limited power that Jews did
possess and their strategic choices in wielding it. The anthropologist James C. Scott
writes that “most of the political life of the subordinate is to be found neither in overt
collective defiance of powerholders nor in complete hegemonic compliance, but in the

67
One need look no further than the example of ritual murder trials, and their resilient
legacy. For early examples see R. Po-chia Hsia, Trent 1492: Stories of a Ritual Murder
Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual
Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988). For a remarkable twentieth century example, see Helmut Walser Smith, The
Butcher’s Tale: Murder and anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York: W.W. Norton,
2002).
68
Perhaps the most compelling recent study of specifically Catholic anti-Semitism
(although Stow deliberately resists using this term in the book) is Kenneth Stow, Jewish
Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Here
Stow focuses on one central metaphorical image: “the dog,” which is persistently used in
Catholic thought to describe the impurity and debased nature of the Jews.
69
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II, Vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 802-826.
70
Salo Baron, The Contemporary Relevance of History: A Study in Approaches and
Methods (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 30. For a rich discussion of
this concept of the “lachrymose,” see the introduction in David Nirenberg, Communities
of Violence: persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 3-17.
26
territory between these two polar opposites.”
71
Jewish vision with all its attendant objects
and performances, was located in such a territory. And the Venice Haggadah effectively
maps this territory because it was manufactured in it.
This study will consist of four chapters that examine visual and textual themes as
they emerge in the liturgical narrative of the Venice Haggadah. The first chapter
considers the construction of a Jewish historical past in the Venice Haggadah, an
interpretive lens that frames the reading of the book and the performance of the Passover
ritual as a whole. This lens establishes historical typologies drawn between Catholic
Europe and ancient Egypt, and considers the use of typology as a rhetorical and
subversive strategy.
72
Relating the book’s visual program to objects such as illustrated
prescriptive Jewish literature on prayer and piety, I will argue that the haggadah’s
imagery is designed to engage its readers in an act of affective piety intended to connect
the worshipper to the past. This compression of historical time through a liturgical
reenactment suggests that reading books such as the haggadah constructs a “ludic space”
both bounded by rules and vigorously imaginative.
73
In the Venice Haggadah, this
process is illustrated through the character of “the Reader,” a conventional Venetian Jew,

71
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 136; James C. Scott Weapons of the Weak:
Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987),
“Hedgemony and Consciousness,” 304-350.
72
Kathleen Biddick has elsewhere written of typology as a strategy for persecution, see
The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) and “Paper Jews: Inscription/Ethnicity/Ethnography," Art
Bulletin 78 (1996): 594–99.
73
While the term “ludic space” is generally attributed to Henri Lefebvre, my entry point
is contemporary video game studies, see Craig A Lindley, “The Semiotics of Time
Structure in Ludic Space as a Foundation for Analysis and Design,” Game Theory 5
(2005). Also see Henri Lefebvre, The Construction of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991
[1974]), 35.
27
who appears as an actor in the contemporary prescriptive genre scenes, and as a witness
in images of the Exodus. His apparent travel across disparate eras disintegrates the
division between liturgical and historical time, and presents a devotional ideal that
encourages the imaginative projection of the books’ readers into the narrative of
redemption.
In the second chapter, I examine the literal and figurative “space” of the Venice
ghetto and its relationship to architectural paratexts in the Venice Haggadah, considering
the meaning of portals and their transgression for early modern Jewish readers. Reading
the haggadah in early modern Italy was inflected by the belief in an impending messianic
redemption. Heightened by popular eschatology, the enclosed ghetto was regarded as a
parallel for the slave camps of Egypt, since both were suffering communities awaiting
architectural liberation. The visual program of the Venice Haggadah asks its readers to
adopt such a belief. The book’s pictorial narrative begins with the arrival of the prophet
Elijah at the door of a Venetian home and concludes with Elijah leading the messiah
through the gates of Jerusalem, where a newly constructed Temple awaits sanctification.
Between the two messianic images, an expansive triumphal arch frames every page in the
book, situating the reader visually and rhetorically within the narrative of a triumphal
procession.
Early modern Jews conceived the messianic arrival in precisely these terms.
Pretenders such as David Reubeni and Solomon Molcho processed through the gates of
Rome, like newly elected Popes or Emperors, adopting the vocabulary of European
processions, and using texts drawn from images of messianic arrivals in illustrated
haggadah as part of their campaigns. These cultural practices indicate that gates,
28
thresholds, and portals had multiple resonances for Jews in early modern Italy. By the
middle of the seventeenth century, motifs of liminal architecture, both in the corporeal
world and the fictive page, persistently functioned as a central motif in the construction
of Jewish experience, and transgressing their boundaries functioned as an apt metaphor
for both spiritual and physical liberation.
Central to ritual murder accusations, matzah is given considerable attention in the
Venice Haggadah, which opens with a visual documentation of the Passover bread’s
production, from milling to baking. I argue that these didactic images are intended to
anticipate and diffuse allegations of the blood libel—the belief that the blood of Christian
children is required for the baking of matzah, a foundational myth in the popular
martyrology of Simon of Trent. In the third chapter, I consider why a subject so fraught
for early modern Jews is given such emphasis in the Venice Haggadah. At the center of
this investigation is the polemical claim that Jews forged a privileged corporeal
relationship to God through the indelibility of circumcision.
A representation of Pharaoh bathing in the blood of Israelite children—made
salutary through the covenant of circumcision—suggests an awareness of Jewish
biological difference in the early modern period that complement the articulation of
Jewish devotional difference. The perceived privilege transmitted through circumcision
was often juxtaposed with the incorporeal nature of baptism, a defect that Jewish
polemicists frequently exploited. In the Venice Haggadah, baptism too is given extensive
allegorical treatment in the mass drowning of Israelite infants in the waters of the Nile.
These images juxtaposing the efficacy of circumcision and the hazards of baptism seem
to visualize a classic argument made in works such as the fifteenth-century Sefer ha-
29
Nizzahon Yashan (Book of the Old Polemic) and in early modern disputations. In
exploring this subject, the Jewish conception of the body as a legible text bearing the
covenant with God becomes central.
Chapter four considers an image of necromancy (negromanzia), perhaps the
book’s most enigmatic image. Without precedent in Jewish visual culture, the image of
Jewish and black Muslim necromancers provides an opportunity to consider the books
arguments for the positioning of Jews (and Jewish vision) in the polemically polarized
schema of rationalism versus mysticism. This distinction had particular resonance with
the controversy surrounding the printing of the Zohar, a hotly contested debate that
continued unabated for nearly a century.
74
At the root of the debate was concern over
exposing potentially dangerous information to the public, both Christian and Jewish. The
creation of the artificial man—a golem—figured largely in these debates, its pursuit
endorsed by the mystically inflected work of scholars of the natural sciences such as
Joseph Delmedigo and Joseph Hamiz, and ridiculed publicly by Leon Modena whose
own polemic against the study of kabbalah, Ari Nohem, was circulating in manuscript by
1639.
75
Modena, who actively practiced alchemy, peddled amulets and practiced
bibliomancy, was not antagonistic to the mystical tradition; indeed he was an enthusiastic
supporter of Azariah de Rossi’s efforts to translate Ficino’s Latin edition of the Pimander

74
Jacob Katz, “Post-Zoharic Relations between Halakhah and Kabbalah,” in Jewish
Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard D. Cooperman (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 283-307; Matt Goldish, “Halakhah, Kabbalah, and Heresy: A
Controversy in Early Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 84
(1993-1994): 153-176.
75
On the golem, see Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the
Artificial Anthropoid (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990). For a dissenting claim, see William
Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 2004), 183-188.
30
into Hebrew. Modena’s ambivalence—which I take as a possible position available to
Jewish intellectual culture in general—is apparent in the contradictions in the postures of
the Venice Haggadah. Moses is represented as sending demons to deliver the plagues to
the Egyptians, and conjuring boils from the end of his staff, even while necromancy is
described as idolatrous. I take these tensions as symptomatic of the growing unease with
the “spiritualization” of Jewish culture, identified by Modena and others as a
Christianizing and pernicious influence.

31

Chapter 1

Jewish Vision in Early Modern Italy

Thus the first model from which the first image of man arose was a clod of earth,
and not without reason, for the Divine Architect of time and of nature, being all
perfection, wished to demonstrate, in the imperfection of His materials, what
could be done to improve them, just as good sculptors and painters are in the habit
of doing, when, by adding additional touches and removing blemishes, they bring
their imperfect sketches to such a state of completion and of perfection as they
desire.
76

Like God, the artist impresses his will upon raw material, creating order. Vasari’s
account of creation delivers another genesis; the origins of an academic field. Neither
Vasari, nor the five centuries of prodigious scholarship since the publication of his Lives,
has produced a trope more essential to the history of art than this emphatic
correspondence between divine creation and the nobility of artistic genius. It is necessary
to Vasari’s celebration of artistic ability that God himself is a visual artist, and the
terrestrial world his first work of art. It is no coincidence that Vasari ascribes to both
God and the artists of Renaissance Italy the ability to fashion perfection, for both are
sculptors of the perceptible world.
77

As fundamental as this notion has remained to academic art history, the ideal of
deific artistic creation presents serious scholarly challenges for the objects and visual

76
Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, ed. and trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and
Peter Bondanella. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4.
77
Vasari follows a tradition of invoking God as artifex, see the early fifteenth-century
handbook, Cennino D' Andrea Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook: The Italian "Il Libro
dell' Arte," trans. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr. (New York: Dover Publications, 1933), 1-2.

32
cultures in early modern Europe that stand outside the canon’s circumscribed field of
artistic accomplishment. Lacking monumental sculpture, architecture and painting,
Jewish visual culture presents such a challenge. The complete absence of famed artistic
personalities exacerbates these problems. What can such a culture have to say to the field
conceived in Giorgio Vasari’s apotheosis of artistic genius? In his conviction that art and
artists were essential to the promotion of the Church, Vasari is typical of Counter
Reformation polemicists who argued for greater physical and emotional access to visual
narratives.
78
The Counter Reformation Church exploited images to incredible effect,
both to buffet their institution against internal dissent, and to provide new accessibility to
the laity.
79
And groups such as the Society of Jesus were particularly successful at
centralizing worship around the experience of images and exporting this experience
globally.
80
Reconciling the apparent anemia of early modern Jewish visual culture with
the extraordinarily rich and prolific production of Counter Reformation Christian images
presents a unique disciplinary challenge. This study attempts to set Jewish visual culture
into dialogue with the history of early modern art, without accepting the modern
historiographical rubric of artistic achievement or attendant methodological ballast.

78
See the seminal study of Vasari’s intervention in the churches of Santa Maria Novella
and Santa Croce in Florence, Marcia B. Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation:
Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce 1565-1577 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979).
79
For the most recent summary of the historiography of Counter Reformation image-
making, see Marcia Hall’s introduction to The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation
Church ed. Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 1-20. Although the Counter Reformation witnessed the introduction of
certain regulations to the production of art, scholars now agree that enforcement of such
regulations was highly sporadic, see Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1660,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 107–128.
80
See Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004).
33
As a discipline the history of art vacillates between scrutiny and reappraisal of
canonical figures and excavation of ever more obscure artistic peripheries. The challenge
in this intellectual climate for a study of Jewish visual culture is to avoid approaching it
methodologically as an impoverished and remote minor court with bloated pretensions to
fame, or apologizing for its considerable comparative inadequacies.
81
Whatever their
level of interaction Jewish visual culture and the artistic world of early modern Italy are
hardly commensurate in their approaches to image making. Rather than documenting the
shortcomings of a marginal culture, the aim here is to achieve a critical practice that the
postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as “provincializing Europe,” to
destabilize the power relations between the center and margin in historical writing by
rejecting the values that define center as center and margin as margin.
82
Writing a history
of Jewish visual culture requires a new beginning, attendant to art history’s
methodological legacy but unencumbered by its entrenched historiographical traditions.
The Zohar, the central text in the kabalistic canon presents just such a new
beginning.
83

81
While some scholars have attempted to write Jewish artists into the canonical history of
art, often these studies document the formal and cultural barriers that prevented Jewish
artists from fully participating in the world of commercial art. See the deeply
problematic, but frequently cited study, Fritz Landsberger, “The Jewish Artist Before the
Time of Emancipation,” Hebrew Union College Annual 16 (1941): 321-414.
82
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for
“Indian” Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 1-26. See more generally, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27-47.
83
The literature on reception of the Zohar in Italy is immense, but most recently, see
Moshe idel, “Italy in Safed, Safed in Italy: Toward an interactive history of Sixteenth-
Century Kabbalah,” in Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern
Italy, ed. David B. Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri, (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 239–69, and Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation:
Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications (Princeton: Princeton
34

When the blessed Holy One wished to fashion the world, all the letters were
hidden away. For two thousand years before creating the world, the blessed Holy
One contemplated them and played with them. As he verged on creating the
world, all the letters presented themselves before Him, from last to first.
84

What follows is an extended interview between God and each of the Hebrew letters. He
notes their linguistic relationships, the strengths and pitfalls of their unique etymological
trajectories. Eventually, God summons and assembles the letters to create the words that
substantiate creation. The celestial letters assembled by God are directly translated into
matter on earth, “The blessed Holy One fashioned high, large letters and low, small
letters…letters above and letters below. They were all as one, from the upper world to
the lower world.” And so the material, visible, phenomenal world begins not with God
the sculptor, but God the editor. This genesis myth describes a cosmos in which the
sensory experience of the world and the reading of texts coalesce. Seeing the world and
reading it are continuous practices.
With its anthropomorphic renderings of Hebrew letters, the artist’s colophon in
the fifteenth-century Kennicott Bible, resonates with the Zohar’s account of divine
creation (Figure 1.1).
85
The object is significant because it presents Jewish visual culture
with the opportunity to restage a culturally indigenous conception of “semiotic

University Press, 2007), chaps. 9–12. .
84
Haqdamat Sefer ha-Zohar, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Daniel C. Matt (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004), 11. This creation myth is not unique to the Zohar, see also
Phineas Mordell, “The Origin of Letters and Numerals According to the Sefer Yeṣirah,”
The Jewish Quarterly Review 3 (1913): 517-544.
85
Bodleian Library, MS. Kennicott 1; for a thorough traditional approach to the object,
see Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jewish Book Art between Islam and Christianity: The
Decoration of Hebrew Bibles in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 212-215. See also
the commentary by Bezalel Narkiss and Aliza Cohen-Mushlin in the facsimile edition,
The Kennicott Bible (London : Facsimile Editions, 1985).
35
creation.”
86
For the illuminator, Joseph ibn Chaim, this anthropomorphosis of language
provides the opportunity to draw a profound parallel between artistic creation and divine
creation—a statement that would be impossible without the confluence of figural image
and Hebrew letter. The colophon is not only a convenient novelty. Rather, it supplies a
significant theoretical insight. Like the Zohar’s genesis narrative, the grotesque alphabet
in the colophon dramatizes the Hebrew language as vibrant, richly personified and firmly
rooted in the material, perceptible world of sensory experience. The colophon makes
language tangible, imaginable, and thus visually accessible and immanent in the material
world. To be sure, the colophon can be read purely as a text, ignoring the meaning
pregnant in the anthropomorphic letters.
87
Instead, the contorted bodies on the written
page invite the viewer to recognize in his corporeal engagement his own subjectivity as a
phenomenal reader. To read the colophon is to read bodies, but to read the colophon is
also to read with the body, a property of language Maurice Merleau-Ponty has described
as “corporeal intentionality.”
88

This “corporeal intentionality” is central to Jewish visual culture in general, and
to reading Venice Haggadah in particular. This insight was certainly on the mind of
Leon Modena when formulating the Venice Haggadah.
89
Describing the function of the

86
Elliot Wolfson, “The Body in the Text: A Kabbalistic Theory of Embodiment,” Jewish
Quarterly Review 95 (2005): 479-500.
87
Indeed, Benjamin Kennicott the eighteenth-century Christian Hebraist who acquired
the bible for the Bodleian, purchased it solely as an artifact of textual biblical
transmission. William McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), 163-166.
88
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs, trans. R. C.
McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 89.
89
To say that early modern Jewish intellectuals were attentive to the Zohar would be an
emphatic understatement. Leon Modena was preoccupied with it, particularly in later
years, and he still owned the controversial two-volume edition printed in Mantua 1560 at
36
images in a preface to the volume’s second, and expanded edition, Modena praised the
book’s visual program, arguing that the haggadah’s visual program was intended to
engage the bodily senses just as the book’s text engaged the intellect, requiring an
interpretive synthesis of text and image. This statement of purpose is the first in any
Jewish book, and in many ways radical. Past scholarship is emphatic on the subject:
Jews do not make images. In this sense, the interpretive parity Modena assigns to the
haggadah’s visual and verbal programs is problematic for traditional assumptions about
Jewish visual culture. Heinrich Graetz the nineteenth-century founder of academic
Jewish studies declared, “Paganism sees its god, Judaism hears Him.” Graetz proposed a
mutually exclusive dichotomy between an intellectual, immaterial, and invisible Jewish
religious praxis and the affective, corporeal, and visual experience of paganism and
Christianity.
90
This influential historiographic prejudice continues to maintain
considerable currency in art history and Jewish studies and accounts for an absence of
Jewish visual culture from curricula in both fields.
Though tempting to dismiss as anachronistic, recent scholarship has generally
supported Graetz’s notion. Viewing ceremonial art in the State Jewish Museum in
Prague, Stephen Greenblatt remarked that, “The Jewish objects are neither sufficiently
distant to be absorbed into the detached ethos of anthropological display nor sufficiently

his death. Inventario dei beni de Leon da Modena [Tratto dal Registro No. 2949 del
Notaio Andrea Calzavara di Venezia (Archivio di Stato di Venezia), carte 54]. The two
volumes are listed as “Zeffe soar parte 1” and “Zeffe soar part 2”. Modena, praised the
book as an indigenous and highly inspirational work of Jewish spirituality, but
recognized the Zohar as a medieval text, rather than the ancient source it was frequently
alleged to be. For Leon Modena’s considerably contested confrontation with the Zohar,
see Yaacob Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early
Modern Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 59-100.
90
Heinrich Graetz, The Structure of Jewish History, ed. and trans. Ismar Schorsch (New
York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1975), 68-9.
37
familiar to be framed and encased alongside the altarpieces and reliquaries that fill
Western museums.” The objects of Jewish visual culture, Greenblatt continues, are “the
products of a people with a resistance to joining figural representation to religious
observance, a strong antiiconic bias. Many of them are artifacts…whose purpose was to
be drawn back or removed in order to make possible the act that mattered: not vision but
reading.”
91
Like the nineteenth-century academic apparatus that structures Jewish
studies, Greenblatt demotes vision while elevating reading, creating a fissure between the
two phenomena and buttressing the conception of Jewish hostility toward the visual.
92

While modernity has evidently 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.
No set of objects more exacerbates this project than Hebrew micrography, the
crafting of decorative and figural images through lines of Hebrew text. Micrography was
popular and prevalent in seventeenth-century Italy, particularly in the Veneto.
93
The
traditional approach to these objects describes micrography as legalistic and instrumental.
In essence, because the creation and display of images are banned by Jewish orthodoxy,

91
Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Memory and Resonance,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in
Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1990), 174.
92
See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 21-82. Here Jay charts
the vacillating fortunes of vision in philosophy from Plato to the relative present.
93
Micrography was also highly diverse, appearing in bibles, illuminated wedding
contracts, broadsides and amulets across Europe and North Africa. Its popularity
continued well into the nineteenth century.
38
fashioning images out of Hebrew letters effectively circumvented the law.
94
For David
Freedberg, micrography is compelling evidence for the universal and irrepressible human
desire to create affectively resonant images.
95
This interpretive trajectory necessarily
assumes, however, that micrographic images resist the potential to be read as texts. It
assumes that the letters are solely instrumental to the formation of the image. On one
hand, describing micrographic images as essentially visual creates an entry for Jewish
visual culture into canonical art history. But it also requires aestheticizing Hebrew
letters, making them as literally and linguistically meaningless as the engravers marks
with a burin or a painter’s brushstrokes. While creating disciplinary space for the
significance of Jewish visual culture in the history of art, Hebrew micrography seems to
perpetuate rather than solve the broader historiographical dilemma. This chapter charts
an alternate interpretation for these objects, one that offers insights into exactly the type
of synthetic visual and textual encounter Leon Modena describes in his introduction to
the Venice Haggadah.
It is intuitive to assume that micrography is not intended to be read.
96
Often the
lines of text are highly, even impractically, convoluted. More significantly, reading the
lines of text requires dissolving the broader visual field, rendering the image void. While
Henrich Graetz would no doubt revel in the notion of Jewish reading as an act of

94
Stanley Ferber, “Micrography: A Jewish Art Form,” Journal of Jewish Art 3-4 (1977):
12-24 and Joseph Gutmann, No Graven Image: Studies in Art and the Hebrew Bible
(New York, 1970), xv.
95
David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 54-81.
96
Indeed, medieval religious authorities criticized the difficulty of reading micrographic
renderings of the masorah—to little effect apparently. See, for instance, Judah ben
Samuel he-Hasid, Sefer hassiydiym, ed. J. Wistinezki (Berlin, 1891-93), no. 709. Here in
a responsa, the Rabbi disallows the use of micrography in transcriptions of biblical texts
and commentaries.
39
iconoclasm, I would like to move beyond the historiographical contest between vision
and intellect, image and text, to focus on a third agent implicated in the act of reading
micrography: the body itself. Here I would like to suggest that these images are intended
to create a particular kind of devotional experience, which Jewish scholars and
theologians, initially the twelfth-century polymath Moses Maimonides, elevated as an
ideal form of Jewish worship.
97
Maimonides described this form of prayer as kavanah,
which most accurately translates as “intention,” but can more critically be understood as
“affect.” This devotional model devalues behaviorism, investing in every act of prayer
and reading the potential for meaningful piety. Accordingly, repeating words by rote or
reading casually are inadequate. In order to make prayer and study spiritually
meaningful, the entire body must be engaged in a performative act of reading. Reading,
in other words, is not a purely cerebral process that can be tidily isolated from the body
that reads.
98
This model of reading obligates the body to act as an epistemological
processor, a demonstration of Merleau-Ponty’s “corporeal intentionality.”
One cannot read micrographic texts casually or without intent. A seventeenth-
century Italian manuscript broadsheet depicting the book of Ecclesiastes rendered as an
armillary sphere demonstrates the convoluted lines of running text that can compose the
micrographic image, and the particular challenge that confronts its reader (Figure 1.2).

97
On the legacy of Maimonides’ notion in the early modern period see Vivian B. Mann,
“Spirituality and Jewish Ceremonial Art,” Artibus et Historiae 48 (2003): 173-182. As
Mann demonstrates, Maimonides’ response remained one of the central texts rabbis
grappled with during the sixteenth and seventeenth.
98
This notion has proven central for debates about Jewish prayer and devotion in the
modern period, particularly in Hasidism, which engages with Maimonides’ description of
affective prayer. See Rivka Horwitz, “Abraham Joshua Heschel on Prayer and His
Hasidic Sources,” Modern Judaism 19 (1999): 293-310. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern,
“Hasidism, Havurot, and the Jewish Street,” Jewish Social Studies 10 (2004): 20-54.
40
While the exact purpose of this plaque is the subject of debate, it was certainly intended
to be read during the festival of Sukkot, and then used to decorate either a family or
community sukkah, a ceremonial booth prescribed for the holiday.
99
In this case the act
of reading requires an intense and sustained visual and corporeal engagement. The
plaque requires the reader to rotate the image, while carefully tracing the lines of text
with a finger or pointer. Like the Kennicott colophon, the object also broadcasts the
bodily act that composed it, boldly declaring the name of its creator, the scribe Israel
David Luzzatto beneath the caption, “This is all [of] Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) the writer.”
100

There is a persuasive visual resonance between the formal circularity of the
armillary sphere and the work of the thirteenth-century cabalist Abraham Abulafia
(Figure 1.3). Abulafia designed mystical texts to engage the body in meditative acts such
as rotating the book to repeatedly read passages written in circular format, providing
precisely the environment necessary for affective reading and prayer.
101
In many ways,
Abulafia’s work provides a material and practical application of Maimonides’ conception
of kavanah. It creates a concrete mechanism for engaging the body, eyes, and intellect.

99
S. Makover, “The Iconographic Program of a Series of Italian Sukkah Decorations,” in
Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem: World Union of
Jewish Studies, 1985), p. 38. There is another closely-related set of scribal broadsheets in
the Smithsonian collection, see Grace Cohen Grossman, Judaica at the Smithsonian:
Cultural Politics as Cultural Model (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press)
pp. 146-151.
100
The lower caption in bold reads: “In sukkot (booths) you shall dwell for seven days,
every citizen [of Israel], for Israel dwelt in sukkot (booths).” The object is catalogued as
Jewish Museum, S256; Norman L. Kleeblatt, and Vivian B. Mann, Treasures of the
Jewish Museum (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1986), pp. 86-87; and Mann,
Gardens and Ghettos, no. 108, pages 260ff.
101
The circular diagrams chart the name(s) of God, according to Abulafia’s unique brand
of mysticism. Repeatedly reciting the divine name was promoted as a method for
achieving spiritual ecstasy. See, Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham
Abulafia (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 13-54.
41
Along these lines, later kabbalists adapted the notion of kavanah to describe a specifically
revelatory phenomenon deeply engaged with processes of visualization.
102
The
micrographic plaque fits neatly into this trajectory, fusing Maimonides’ interest in
affective reading with the mystical emphasis on visual engagement. Given the continuity
of Abulafia’s diagrams into the early modern period it is likely that his mystical texts
provided a prototype for later micrography.
103
Nonetheless, significant distinctions
differentiate the two. The armillary sphere is not an abstract shape like the circular
diagrams. While the image of the armillary sphere provides the impetus to engage with
the book corporeally, its iconography is also essential to the ultimate meaning of the
object.
104

The image is deliberate, and confronts the viewer with a provocative question:
why render Eccelesiastes in the image of an armillary sphere? Luzzato did not simply
select it for its convoluted lines as an act of masochism. Rather, the viewer is forced to
engage in a more premeditated and meaningful dialogue between text and image.
Ecclesiastes is a book preoccupied with man’s place in the cosmos and the cyclical
patterns of natural phenomena. It is a book about the perpetuation of the cosmos and the
fragility of human existence. No issue occupied Jewish natural philosophers in the early
modern period more than reconciling developments in astronomy with canonical Jewish

102
See the transcription of the anonymous fourteenth-century “She-ar Kavanah” (BL
Plut. II, Cod. 41, fol. 222 a/b) in Gershom Scholem, “The Concept of Kavvanah in the
Early Kabbalah,” in Studies in Jewish Thought, ed. Alfred Jospe (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1981), 162-180.
103
See Idel, Kabbalah, 97-103.
104
Abulafia’s visual volvelles or dials are almost contemporary to the earliest paper
volvelles, typically associated with Raymond Llull. On the history of dials, see Jennifer
Helfland, Reinventing the Wheel: Volvelles, Equatoria, Planispheres, Fact-finders,
Gestational Charts (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002).
42
texts and orthodox conceptions of biblical cosmology.
105
The choice of a technological
apparatus places Ecclesiastes’ description of God’s creation as “everything under the
sun,” in dialogue with contemporary arguments about heliocentrism and the possibility of
proof for recent revolutionary scientific claims. The topic was not without heated debate.
In the early modern period influential Rabbis, considered the scientific basis for
astronomy in general principle.
106
In the eighteenth century Jewish natural philosophers
such as Tobias Cohen still contested the issue. The object was also produced following a
period of intense messianic speculation associated with the burgeoning popularity (and
eventual decline) of the messianic pretender Sabbatai Sevi, during which astronomical
projections were leveraged to prove his messianic legitimacy. It is essential to note that it
is the image of the armillary sphere that embeds the ancient text in contemporary and
culturally specific concerns, making this reading of Ecclesiastes highly historically
contingent, as well as corporeally engaging. Reading the text in this visual configuration
suggests a unique interpretive and phenomenal experience.
Micrography presents a model that satisfies both Leon Modena’s suggestion of
synthetic reading and Maimonides’ devotional affective ideal. Although micrography
might appear to be an idiosyncratic scribal art form, this model of reading is not unique to
it. Indeed, books such as the Venice Haggadah share a similar reliance on harmonious
text and image relations, despite the spatial divide between the central text and marginal
image. The philosopher Graeme Nicholson has argued that the “experience of reading is

105
David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 74-80.
106
David Fishman, “R. Moses Isserles and the Study of Science among Polish Rabbis,”
Science in Context 10 (1997): 571-88.
43
bound deeply to our experience of seeing, because both are interpretive.”
107
Vision is not
a passive biological act that results in the transference of objective data, but like reading,
a hermeneutical practice. Such an assertion originates in arguments for the
epistemological value of corporeal experience, including vision, articulated in the
phenomenology of the twentieth-century philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
108

Modena seems to have predicted Merleau-Ponty’s argument in the seventeenth
century. Elsewhere in his writings, Modena would argue that “one never finds that God
commands belief in anything but a palpable concept, or one that is possible to
visualize.”
109
It is possible to detect the resonances between Modena’s thinking and
Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on a vital link between percept and concept, for instance, that
“we cannot conceive of anything which is not perceived or perceptible.”
110
Like
Merleau-Ponty, Leon Modena was acutely aware of the agency of vision in creating
knowledge of the world. In appealing to a phenomenological experience as a site for
constructing beliefs, Modena locates the body and its senses as central to early modern
Jewish visual culture.
The affinity between seeing and reading in Jewish culture has been influentially
addressed by Elliot Wolfson, whose examination of Jewish mystical texts functions as a

107
Graeme Nicholson, "Seeing and Reading: Some Aspects of their Connection," in
Hermeneutics & Deconstruction, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Don Ihde (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1985), 34.
108
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction, 2nd Edition
(New York and London: Routledge, 2002 [1945]).
109
Leon Modena, Magen Wa-hereb, ed. and trans. by Allen Howard Podet (Lewiston,
NY: Mellin Press, 2001), 39.
110
For instance, that “we cannot conceive anything which is not perceived or
perceptible,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction,
2nd Edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2002 [1945]), 373.
44
penetrating critique of Graetz’s myth of Jewish hostility towards the visual.
111
Wolfson
describes the emphatically visual nature of medieval Jewish mysticism, noting that texts
such as the Zohar ask readers to imagine not only divine acts, but to imagine God itself,
demanding an “epistemic priority” for vision and imagination. Perpetuated through
manuscript transcription and controversially printed in Mantua in 1560, the Zohar
demands an attention to affect not unlike the sensorial piety proposed by Ignatius Loyola
almost concurrently.
112
Nor is this phenomenon unique to mystical texts and practices.
Scholars have recently noted the attention to “spiritual exercises” in a variety of seminal
Jewish texts.
113

Despite Wolfson’s intervention, scholars of the Jewish studies have remained
firmly attached to a traditional logocentric definition of the Jewish book.
114

Consequently, studies in Jewish book history are subject to an incisive methodological
critique of book history recently issued by Bruce Smith. Smith writes that many works in
the field of book history “tend to assume a ‘reader’ (note the singular) who is absent in

111
Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in
Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Wolfson’s
work has initiated a new interest in processes of visualization in Jewish mysticism, see
Rachel Neis, “Embracing Icons: The Face of Jacob on the Throne of God,” Images 1
(2007): 36-54.
112
For the history and historiography of the notion of spiritual exercises, see Pierre
Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993). Hadot argues that the conception of spiritual exercises finds its
origins in a variety of antique traditions revived by, rather than originating in, Jesuit
thought.
113
Jonathan Schofer, “Spiritual Exercises in Rabbinic Culture,” AJS Review 27 (2003):
203-226.
114
For the most recent work on the history of the Jewish book and reading, see
“Symposium: The Jewish Book,” AJS Review 34 (2010): 353-377. See also the brief but
remarkable study, Robert Bonfil, “Reading in the Jewish Communities of Western
Europe in the Middle Ages,” A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo
and Roger Chartier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 149-178.
45
body, unlocated in space and time and sedentary in posture, totally absorbed by the
printed text he holds in his hands. He never yawns, he never lets his mind wander, he
never looks around.”
115
In contrast, Smith proposes a greater attention to the visual—and
more broadly sensory—ambience in which books were read.
Readers of the Venice Haggadah did not need to look far for ambient imagery.
116

There in the margins of the book are an abundance of figurative images, many with
relationships to the text that temporal and cultural distance have rendered opaque.
Following Nicholson and Smith, this study focuses on the relationship between reading
and vision as symbiotic and synthetic interpretive acts, attempting to recuperate the
meaning of seeing these images for early modern Jewish readers. This approach
necessarily requires engaging with epistemology as a historically contingent corporeal act
embodied in the reader’s experience in time and location in space. Smith’s theory of
“ambient poetics” or “historical phenomenology” is particularly suited to this approach to
the Venice Haggadah. The haggadah stipulates that its readers perform such activities as
washing hands, reclining on cushions, drinking wine, addressing specific participants,
and eating a variety of liturgically prescribed foods during the performance of the text.
117

By treating images as one aspect of a multimedia reading encounter, this approach also

115
Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 127.
116
This theme has been treated, although in a different cultural context, in Michael
Camille, Image on the Edge: the margins of medieval art (London: Reaktion, 1992).
Where Camille focuses on disjunctions and tensions between the verbal and visual, I
focus on continuities.
117
Joel Hecker, “Eating Gestures and the Ritualized Body in Medieval Jewish
Mysticism,” History of Religions 40 (2000): 125-152.
46
contributes to a growing body of literature that Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett has
characterized as the “corporeal turn” in Jewish studies.
118

One compelling example of the phenomenological experience of reading the
haggadah is the consumption of the maror, the bitter herb eaten during the Passover
seder. Like the process of tracing with fingers and rotating texts, acts such as the
preparation and consumption of food form the kind of embodied sensory conditions that
fundamentally inform the perception of images and the reading of texts. In explicating
the symbolism of the bitter herb, the Venice Haggadah explains that the maror is
consumed as a corporeal mnemonic, to recall—even if temporarily—the bitterness of
slavery.
119
The pictorial cycle that accompanies this commentary visualizes a narrative
of bitterness and redemption: from slaves enduring the abuse of Egyptian overlords to
newly liberated subjects (Figures 1.4-5). These images suggest that the repression of
slavery evaporates through redemption just as the bitterness of maror fades from the
palette.
This notion in the Venice Haggadah was a departure from the traditions of
haggadah illustration in earlier periods. The fifteenth-century Golden Haggadah displays
a monumental image of the bitter herb, with the heading “this is Maror.”
120
Typical of

118
Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, “The Corporeal Turn,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95
(2005): 447-461; and in the context of visual and material culture, see Barbara
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, “Towards a Post-disciplinary Jewish Subject,” Images 1 (2007):
12-14.
119
Modena’s own treatise on mnemonics, which remained in his personal library at his
death, was published shortly after the Venice Haggadah. The treatise remains unstudied;
Leon Modena, Lev ha-Aryeh: yelmad me-adam da`at le-`ezur ha-Zakron be-kol ha-
hakhamot ve-`eske bene adam (Venice, 1612).
120
The image appears on folio 45v. The Golden Haggadah is so called for the gold leaf
background to many of its images. The book was likely produced in Northern Spain
around 1420, and is currently held in the British Library. For the most recent research on
47
haggadahs of the late medieval period, the maror is represented within the conventions of
the medieval herbal tradition, with the specimen floating in a sea of text (Figure 1.6). In
the Venice Haggadah, the representation of maror shifts away from a literal illustration of
the bitter herb to address the bitterness of slavery the food is intended to recall. The herb
itself disappears from the pages of the book, no longer the focus of the viewer’s visual
attention. Significantly although, the textual heading, “this is maror (bitterness)” --
remains intact—essentially becoming the caption for these images. As the viewer
pronounced the words, “this is maror” and held the herb in his hands, and tasted it, he
would have been confronted with these images of abuse and redemption. This example
demonstrates the contingent rather than essential experience of “Jewish” vision, and the
way that each haggadah can structure a particular experience for its reader.
As a network of interrelated texts, images, and corporeal phenomena reading the
Venice Haggadah must have been particularly resonant for its Jewish readers in the
ghetto of Venice. Marginalized and persecuted, Jews in early modern Italy had good
reason to be discontent, to be, in a word, bitter. Describing life in the Venetian ghetto in a
haggadah commentary, the seventeenth-century Rabbi Eliezer Nachman Foa (d. 1641)
wrote that “present exile is bitter in itself and bitter on account of its length and on
account of the abuse we suffer from so greatly that it clings to the soul and is very
bitter.”
121
It seems appropriate that Foa’s exegesis on the gustatory experience of the
bitter herb at the Passover table reframes the visceral encounter to describe current

the object, see Marc Michael Epstein, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and
Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 129-200.
121
Eliezer Nachman Foa, Midrash Haggadah, (Venice, 1641), 164, cited in Robert
Bonfil, “Change in Cultural Patterns of Jewish Society in Crisis: The Case of Italian
Jewry at the Close of the Sixteenth Century,” Jewish History 3 (1988): 11-30.
48
cultural circumstances and their affective associations. Jewish literature on the passions
recognized the expediency and justifiability of emotions such as anger as a response to
injustice.
122
The Venice Haggadah sanctions, indeed, encourages these raw emotions.
The book repeatedly cycles through narratives of injustice and retribution, engaging with
exactly this kind of affective emotive typology.
These affective reactions are also modeled in prescriptive imagery, which offer
valuable insights into early modern Jewish reading practices. Jewish books of customs or
minhagim were popular in the seventeenth-century ghetto. These texts often included
images that both describe current Jewish devotional exercises, and project a model for
ideal practice.
123
In a compelling image accompanying a description of Tisha B’av, the
commemoration of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, worshippers are depicted
reading, assumedly from the book of Lamentations, with such intent and devotion that
they can feel the flames that consumed the Temple in Jerusalem (Figure 1.7). Another
book of customs depicts readers so engaged with their texts that their own synagogue
begins to crackle and burn with flames (Figure 1.8). This compression of historical time

122
Elijah de Vidas, Sefer Reshit Hochma (Venice: Giovanni di Gara, 1579). For
contextualization on the prescriptive character of Sefer Reshit Hochma, see Solomon
Schimmel, “Education of the Emotions in Jewish Devotional Literature: Anger and Its
Control,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 8 (1980): 259-276. For the use of the book in a
pedagogical context, see Robert Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance
Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 320-1.
123
Diane Wolfthal, Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity, and Memory in the Illustrated
Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), Chapter 5. Diane
Wolfthal, “Imaging the Self: Representations of Jewish Ritual in Yiddish Books of
Customs,” ed. Eva Frojmovic, Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other (Leiden: Brill,
2002), 189-211; Jean Baumgarten, “Prayer, Ritual and Practice in Ashkenazic Jewish
Society: The Tradition of Yiddish Custom Books in the Fifteenth to Eighteenth
Centuries” Studia Rosenthaliana 36 (2002-2003): 121-146.
49
through a liturgical performance suggests that ideal Jewish reading proposes an
experience that was intended to be both vigorously imaginative and corporeally engaging.
Both images distinctly feature readers who weep openly, an indigenous Jewish
practice associated not only with grief over the destruction of the temple, but in a quite
separate context with visionary and revelatory mystical experience. Moshe Idel has
identified these two forms of weeping as culturally and historically distinct phenomena,
both with origins in medieval Jewish mysticism.
124
The appearance of the image of
weeping in a vernacular, seventeenth-century book of customs indicates the extent to
which medieval mystical practices linger in early modern Jewish culture.
125
Here the
tears of mourning and the tears of revelation coalesce, a complex iconographical gesture
that elaborates on our understanding of the diverse practices that compose Jewish
reading. The sorrow attendant to reading the Book of Lamentations both inspires the
reader affectively, and initiates a visionary experience.
Evidently, there were a number of models and practices available to early modern
Jewish readers. These can at least begin to account for the complex reading experience
implicated in the pages of the Venice Haggadah. This process is exemplified through the
character of “the Reader,” a conventional Venetian Jew, who appears as an actor in the
contemporary genre scenes, and as a firsthand witness in images of the biblical narrative,
typically with his haggadah close at hand (Figure 1.9). For instance, the Reader and his
son reappear as witnesses to the binding of Isaac, carrying the haggadah (which they are

124
Idel, Kabbalah, Chapter 5. On the textual motif of weeping in association with the
destruction of the Temple, see Melvin Glatt, “God the Mourner—Israel’s Companion in
Tragedy,” Judaism 28 (1979): 79-80.
125
The most recent work on mysticism suggests that mysticism was pervasive—
sometimes problematically so—in seventeenth-century Venice, see the introduction to
Dweck, Scandal of Kabbalah, and the substantial discussion of the historiography there.
50
simultaneously reading at the Passover seder) in their hands (Figure 1.10). These figures
represent ideal readers, engaged in reading with kavanah. The apparent travel across
disparate eras disintegrates the division between liturgical performance and historical
time, allowing the imaginative projection of the book’s’ reader into the narrative of
redemption. The presence of the Reader also reminds us that the Passover haggadah was
not intended to be read silently or in solitary confinement, like a Carthusian monk at
prayers. Nor was it a book intended to be read in the sacred space of the synagogue
under the jurisdiction of rabbinic authority, but with the family and in the home.
The Venice Haggadah’s novelty is not only its visual program. The book also
provided a vernacular translation that facilitated the performance of the text in the
domestic space. The text requires the participation of various members of the audience,
most specifically children. The Reader frequently appears alongside his son. The image
expands the conception of the ideal reader to include the engagement of the young in the
act of performative reading. The Passover Seder is exemplary for this pedagogical
character. It was noted by Johannes Buxtorf in his Synagoga Judaica, which
characterizes the interchange between adults and children as a reverse Socratic dialogue,
with children posing questions and adults answering to the best of their knowledge.
126

Isaac Abarbanel, meanwhile, explains the appearance of the anecdote of the Four Sons is
intended to provide four distinct pedagogical models for engaging the young,
emphasizing how importance of this aspect of the Seder.
127

Typologies provide an essential interpretive lens for approaching the Venice

126
Johannes Buxtorf, Juden-schül (Synagoga Judaica), (Basel, 1603), Chapter 13.
127
Abarbanel Haggadah, 40-42.
51
haggadah.
128
In his haggadah commentary, Isaac Abarbanel constructed a typology
between exile from Spain and exile in the slave camps of biblical Egypt. Abarbanel
experienced this issue personally, and witnessed the conflation of biblical precedent and
contemporary suffering. In 1492, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile issued the
decree expelling the Jews from Spain, shortly before the celebration of Passover that
year.
129
The timing of the proclamation was not lost on the Jews of Spain. One Spanish
Rabbi reported in a sermon, “In place of the Haggadah there was weeping and horror
over the unleavened bread and bitter herbs: the people wept on that night, for there was
great sorrow.”
130
Responding to the exile from Spain, Abarbanel asked, “What have we
gained by the Exodus and redemption from Egypt, if we are now in Exile?” Writing in
Venice shortly before his death, Abarbanel elaborated,
We would rather toil for Egypt than die in this wilderness of the nations, with its
forced conversions and expulsions, where so many of us come to a bitter end, be
it by sword, hunger, or captivity, or worst of all, abandonment of our faith.
131

Abarbanel’s work must have remained poignant in the seventeenth century, since Leon
Modena selected Abarbanel’s commentary from a huge pool of similar exegetical
writings for inclusion in Leon Modena’s second edition of the Venice Haggadah printed

128
Kathleen Biddick The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
129
On this see Edward Peters, “Jewish History and Gentile Memory: The Expulsion of
1492,” Jewish History 9 (1995): 9-34. This article also includes an English translation of
the entire text of the decree, see pp. 23-8.
130
Rabbi Avraham mi-Turrutiel, “Hashmalat Sefer ha-Qabbalah,” translated in Marc
Saperstein, Your Voice Like a Ram’s Horn: Themes and Texts in Traditional Jewish
Preaching (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1996), 18-19.
131
Abarbanel Haggadah, 34. The standard biography on Abarbanel remains
Netanyahu’s 1953 work, recently updated and revised, Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac
Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). For
more on Abarbanel’s exegetical works, see Eric Lawee, Isaac Abarbanel’s Stance
Toward Tradition: Defense, Dissent, Dialogue (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).
52
in 1629. Using the haggadah to illuminate contemporary oppression is essential to
understanding the early modern interpretation of the haggadah images. The readers of
the haggadah must have understood the words and images of the this book as directly
reflecting, and perhaps influencing, their present situation.

Jewish Memory
The construction of the Jewish historical past in the Venice Haggadah supports
this sense of agency. In his path breaking work on Jewish collective memory, Yosef
Yerushalmi has pointed to the exceptionality of the Passover liturgy. The experience of
reading the haggadah promotes more than a historical recollection, but a collective
“reactualization.”
132
The Venice Haggadah’s construction of the narrative of redemption
does not attempt to create historical distance between early modern reader and Israelite
slave, but to compress it tightly, until the distance disappears entirely. Yerushalmi argues
that a conception of Jewish history as a scholarly genre is a relatively modern
construction that replaces an eroded awareness of collective memory, experience and
shared canonical textual study. In the strictest sense, the traditional text of the haggadah
documents an historical moment, rooted in both archaeological fact and liturgical
obligation. As Brian Curran has recently argued, the early modern period evinced a
passion for Egypt, which humanists understood as a pre-classical civilization
foundational for Greco-Roman culture.
133
And yet the Venice Haggadah’s visual
narrative lacks any reference to Egypt. It lacks so much as a cursory obelisk, eschewing

132
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1996), 44.
133
Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: the Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early
Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
53
nearly all references to an archaeological conception of Israelite Egypt, markers that
pervaded the broader visual and intellectual culture of early modern Europe. This is not
the consequence of artistic or intellectual oversight.
134
The narrative structured by the
Venice Haggadah’s visual program is only nominally an historical one.
Elaborating on Yerushalmi’s thesis, recent work has pointed to the cyclical nature
of Jewish historical experience. Gabrielle Spiegel has argued that Jewish historical
experience is predicated on recognizing “paradigmatic” events and incorporating them
into the liturgical cycle, precisely the phenomenon active in the Venice Haggadah;s
visual program.
135
This model does not conceive of history proceeding in a linear and
progressive manner, but in a cycle. This is in a certain sense remarkably similar to recent
work by art historians investigating the polyvalent temporality of objects in the early
modern period. Whereas Wood and Nagel describe early modern material culture as
possessing a non-linear (and often times disordered) temporality, Jewish experience
proceeds in a cyclical pattern.
136
The lack of exotic detail or reference to historical Egypt
is not anachronism, because “Egypt” was not a historically remote location, but a lived
experience in the ghetto of Venice. The notion of plural temporality also functions to
transform the visual program of the Venice Haggadah from a description of ancient
injustice into contemporary polemic. The emotional resonance in the book draws on this

134
As Curran argues, although many monumental history paintings were engaged with a
specifically humanist interest in Egypt, this enthusiasm spilled out into print culture, the
decorative arts and architecture. Certainly by the beginning of the seventeenth century,
examples of the “Egyptian Renaissance” were accessible throughout Venice. See
discussion of the effects of the publication of the Hypnertomachia Poliphili in Curran,
133-164.
135
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time,”
History and Theory 41 (2002): 149-162.
136
Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York:
Zone Books, 2010).
54
idea particularly. It is not a case of the viewer inserting himself into a historical past, but
rather the interchangeability of Egypt and Italy. In other words, if the Renaissance
reception of the past can be described as anachronic, Jewish visual culture is
ambichronic.

Idolatry and Jewish Vision
Marginal to the traditional Passover narrative, idolatry assumes a prominent place
in the visual program of the Venice Haggadah, an attempt, I argue, to articulate Jewish
response to the debates over visual orthodoxy vigorously contested across Europe’s
confessional communities. Idolatry is a central discourse in these conflicts. Indeed,
Michael Cole and Rebecca Zorach have recently proposed labeling the early modern
period “the age of idolatry.”
137

Consistent with this pervasive concern, if the Venice Haggadah takes elaborate
steps to describe an ideal reader and ideal reading practice, it marshals its imagery
equally poignantly to fashion a conception of visual piety in negative terms. Early
modern Jewish scholars left no cohesive manifestos, artist’s biographies, or bodies of
aesthetic theory to account for the presence and function of images in Jewish devotional
culture. More commonly, Jewish visual orthodoxy was articulated in a variety of primary
sources by describing what it was not.
138
Maimonides wrote soberly of issues
surrounding the use of images in his Mishneh torah, a codification of Jewish law:

137
See the introduction by the editors in Michael W. Cole and Rebecca Zorach, eds. The
Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World (Burlington:
Ashgate, 2009), 1-10.
138
See Vivian Mann, Art and Ceremony in Jewish Life: Essays in the History of Jewish
Art (London: Pindar Press, 2005), Chapter 1.
55
It is forbidden to make images even though they are not used for idolatry...This
includes even images of silver and gold which are made only for beauty, lest
those who worship idols be misled by them and think they are for purposes of
idolatry. However, this prohibition against fashioning images for beauty applies
only to the human form and, therefore, we do not fashion a human form in wood
or plaster or in stone. This holds when the form projects like the murals and
paneling in a reception hall and the like.
139

But when asked to reconcile Jewish visual practice with the non-Jewish world, authorities
wrote of images with considerably more heat and less legalistic cogency, berating
Christians for their “living, weeping, bleeding, flying and speaking” images and mocking
“the uncircumcised Christians who make images and bow down before them.”
140

These aggressive, rhetorically inflated rejections of idolatry might seem
hyperbolic to modern readers approaching the period through the lens of Jewish
aniconism. For a culture that prided itself on a rejection of the visual, the need to address
images with such vehemence terms appears excessive. If early modern Jews believed a
rhetorical rejection of images would relieve allegations of idolatry, in was certainly not
the case. Even Protestants, who might have found sympathetic cause with Jewish
aniconism, found reason to lodge allegations of idolatry. To Reformed sensibilities,
Jewish devotion to texts was hardly innocuous. Viewing the procession of the Torah, one
Protestant visitor commented, “They receive the five books of Moses and honor them, by

139
Translated in Vivian Mann, Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 24
140
Rashbam, Exodus 28:30. See Martin Lockshin, Rashbam’s Commentary on Exodus:
An Annotated Translation (Providence: Brown University Press, 2001), 365-6. For
discussion of this source, see Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern
Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000),
123. For the history of idolatry in Jewish-Christian polemics, see Hanne Trautner-
Kromann, Shield and sword: Jewish polemics against Christianity and the Christians in
France and Spain from 1100-1500 (Tübingen, 1993), 87-8; Samuel Krauss and William
Horbury, The Jewish-Christian Controversy from the Earliest Times to 1789, (Tübingen,
1995), 222.
56
carrying them about their Church, as the Papists do their cross.”
141
Other forms of
reading were equally offensive. Physical contact between mezuzah and the Jewish body
was a proxy for reading the prayers contained within, an address for God’s protection. It
was the gesture of kissing the mezuzah that struck John Calvin as the worst kind of
idolatry. The Jews, Calvin argued, took an “excellent lesson,” and “turnd it into a charme
and sorcerie…lyke to the Agnus Dei in popery, and such other geugawes that the papists
hang about their necks.”
142
For Calvin, no distinction existed between the idolatry
attendant to viewing the iconic Lamb of God, and reading through tactile osmosis the
words of God.
Both Catholic and Protestant accounts of Jewish vision express a vigilance to
suspect practices in any tradition considered heterodox. These persistent allegations also
help to explain the Jewish hypersensitivity, and consequent defensiveness, to allegations
of Jewish idolatry. Like the Jewish body—the subject of this study’s third chapter—
Jewish vision was the site of a power struggle. Secular authorities passed laws to limit it,
church officials sought to redirect it, and the Rabbis defended it.
143
Steadfastly opposed

141
Laurence Aldersey, The Voyages and Discoveries of Laurence Aldersey of the English
Nation, 1581 in Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of
the English Nation (London, 1589), 179.
142
John Calvin, Sermons on Deuteronomy, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Henry
Middleton, 1583), 276.
143
For laws regulating Jewish vision, see David Joshua Malkiel, A Separate Republic:
The Mechanics and Dynamics of Venetian Jewish Self-Government, 1607-1624
(Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988), 154-155. More recently, Dana Katz has made an
extraordinary study of laws regarding Jewish fenestration in the ghetto of Venice, Dana
Katz, “‘Clamber not you up to the casements’: On ghetto views and viewing,” Jewish
History 24 (2010): 127-153. For the role of images in the conversionary process, see
Carolyn H. Wood, “Giovanni da San Giovanni and Innocenzo Tacconi at the Madonna
dei Monti, Rome,” The Burlington Magazine 143 (2001): 11-18. To the best of my
knowledge, no study yet exists on the decoration of Venetian conversionary chapels.
57
to the worship of images, Jews nonetheless found their very eyes the subject of polemic,
regulation and debate.
The Venice Haggadah presents a rejection of idolatry as central in the
development of Jewish religious difference (Figure 1.11). In the image, worshippers
gather to adore a series of icons—among them a sun, moon, and ram—mounted on
columns. In the background, the same columns are burning, and the former worshippers
are boarding a gondola and departing for a new land. The caption reads, “Li antichi
nostri di Avraham innanzi che li idoli adoravan tutti quanti.”
144
Presenting such a
critique in specifically visual terms presents both novelty and continuity to the Jewish
negotiation over the role and power of images in Jewish worship. The accompanying
central text elaborates the caption and describes the confessional birth of Judaism.
In the beginning , our ancestors were idol worshippers and now the Omnipresent
has drawn us to His worship. As it says “Then Joshua said to all the people,
‘Thus said Adonai, the Lord of Israel: In olden times, your forefathers, Terah,
father of Abraham and father of Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates and
worshiped other gods. But I took your father Abraham from beyond the
Euphrates and led him through the whole land of Canaan and multiplied his
offspring.
145

The text is an extended quotation from a sixth-century Midrashic source, B'reshith
Rabba. Its inclusion in the Passover liturgy draws attention to the cyclical and typological
nature of Jewish experience. First the idolatry of Abraham’s ancient ancestors, then the
idolatry of the Egyptians, and finally the idolatrous practices the readers of the Venice
haggadah confronted in the culture that surrounded them.

144
“The ancient ancestors of Abraham before idols, which they all worship.”
145
Midrash Rabbah, 38:13. See Midrash Rabbah, trans. H. Freedman and Maurice
Simon (London: Soncino Press, 1961, 10 Vols.), Vol. 1, p. 310-311. See Joseph Tabory,
JPS Commentary on the Haggadah (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2008),
88.
58
The image is remarkably engaged with a plethora of accounts of Jewish reception
of images. Material objects and written accounts document a number of early modern
encounters between Jewish viewers and Christian art. Popular preaching, theological
writing, moralizing tales and the early history of art all take up the issue of Jewish
reception. Although to a great extent these accounts are engaged in self-consciously
crafting an erroneous conception of perfidious Jewish devotion and theological blindness,
as a discourse they are eloquent testimony to the complexity of polemicizing Jewish
vision during the Counter Reformation.
In order to understand early modern Christian conceptions of Jewish vision, it is
necessary to return to the work of Giorgio Vasari. Of the many accounts that detail the
Jewish encounter with images, none is more specious and compelling than Vasari’s
account of the Jews of Rome. In his Life of Michelangelo, Vasari describes a peculiar
incident in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli,

where some years earlier
Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses was installed as part of the abbreviated tomb complex
of Pope Julius II. After much praise of the statue, Vasari writes, “And the Jews will
continue to go there, as every Sabbath, both men and women like a flock of starlings, to
visit and adore it. And it is not a human, but a divine thing that they adore.”
146
Formal
restrictions enacted by both the Christian and Jewish communities make the event he
describes impossible. Nonetheless, this account is rich with significance and ripe for
interpretation. Consider Vasari’s figurative conceit that Jews are “like a flock of
starlings.” The allusion is to Pliny’s account of the painting contest between Zeuxis and

146
“E séguitino gli Ebrei di andar, come fanno ogni sabato, a schiera, e maschî e
femmine, come gli storni a visitarlo et adorarlo, ché non cosa umana ma divina
adoreranno.” Giorgio Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del
1568, ed. Paola Barocchi, Vol.1 (Milano, 1962), 31.
59
Parhasius.
147
It was birds, according to Pliny, who were so convinced by the illusion of
Zeuxis’s painted grapes that they flew down and pecked at the painted surface.
148

Parhasius, meanwhile, painted a trompe l’oeil curtain, and when Zeuxis demanded to see
what was beneath it, the winner of the contest was revealed. Parhasius, in deceiving the
more intelligent human viewer, triumphs over Zeuxis, whose illusionism convinced only
the animals. Jacques Lacan commented that Pliny’s account of the contest suggests that
animals are interested only in the surface of images, while humans are interested in the
ideas that lie beneath.
149
Lacan’s analysis lends valuable anecdotal insight into Vasari’s
account. Vasari’s comparison between the cognitive faculties of birds and Jews indicates
much about Christian perceptions of Jewish vision. In this model, Jews have the stunted
vision of animals, barbarians, and idolaters. I would like to use Giorgio Vasari’s
comments on the Jews of Rome to situate Jewish visual experience within the Counter-
Reformation controversies surrounding devotional imagery and broader theological
concerns about the centrality of vision in both Jewish and Christian worship.
150
In this

147
On Vasari’s knowledge of Pliny’s writings on antique art history, see Michiaki
Koshikawa, “Apelles's Stories and the "Paragone" Debate: A Re-Reading of the Frescoes
in the Casa Vasari in Florence,” Artibus et Historiae 22 (2001): 17-28. On the critical
legacy of the Zeuxis myth, see Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis,
Myth and Mimesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
148
Pliny, Natural History, 35:66, see the classic translation by K. Jex-Blake, The Elder
Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art. (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 111.
149
See Lacan’s 1964 essay “Line and Light,” in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan, Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain
Miller and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton Publishers, 1998), 103.
150
Typically this account has been dismissed by historians and scholars. However, an
interpretation of Vasari’s account by Paul Barolsky is significant. Barolsky suggests that
Vasari intends to construct a typology between the conversionary power of the Moses
(and by extension Michelangelo himself) and St. Paul. This Pauline reading seems
especially appropriate for Vasari, a counter-reformation artist who was deeply interested
in the power of art to compel devotion. See Paul Barolsky, Michelangelo’s Nose: A Myth
and its Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 43.
60
controversy, it seems that the nature and possibilities of visuality displace the art object
as the central subject of debate.
In spite of its seemingly patent invention, Vasari’s anecdote must have had a
particular polemical resonance during the Counter-Reformation. In fact, excluding its
primary role as testament to the skill of Michelangelo, Vasari’s account of the Jews in
San Pietro in Vincoli fulfills two subsidiary but highly significant purposes: the first is to
accuse Jews of idolatry and the second is to emphasize the potential of images for
encouraging devotion, even for the misguided Jewish viewer. The incident in San Pietro
in Vincoli is not the only time that Vasari emphasizes the visual practices of the Jews. In
his introduction to the second edition of the Lives, published in 1568, Vasari includes a
brief history of art, from ancient history to his time. He writes that while many ancient
peoples created art, such images were also to be regulated for fear of idolatry. According
to Vasari this fact is,

Proved by the stern commandment made by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt,
namely, that under pain of death there should be made to God no image
whatsoever. He, on descending from the mountain, having found the Golden Calf
wrought and adored solemnly by his people, and being greatly perturbed to see
Divine honors paid to the image of a beast, not only broke it and reduced it to
powder, but for punishment of so great a sin caused many thousands of the
wicked sons of Israel to be slain by the Levites.
151

It is crucial that Vasari mentions the story of the Golden Calf, and it should
illuminate our interpretation of the incident described in San Pietro in Vincoli. For
centuries, the story of the Golden Calf had been employed as an anti-Jewish polemic,
identifying Jews as heretics and idolaters, unworthy of God’s affection. While Vasari’s

151
Vasari, Lives, 5-6.
61
comments on Michelangelo’s Moses may appear as little more than hyperbole to modern
readers, the significance of his account would not have been lost on his contemporaries
who were familiar with this anti-Jewish trope not only through the gospels and patristic
tradition, but from the sermons of Observant Franciscan preachers as well.
152
While
Vasari’s use of the Golden Calf motif to expose Jewish errors may appear opaque to
contemporary readers, it was entirely conventional for the period. Michael Camille
suggests that much of the Christian interest in the Golden Calf story is bound up in
Christianity’s own anxiety about cult image devotion. As long as it was possible “to
propagate the notion that Jews were still the idolaters they had been in the Old
Testament,” Christian theologians and polemicists could, like Vasari, displace this guilt
upon the Jews.
153

In his account of the Jews in San Pietro in Vincoli, Vasari implies a re-enactment
of the Golden Calf incident, in which Michelangelo’s Moses takes the place of the idol.
154

152
For specific examples of the appearance of the Golden Calf motif in Franciscan
rhetoric, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons and Jews: Making Monsters in
Medieval Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 108; Jeremy Cohen, The
Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1982), 240. Franco Mormando, The Preachers Demons: Bernardino of Siena and
the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), 176.
153
Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 174.
154
Vasari’s proposed reenactment of the Golden Calf incident in the church of San Pietro
in Vincoli enjoys a long tradition of agreement. However, these interpretations have only
focused on the character of Moses, without acknowledging Vasari’s comments about the
Jews. In Freud’s famous essay on the statue, he provides a useful catalogue of these
opinions. Most significantly, that of Jacob Burckhardt who writes, “Moses seems to be
shown at that moment at which he catches sight of the worship of the Golden Calf, and is
springing to his feet.” Jacob Burckhardt, La civiltà del rinascimento in Italia (Florence,
1927), 634. More recently, H.W. Janson noted that Michelangelo’s Moses must be
captured at a narrative moment after his descent from Mount Sinai, ee H.W. Janson, “The
62
The distinction is significant for Vasari’s early modern readers in counter-reformation
Italy. According to Vasari, the Jews do not venerate the statue as a representation of
God’s divinity, but as Divine in and of itself. This distinction appears almost verbatim in
the decrees of the Council of Trent: “The images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God,
and of the other saints are to be placed and retained especially in the Churches, and that
due honor and veneration is to be given them; not, however, that any divinity or virtue is
believed to be in them, or that something is to be asked of them, or that trust is to be
placed in images.”
155
This orthodox conception of Christian devotion is markedly
different from Vasari’s account of the Jews. Like Pliny’s birds, Vasari’s Jews confuse
the representation from that to which it refers. Accordingly, Jews cannot distinguish
between the essence of God and an illusory representation.
This is, of course, precisely the criticism leveled at the Church by iconoclastic
Protestant Reformers, and the statement from Trent undoubtedly speaks to this tension.
But performances of idolatry and iconoclasm are not contradictory. Joseph Koerner’s
Reformation of the Image, in particular, has radically altered the potential for scholars to
disentangle the rhetoric and reality of aniconism. In Koerner’s study, Lutheran
iconoclasm emerges as a highly politicized performance, based as much on an internal
Protestant denominational power struggle as genuine conviction. Despite adopting
iconoclasm as a practice, Reformation visual culture was inescapably iconic. Objects
such as Lucas Cranach’s Wittenberg Altarpiece—Koerner’s intensive case study—are

Right Arm of Michelangelo’s Moses,” in Michelangelo, Selected Scholarship in English,
Vol. 4, ed. William Wallace (New York, 1995), 245.
155
This quotation is from the twenty-fifth session of the council which closed on
December 4, 1563 entitled “Decrees on the Invocation, Veneration and Relics of Saints
and on Sacred Images,” translated in H.J. Schroeder ed., Canons and Decrees of the
Council of Trent (Rockford: TAN Books and Publishers, 1978), 215-216.
63
capable of marshaling the visual to promote piety, while simultaneously issuing an
admonition against image devotion to its audience and an assertive response to Counter
Reformation polemics. In Koerner’s work, the Reformed image emerges as a self-
conscious site of negotiation between icon and iconoclasm. Images in the Venice
Haggadah represent a similar negotiation, simultaneously responding to anti-Jewish
tropes and issuing critiques of inappropriate devotion while using images to engage the
viewer in affective response.
Indeed, the early modern conception of idolatry is best understood more broadly
as a failed act of reception. In this model, idolatry embodies its apparent inverse—
iconoclasm—since both represent extreme failures on the spectrum of ideal reception.
This is highlighted in the case of Jewish worship, which is described in Christian
polemics as embodying both acts of inappropriate hostility and devotion to Christian
images. One of the most popular vernacular publications during the early modern period,
Jacopo da Voragine’s Golden Legend, describes several instances of Jewish iconoclasm,
which typically culminate in a demonstration of the power of sacred images, recognition
of Jewish spiritual blindness, and ultimate conversion to Christianity.
For instance, Voragine’s account of the festival of the Exaltation of the Cross
describes a Jew in Constantinople who enters Hagia Sophia and strikes an image of the
crucified Christ in the throat. Blood spurts out, covering the man’s face and hands.
Fleeing the scene, the man flings the miraculous icon down a well, but is confronted by a
Christian who accuses him of murder. The tale proceeds with the Jewish man’s
admission:
“Truly the God of the Christians is great, and everything confirms faith in him. I
have not stabbed a man but an image of Christ, and straightaway the blood gushed
64
out from his throat!” The Jew then led the man to the well and they retrieved the
sacred image, and it is said that the wound in Christ’s throat can be seen to this
day. The Jew became a Christian without delay.
156

In this account, a Jew is transformed by his encounters with a Christian image. The
encounter proves the efficacy of cult images in encouraging faith and devotion by
redirecting Jewish iconoclasm to impassioned devotion—a narrative that should resonate
strongly with the Vasari account and the discursive legacy it represents. The image of
iconoclasm in the Venice Haggadah is a remarkable inversion of this trope. In the image,
burning the idols is an act of conversion, marking Abraham’s rejection of his pagan
heritage, acceptance of his role as founder of a new people and the initiation of his
privileged relationship with God. By appropriating and subverting the trope of Jews
worshipping the Golden Calf, the Venice Haggadah demonstrates an awareness of
popular misconceptions of Jewish worship. As early as Philo, blame for the Golden Calf
was displaced upon the Egyptians who had forcibly imposed their idolatrous traditions on
the Israelites. This traditional explanation continued in early modern scholarship.
157
This
seems appropriate since the incident describes Abraham’s confessional conversion to
Judaism, which was novel in its rejection of idolatry.
Reading the image through a typological lens, it functions as polemic, drawing
parallels between the pagan ancestors of Abraham, and the idolatrous practices of early

156
Jacopo da Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, Vol. 2, trans.
William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 170-171.
157
Philo, De Vita Mosis, 2.161-62, 169, 270-71. For the polemical character of Philo’s
De Vita Mosis, see Louis H. Feldman, Philo’s Portrayal of Moses in the Context of
Ancient Judaism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). In early modern
Italy, Abraham Farissol made a similar claim, see David Ruderman, The World of a
Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol (New York:
Hebrew Union College Press, 1981), 75. Pier Cesare Bori, The Golden Calf and the
Origins of the Anti-Jewish Controversy, trans. David Ward (Atlanta: Scholars Press,
1990), 31-40.

65
modern Christians.
158
All of these charges and critiques prompt much broader questions
about the role and power of visuality in the rhetoric of cultural tolerance ostensibly
practiced in early modern Italy. It is possible to locate visual practices at the center of a
conflict between competing Christian and Jewish modes of religious worship. Leon
Modena’s phenomenological creed, his conviction that a belief must be imaginable,
becomes central in this context. Consider how Modena reformulates the utility of Jewish
vision in this passage from a seventeenth-century polemic,
“A belief must be imaginable, and the Trinity is unimaginable. One must
remember that there is a true and necessary postulate, which refutes all the
principles of the Nazarene faith. It states that a belief is not a matter formulated
in words, but it is that which is imagined in the soul. And in the Torah of Moses,
essential for every religion, one never finds that God commands belief in anything
but a palpable concept, or one that is possible to visualize.”
159

The argument continues by citing the example of Moses’ staff, which God transforms
into a living serpent before an audience with Pharaoh, impressive evidence of God’s
greatness. Modena notes that it is possible to accept the veracity of the anecdote, despite
the fact that the details are opposed to the laws of nature, because it is possible to
visualize it occurring. Modena acknowledges that visualizing God is precisely what
makes faith possible, and he alleges that the impossibility of imagining the tripartite
Christian God acts a tool for complicating the fundamental principles of Christianity.
160

158
For instance, the fourteenth-century Nizzahon Yashan invokes a passage from Isaiah
to compare pagan and Christian idolatry, see David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate
in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1979), 67. In his haggadah commentary Isaac Abarbanel, who may
well have known the Nizzahon Yashan, includes the same passage from Isaiah in his
commentary on idolatry, see Abarbanel Haggadah, 124-5.
159
Modena, Magen wa-Hereb, p. 39.
160
On imagination as an evidentiary basis for the existence of God, see Elliot R.
Wolfson, “Imaging the Imageless: Iconic Representations of the Divine in Kabbalah,” in
66
Modena draws attention to a problem of which Christian theologians and theorists
of vision were acutely aware. The problem of representing the “unimaginable” certainly
precedes early modernity; the same issues occupied scholastic scholars such as Albertus
Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, who puzzled over the difficulty of imagining the
Trinity.
161
The Renaissance’s emphatic pictorial illusionism tended to further exacerbate,
rather than resolve, these theological difficulties. Georges Didi-Huberman has detailed
the convoluted theological arguments necessary to substantiate the iconographic
programs of Renaissance artists who sought to visually represent the mysteries of
Christian spirituality. Huberman concludes that to “imply” rather than expose Christian
mystery was the exegetical ideal to which Renaissance painters could aspire, for
mysteries such as the Trinity are essentially unimaginable.
162

As an epistemological system, Modena’s conception of imagination as a crucible
for devotion is remarkably engaged with early modern debates about the role of vision in
constructing knowledge. In appealing to the imagination, rather than faith, reason or
textual evidence as a site for constructing beliefs, Modena locates the body and its senses
as central to early modern Jewish epistemology. In Modena’s polemic, visuality not
becomes a point of distinction between Judaism and Christianity, but represents what
Michel de Certeau described as an “oppositional practice,” an action that creates

Iconotropism: Turning Toward Pictures, Ellen Spolsky, ed. (New York: Associated
University Presses, 2004). Wolfson is apparently unaware of Modena’s writing on the
subject.
161
See the introduction in Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché, eds., The
Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
162
Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, Dissemblance and Figuration (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 123.
67
possibilities within confined structures of power.
163
Significantly, this possibility is also
manifest in material images, such as the Venice Haggadah’s representation of
iconoclasm.
This chapter began by drawing attention to the disturbing lack of studies on
Jewish visual culture in contemporary art history and the resilience of the representation
in early modernity of Jews as inappropriately engaged with the visual world. Narratives
and conceptions of Jewish vision were highly contested. Giorgio Vasari, described the
Jews of Rome as improperly enthusiastic in their affection for Renaissance sculpture, an
anecdote designed to resonate with his contemporaries who were familiar with the debate
over religious imagery and the characterization of Jewish worship as alternately
iconoclastic or idolatrous. Vasari’s account, and the discourse it aptly represents, also
poses provocative questions about the role of vision in Jewish religious experience,
particularly in a time of cultural upheaval for Italian Jews. Leon Modena’s aesthetics of
opposition emerges from this contested period, displacing the debate over idolatry and
iconoclasm and privileging Jewish vision in the process. Relocated within a dense urban
space, marginalized and persecuted, Italian Jews nonetheless sought to express their
situation visually. Without significant monumental public art to speak of, images printed
in Hebrew books, assumed power as the primary vehicle for Jewish visual culture.
Ultimately, such evidence suggests a considerable Jewish investment in the power and
agency of the visual as a traumatized society attempted to articulate its experiences
through the power of images.

163
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), 91-111.
68

Chapter 2

A Messiah at the Threshold:
Imagining Redemption in the Venice Haggadah

Reading the haggadah in early modern Italy was inflected by the belief in an
impending messianic redemption. Heightened by popular eschatology and a burgeoning
scholarly interest in apocalyptic prediction, the ghetto was understood as a parallel for the
slave camps of Egypt; both were suffering communities awaiting impending and
inevitable liberation. This phenomenon has been studied primarily from the perspective
of intellectual history.
1
However, “religion is not regarded as something one does with
speech or reason alone, but with the body and the spaces it inhabits.”
2
Indeed, this study
has consistently argued that the construction of subjectivity is contingent upon the
material situation of bodies within space. This chapter explores the space of the Venetian
ghetto and its relationship to images of messianic redemption in the Venice Haggadah.
These images are presented primarily as dramas of transgression, a series of walls, portals
and thresholds that viewers are invited to penetrate, participating in an imagined
messianic procession that expresses a hope for both literal liberation and spiritual
transformation.
The final, climactic image in the Venice Haggadah shows the messiah, mounted
on an ass approaching the gates of Jerusalem (Figure 2.1). The messiah is preceded by
the prophet Elijah, who blows the shofar to announce his arrival. Jerusalem itself is

1
See Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays in Jewish
Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971) and Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
2
See the “Editors’ Introduction” in Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and
Belief 1 (2005): 4-9, 5.
69
represented as a centrally-planned city, with the Dome of the Rock—a proxy for the
newly reconstituted Temple—at its core. Nestled in a valley surrounded by rolling hills,
the city is enclosed by hexagonal walls with towers at the points of intersection. At the
moment of the messianic arrival, the empty Jerusalem is being repopulated by Jews
returning from exile, who stream into the valley from all directions. The caption
explains, “Ieruscialaim edificata sia, a nostri giorni a venga a noi il Messia.”
3
The
accompanying text is the hymn Adir Hu (He Who is Most Mighty), which asks—or
rather expects—God to redeem the people of Israel, “Il terribile esso edifichi la casa sua
presto, in fretta, in fretta a giorni nostri presto, Iddio edifichi, Iddio edifichi, edifichi la
casa sua presto.”
4
The repetitive nature of the hymn—used for the first time in
connection with messianic imagery in the Venice Haggadah—emphasizes both the
urgency of the messianic arrival and its anxious anticipation among the Jews of early
modern Venice.
5
The book’s pictorial narrative begins with the arrival of the prophet
Elijah in the guise of an indigent man at the door of a Venetian home and concludes with
Elijah leading the messiah through the gates of Jerusalem, where a newly constructed
Temple awaits sanctification (Figure 2.2). Between the two images, an expansive
triumphal arch frames every page in the book, situating the reader visually and
rhetorically within the narrative of a triumphal procession (Figure 2.3).

3
Jerusalem shall be [re]built, and in our days the Messiah will arrive.
4
“The most mighty will build his house soon, speedily, speedily in our days soon: The
Lord will build, Lord will build, build his house soon.”
5
For comparative ideas of messianic thought and the role of messianism in the Jewish-
Christian debate, see David Ruderman, “Hope Against Hope: Jewish and Christian
Messianic Expectations in the Late Middle Ages,” in David Ruderman ed., Essential
Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (New York: New York
University Press, 1992), 299-324.
70
The historiography of Jewish messianic belief is contested. Gershom Scholem,
who still casts a long and influential shadow on the study of the subject, begins his
seminal study 1971 with the unequivocal declaration, “Any discussion of the problems
relating to Messianism is a delicate matter, for it is here that the essential conflict
between Judaism and Christianity has developed and continues to exist.”
6
As scholars
have persuasively demonstrated the ‘Christian’ investment in the messianic status of
Jesus Christ represents an evolution of early Jewish thought rather than a radical
departure.
7
Nonetheless, distinctions between the conceptions of Messianic salvation
became foundational to the development of Jewish and Christian confessional identities.
Scholem argues that Jewish salvation would not occur in the soul of the individual, but
publicly, and in the visual world. The images distributed through printed sources such as
the Venice Haggadah established a common Jewish vision of redemption, and to
believers, perhaps even hastened the messianic arrival.
Aware of this very fact, in 1666 the Polish monarch Jan Casimir banned the
production and display of images of the messianic pretender Sabbatai Sevi.
8
Printed
images and textual accounts of the spiritual leader proliferated in early modern Europe
and were critical to his initial success in building popular support for his movement.
9
By

6
Scholem, Messianic Idea, 1.
7
J.H. Charlesworth, “From Jewish Messianology to Christian Christology: Some Caveats
and Perspectives,” in Judaisms and Their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era, ed.
Jacob Neusner, William Scott Green, Ernest S. Frerichs (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), 265-282.
8
Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah: 1626-1676 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press: 1973), 597. Sabbatai’s name has several disparate spellings,
for clarity I have adopted Scholem’s spelling as a convention throughout this study.
9
Besides Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, see David Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi: Testimonies to a
Fallen Messiah (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007); Moshe Idel,
Messianic Mystics, 183-212. To my knowledge, no studies of Sevi’s visual culture or a
71
no means were the followers of Sabbatai the first to use the power of print to represent
messianic imagery. Before the decline of Hebrew printing in Italy in the mid-seventeenth
century, images of the messiah were conventional in Hebrew texts such as the haggadah.
Sabbatai and the messianic pretenders that preceded him exploited this common
conception of the messianic arrival to prove their legitimacy.
10
In the culture of early
modern Jewish messianic speculation, visualizing the arrival of the messiah was crucial.
As the Church pursued the conversion of European Jews and the dissolution of Jewish
cultural identity with increasing intensity, the fragile state of Jewish communal life was
perceived as an incipient apocalyptic event that would precipitate the messianic arrival.
11

In order to understand what makes the visual imagery in the Venice Haggadah
significant, it is necessary to investigate the history of comparable imagery that precedes
it. The most important of these examples is found in the 1478 Washington Haggadah, an
illuminated manuscript held in the Hebraic Section in the Library of Congress.
12

Apparently executed in Germany for clients in Italy, the book marks the high point in the

catalogue of his images have yet emerged. Certainly images of Sevi appeared in printed
broadsides, vernacular propaganda, and literature produced by his followers. For
examples, see Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp. xxiii-xxvi.
10
For Sevi’s use of previous models, see Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophecies
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 8-41.
11
The Christian conception of messianic redemption was predicated on the conversion of
the Jews, see John Edwards, “The Friars and the Jews: Messianism in Spain and Italy
Circa 1500,” Friars and the Jews in the Middle Ages, ed. Susan E. Myers, Steven J.
McMichael (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 273-299.
12
See the annotated facsimile, Joel Ben Simeon, The Washington Haggadah (Ms.
Washington Haggadah): A fifteenth-century manuscript from the Library of Congress
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). The volume also contains critical essays
and commentary by David Stern and Katrin Kogman-Appel. In general, the Washington
Haggadah is among the most thoroughly studied early modern Hebrew illuminated
manuscripts. See the extensive commentary that accompanies the earlier facsimile
edition, Myron Weinstein, ed. The Washington Haggadah: A Facsimile Edition of an
Illuminated Fifteenth-Century Hebrew Manuscript at the Library of Congress. Signed by
Joel ben Simeon (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1991).
72
prolific career of the scribe and illustrator Joel Ben Simeon (b. 1420).
13
As I have noted
previously in this study, the images in the Washington Haggadah are subtly innovative,
and provide an important prototype for later works, particularly in Italy.
14
This image
depicts the Messiah approaching the gates of a city, or a large, monumental structure
(Figure 2.4). Accompanying him on the ass are figures that have previously appeared in
the haggadah as participants in the Passover seder. A figure steps forward from the
building and welcomes the approaching figures, raising a glass in benediction.
15

The image might be based on frequently cited biblical references to the messianic
arrival, such as the visionary predictions of Zechariah 9:9, “Raise a shout, Fair Jerusalem!
Lo, your king is coming to you. He is victorious, triumphant, Yet Humble, riding on an
ass.” Certain details, such as the appearance of the ass, correlate with this description.
But this is certainly not the text that accompanies the image on the haggadah’s page.
Collectively, these passages are known as the shefokh—the first word in the text—and
they are among the most aggressively polemical in the haggadah. The first passage is
drawn from Psalms 79:6, it reads: “Pour out Your fury on the nations that do not know

13
See Franz Landsberger, “The Washington Haggadah and Its Illuminator,” Hebrew
Union College Annual 21 (1948): 73-103, and Mordechai Glatzer, “The Ashkenazic and
Italian Haggadah and the Haggadot of Joel ben Simeon,” in Weinstein, Washington
Haggadah, 137-169.
14
For instance, in Chapter 1 I argue that the image of maror in the Washington Haggadah
disrupts the tradition of literally representing food in favor of representing the experience
of eating the food.
15
The visual training for Jewish scribe-artists such as Joel Ben Simeon remains a lacuna
in historical studies, due primarily to lack of documentary evidence. For recent
approaches to these objects, see Katrin Kogman-Appel, Illuminated Haggadot from
Medieval Spain: Biblical Imagery and the Passover Holiday (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), and Marc Michael Epstein, The Medieval
Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2011). Both of these rigorous studies are intensely object-based, and eschew
questions of technical and workshop training.
73
You, upon the kingdoms that do not invoke your name, for they have devoured Jacob and
desolated his home.” The second passage, an excerpt from Psalms 69:24, reads: “Pour out
Your wrath upon them; may Your blazing anger overtake them; may their encampments
be desolate; may their tents stand empty.” The belligerent posturing of the text seems to
suggest that the messiah is approaching an enemy city, delivering liberation through
destruction and retribution, rather than heralding a period of utopian peace for mankind.
The tradition of using these passages in connection with messianic imagery in the
haggadah deserves further exploration, because it is from this tradition that the Venice
Haggadah very deliberately departs. Yosef Yerushalmi writes that shefokh is a relatively
recent addition to the Passover liturgy, arriving in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
“under the impact of the Crusades, which brought the first great waves of massacres to
European Jewry.”
16
The prayer originates in the haggadah as an assertive response to
Christian intolerance. The shefokh is not a utopian text that recognizes the possibility of
peaceful coexistence in the messianic era. Neither does it request divine intervention to
provide relief from violence. Rather it focuses exclusively on vengeance, demanding that
God’s “blazing anger” consume the enemies of the Jews. Independently, the passages
that comprise the shefokh are not necessarily messianic in content. Indeed, in Chapter 4,
I explore how Leon Modena productively reoriented the text of the shefokh. Nonetheless,
it is essential to recognize that prior to the publication of the Venice Haggadah, messianic
imagery in illustrated haggadahs had been associated exclusively with this text.

16
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society, 1997), pl. 13. For a more recent history of the development of the Passover
liturgy, see Jay Rovner, “An Early Passover Haggadah According to the Palestinian
Rite,” Jewish Quarterly Review 90 (2000): 337-296. See also Yuval, Two Nations,
Chapter 3.
74
Although early printed haggadahs were generally sparsely illustrated or decorated
with conventional printer’s ornaments, each include an elaborately illustrated shefokh
page. Printers seem to have understood that, as the climax to the haggadah experience,
an extravagant shefokh page was worthy of investment. These printed pages closely
follow the subject matter of the Washington Haggadah. Haggadahs printed in Mantua in
1560 and 1568, make clear their indebtedness to the preceding manuscript tradition
(Figure 2.5).
17
In this image, the messiah appears again atop a mule approaching a
spatially ambiguous portal. The messiah is also joined by a second figure, apparently
blowing into a shofar. This iss undoubtedly the prophet Elijah who, according to
prophecy will herald the coming of the Messiah. Elijah appears in a number of biblical
texts in association with the messiah, for instance, Malachi 3:23, “Lo, I will send the
prophet Elijah to you before the coming of the awesome, fearful day of the Lord.” These
images have three basic components that essentially become conventional: the figure of
the messiah, the figure of Elijah, and an ambiguous portal. Images following this
prototype appear in haggadahs printed in Venice in 1599, and again in 1608.
18
The
mechanism for the transfer of the image seems to parallel the transfer of the text, likely
printers used previous editions as the basis for new ones, reproducing the image as well
as the text.
Because the subject matter of these images appears so self-evident, they have
attracted little scholarly attention. Conventional thought holds that the images represent
the Messiah arriving in Jerusalem, an interpretation which obviously corresponds to the

17
On the Mantuan editions, see Vivian B. Mann, ed. Gardens And Ghettos: The Art of
Jewish Life in Italy, exh. cat. (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1989), 244.
18
For examples of these conventional shefokh pages, see Yerushalmi, Haggadah and
History, plates 26 and 37 respectively.
75
quote from Zechariah.
19
But, of course, the text from Zechariah appears nowhere on the
page, nor is it otherwise referenced in the haggadah text. Furthermore, the visionary,
utopian prophecies of Zechariah seem dissonant with the dramatically polemical tone of
the shefokh. Israel Yuval has characterized the shefokh as a “ritual curse,” and argues
that this was not a secret in the period, but rather well-known and frequently addressed by
Christian scholars. Yuval points to the work of Antonius Margarita, a former Jew who
composed a series of polemics against Judaism in Germany at the middle of the sixteenth
century. Margarita believed that the recitation of the shefokh was the clearest evidence
that the Jewish conception of redemption implied the destruction of Christianity. In his
Der gantz Juedisch glaub (Leipzig, 1531), for instance, Margarita described the recitation
of the shefokh as one of a number of curses in the Passover liturgy which shows the
surreptitious Jewish resentment for Christianity.
20
The association between the biblical
passages and the historical conception of the messianic arrival is also the subject of satire
by Margarita,
“According to the lies of the Jews, when the Messiah comes he will ride upon an
ass and seat all the Jews upon the ass, while all the Christians will sit on the ass’s
tail. Then the Messiah will ride with all his passengers into the sea, and when he
comes to the depths of the sea, the donkey will drop its tail and all the Christians
will fall into the sea and drown.”
21

Although it is quite likely with this kind of polemic that Margarita dramatically inflates
the viciously anti-Christian character of the shefokh, the commentary nonetheless reveals

19
Joseph Gutmann, “Return in Mercy to Zion: A Messianic Dream in Jewish Art,” The
Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives, Lawrence A. Hoffman, editor, (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 241.
20
Yuval, Two Nations, 124.
21
Antonius Margarita, Ein kurzer Bericht und Anzaigung (Vienna, 1541), fol. 11v,
translated in Yuval, 125. Yuval also describes the later use of Margarita’s work by more
influential figures, including Johannes Buxtorf, and Martin Luther.
76
that the polemical context of the prayer was acknowledged by Christians as well as Jews.
Before Leon Modena’s attempts to reorient the intended target of the passage, it was
clearly understood as dually messianic and anti-Christian.
The aggressive tone of the shefokh corresponds much more closely to the rhetoric
of martial victory than that of utopian spiritual renewal. Consistent with this polemical
tradition, apocalyptic descriptions of the messianic arrival, particularly following the
destruction of the Second Temple—focus not on Jerusalem, but on Rome as the
geographical locus of redemption. In histories, scholarly works, and a variety of biblical
and Talmudic commentaries, Rome emerges as the indefatigable enemy of the Jewish
people. An anonymous Jewish author of the sixteenth century writes, “The signs are that
between this and that, the Messiah will be born (with God’s help), and the devastation of
Rome, and salvation in the arrival of many of our brothers of the ten tribes.”
22
The author
of the document also invested in the Ottoman Sultans an enormous amount of agency in
initiating the messianic age. As prospective contributors to Rome’s destruction, the line
of Mehmed the Conqueror is described as facilitators of the messianic arrival.
23

The suggestion that the Messiah must confront Rome also has precedents in the
Talmud. This exchange, for instance, from tractate Sanhedrin stages the scene
dramatically:

22
Isaiah Tishby, “Acute Apocalyptic Messianism,” in Essential Papers on Messianic
Movements and Personalities in Jewish History, ed. Marc Saperstein (New York: New
York University, 1992), 273. The text is from the “Genizah Pages,” a document Tishby
spent a great deal of his career analyzing.
23
Tishby, Apocalyptic Messianism, 269. This recruitment of a third party as an ally in
the messianic redemption has precedent. There are numerous Biblical descriptions of the
Persian king Cyrus the Great that apply messianic language, even describing Cyrus as the
“anointed” (Isaiah 45:1-3). For the recurrence of these concepts in the early modern
period, see Cornell Fleischer, “Shadows of Shadows: Prophecy in Politics in 1530s
Istanbul,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 13 (2007): 51-65.
77
Rabbi Joshua ben Levi met Elijah standing at the door of Rabbi Simeon bar
Yohai’s tomb.
He said to him:
“When will the Messiah come?”
Elijah said to him: “Go, ask him yourself!”
“And where does he sit?”
“He is sitting at the gates of Rome, among the poor and sick.”
24

This episode was well known in the sixteenth century, and figured in the messianic
predictions of Isaac Abarbanel among others.
25
But the most compelling evidence for the
significance of this prophecy in early modern Italy is the performance of two actual
messianic pretenders. More than a century after the fact, the seventeenth-century
chronicler Joseph Sambari described an unusual event in Rome. Its reappearance in the
scholarship of the following century demonstrates the persistent significance of the event
for early modern Jews. Sambari reports, “In the year of Creation 5,284 (1524), a man
from the land of the Moors came to Rome. His name was David Ha-Re’uveni, and he
postured as a prophet and said that he was the commander of the army of the King of the
Messiah.”
26

Reubeni has left a substantial historical record, both of his own writings and the
accounts of witnesses to his procession through Europe. Unlike biblical models for the

24
Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin 98a. All Talmudic citations are based on
Jacob Neusner, Babylonian Talmud: A Translation and Commentary, 22 vols,
Hendrickson Publishers, New York, 2006. For more on this legend in Jewish thought, see
Howard Schwartz, Caren Loebel-Fried and Elliot K. Ginsburg, Tree of Souls: The
Mythology of Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 492.
25
Abraham Berger, "Captivity at the Gate of Rome: The Story of a Messianic Motif",
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 44 (1977): 1-17. Berger also
explains the divergent translations of the final line in many modern editions of the
Talmud.
26
R. Yosef Ha-Sambari, “Words of Joseph,” in Aaron Z. Aescholy, Jewish Messianic
Movements, Sources and Documents (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1987) (Hebrew), 386.
Also cited and translated in Harris Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs: from the Galilee to
Crown Heights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 117.
78
messianic arrival, such as those presented in Zechariah, Reubeni viewed his project as
one which was set to conclude in Rome, not Jerusalem. In fact, it is while Reubeni is
already in Jerusalem that he receives a prophetic vision to begin his journey to Rome.
“The Ishmaelites have a representation at the top of the Dome of the Courtyard, a
half-moon turned to the west. And on the first day of the holiday of Shavuot
[1523], it turned to the east. And when the Ishmaelites saw this, they called out
loudly…then some of the Ishmaelite craftsmen went up and returned the image to
its position as on the first day; and on the second day the image returned again to
the eastern inclination, while I was praying, and the Ishmaelites cried and shouted
and tried to turn it back and couldn’t. And the elders had already informed me,
“When you see this sign, go to Rome.”
“And thereafter, I went from Mt. Zion into Jerusalem and went to the house of a
Jew named Avraham Hagar…I said to him, “Draw me [a map of] Venice and
Rome and Portugal,” and he drew it all for me. And I said to him, “I want to go
to Rome.” And he said to me, “What are you going for?” And I said to him, “I
am going on a good purpose, and it is secret, I cannot reveal it, and I want you to
advise me how I should travel.”
27

In February of 1524 David Reubeni rode through the gates of Rome mounted upon a
white horse. First-hand accounts suggest that Reubeni was a dramatic figure. He wore
exotic costumes and issued dire predictions about the future of Europe. According to
some reports, he was a dwarf.
28
Reubeni claimed to be a descendant of Mohammed, a
prince of Arabia, a tribune for the Jews of the East, and a prophet. His claims must have
impressed Vatican officials for after his dramatic entrance through the city gates, Reubeni
was granted an audience with the newly elected Medici pope, Clement VII. Three years
later, shortly after the sack of Rome, Reubeni’s disciple, Solomon Molkho, also returned
to Rome to live as a beggar in fulfillment of the Talmudic prophesy on the suffering of

27
See Aaron Z. Aescholy, ed., The Story of David Ha-Re’uveni (Hebrew) (Jerusalem:
Mossad Bialik, 1994), 7-31.
28
On David Reubeni and Solomon Molcho, see Aaron Z. Aescholy, “David Reubeni in
the Light of History,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 28 (1937): 1-45; Stephen Sharot,
“Jewish Millenarianism: A Comparison of Medieval Communities,” Comparative Studies
in Society and History 22 (1980): 394-415.
79
the Messiah.
29
There, Molkho declared himself the Messiah and announced that his
Messianic kingdom would arrive in 1540.
Clearly, for both Molkho and Reubeni, Rome serves as the dramatic punctuation
for their messianic teleology. Both the messianic arrival as imagined in the haggadah
images, and the performances of the actual messianic pretenders, are preoccupied with a
vision of redemption predicated on the suffering of Christian Europe. A poem by
Molkho reads,

“The nations will fight/but men of might,
will put the stranger to flight.
And then will be the time,/ o of cities the prime,
to flush Rome—Edom’s pest—from out of the nest.”
30

The celebration of the military destruction of Rome in the poem confirms a broader
historiographical contention that, unlike other messianic pretenders who attempted to act
primarily as spiritual or charismatic leaders, Reubeni and Molkho particularly viewed
messianic redemption as a martial achievement.
31
Whatever their diplomatic overtures to
European courts, these are figures who obviously viewed Christianity as an enemy to be
defeated. Consider this description of Molkho, written in correspondence to Clement VII
by Josel of Rosheim, a high ranking Jewish official in the court of Charles V:
This same infidel Portuguese Jew [Molkho], together with another [Reubeni],
who came to Rome in the first year of His Holiness, has come here together with
Antonio di Leva, and they have brought with them the Jewish flags, shield, and

29
For Molkho, see Idel, Messianic Mystics, 144-152, and Lenowitz, Jewish Messiahs, 93-
124.
30
Solomon Molkho,“The Beast of the Reed,” in Movements, ed. Aescholy, 14; Lenowitz,
119.
31
See Lenowitz’s analysis of their rhetoric, 93-124
80
sword, which, according to his contention, have been sanctified by the names of
God in Hebrew.”
32

Molkho’s accoutrement, such as the sword and shield, suggest an image of a triumphant
military hero. Indeed, Moshe Idel has argued that Molkho viewed himself as a general
“who will actively participate in the Armageddon struggle against Christianity” and notes
that Molkho wrote poetic passages about the symbolism of his sword.
33

The reference to the flag is particularly provocative. Shortly before his entry into
Rome, Solomon Molkho commissioned the creation of an embroidered pennant, which
miraculously survives in the State Jewish Museum in Prague (Figure 2.6).
34
The text
upon it is familiar: it is the shefokh. Molkho carried the text-embroidered banner above
his head during processions just as the text floats above the head of the messianic figure
on the traditional shefokh page. With the introduction of the physical, material shefokh
text into the performance of the messianic arrival, Solomon Molkho attempted to literally
dramatize the visual tradition of the Washington Haggadah and its descendants.
The Inquisition in Mantua burned Solomon Molkho in 1532, and Reubeni died at
the hands of the Inquisition in Llerena, Spain in 1541, effectively ending this particular
phase of Messianic speculation in early modern Europe. The abrupt termination of this

32
Josel obviously viewed the messianic pretenders as a destabilizing influence on Jewish-
Christian relations, and emphatically disavowed Reubeni and Molkho in communications
to influential Christian figures. For the quote, see Chava Fraenkel-Goldschmidt, The
Historical Writings of Joseph of Rosheim (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 183-4. For a broader
view of Josel, see Selma Stern, Josel of Rosheim: Commander of Jewry in the Holy
Roman Empire of the German Nation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1965).
For more on the significance of Solomon Molkho’s regalia, see Moshe Idel, "Shlomo
Molcho as a Magician," Sefunot (1985): 83-119. Here Idel Describes Molkho’s now lost
garments and prayer shawl, which supposedly included symbolic colors and symbols.
33
Idel, Messianic Mystics, 147.
34
See David Altshuler, The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak
State Collections (Washington, DC: Smithsonion Institution, 1983), 66-67. The author is
apparently unfamiliar with Josel of Rosheim’s description of the banner.
81
movement signals awareness on the part of Christian authorities of the threatening martial
ideologies upon which this model of messianic redemption was based. The messianic
shefokh represents the essentially polemical events of the messianic redemption as
presented in some aspects of Jewish thought, and by extension, the visual tradition that
joined the shefokh and messianic imagery in the Passover haggadah.
Despite this tradition’s troubled past, haggadahs featuring this text and image
combination appear as late as 1608, demonstrating how entrenched this visual trope had
become by the time the Venice Haggadah was printed in 1609. Clearly aware of the
negative implications of visualizing the shefokh through a messianic lens, Leon Modena
deliberately attempted to reorient the textual perspective for the messianic arrival,
diffusing its polemical content, and recontextualizing the messianic arrival as a personal
event that directly implicated the reader in precipitating redemption and participating in
the messianic arrival. Besides developing a new visual context for the shefokh in the
Venice Haggadah (see Chapter 3), Modena also attempted to mitigate its perceived
damage elsewhere in his work. In his Riti Ebraici, a description of Jewish customs
intended for a Christian audience, Modena completely excised the recitation of the
shefokh from his account of the Passover liturgy.
35

Given Modena’s sensitivity to the problems surrounding the relationship between
the shefokh and the messianic image, the innovations in the Venice Haggadah are
consistent with his revisionist approach. To avoid any confusion, the city in the Venice

35
To my knowledge this discrepancy has not been noted elsewhere. Given Modena’s
mitigation of the shefokh in the Venice Haggadah, it seems reasonable to assume the
discrepancy was deliberate. Modena describes the recitation of the Passover psalms in
Leon Modena, Historia de' riti hebraici, vita ed osservanze de gl'Hebrei di questi tempi
(London, 1650), 130.
82
image is labeled as “Jerusalem,” the only didactic label of the kind in the Venice
Haggadah. The necessity for such a label implies an ambiguity for the setting in previous
representations of the messianic arrival—and the need to avoid any potential
misinterpretations. The image clearly and explicitly needs the city recognized as
Jerusalem and not a capital of Christian Europe. The poetic text of the Adir Hu also
patently departs from the polemical passages in the shefokh. In the Venice Haggadah, the
messianic image rejects martial themes in favor of an apparently utopian fantasy: an end
to exile and diaspora and a rebuilt Jerusalem.
Because the image is so disruptive to the pre-existing tradition, it is one of the few
in the book to attract scholarly attention. Shalom Sabar has focused on the representation
of Jerusalem as an idealized, centrally-planned city in the image, with the Dome of the
Rock at its navel. He argues that the abandonment of the traditional shefokh and the
adoption of a specifically humanist conception of an idealized space points to the
developing harmony between the Jewish community and the Venetian state in the post-
Lepanto era. Sabar writes that “This change in context from revenge on the Gentiles to
messianic hope points, in my opinion, to the respect, even admiration, which Venetian
Jews expressed towards the Republic and its institutions.”
36
Sabar expands this into a
compelling visual comparison between the symmetry of Jerusalem in the image, and a
variety of idealized centrally planned urban environments in Italian renaissance
intellectual and visual culture. The appropriation of this motif, he argues, indicates that
early modern Jews conceived of Messianic Jerusalem as a kind of idealized renaissance

36
Shalom Sabar, “Messianic Aspirations and Renaissance Urban Ideals: The Image of
Jerusalem in the Venice Haggadah, 1609,” Jewish Art: The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in
Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art 23/24 (1997/1998), 298.
83
city state that paralleled the poetic idealizations of Venice. By adopting, or perhaps
appropriating, the rhetoric of humanist urban ideals, the image proposes a parity between
Jerusalem and Venice, pointing to a Jewish commitment to the “myth of Venice” as a
utopian society.
37

Sabar’s approach presents certain methodological problems. His argument
essentially relies on stylistic evidence; the artistic choice to represent Jerusalem as a tidy,
centrally-planned city, rather than the rambling architectural assemblage it was. But in
order for the image to provide the kind of rhetorical claims to urban idealization that
Sabar argues for, we would have to know that the anonymous artist was directed to
design Jerusalem specifically in this model, and that the iconographical meaning of such
a model was transparent to the book’s readers. However, the deliberate label for the city
seems to imply that there was concern that readers might not correctly interpret the
representation as Jerusalem without didactic assistance. The alternative argument is that
the centrally planned Jerusalem with the Dome of the Rock at its center appears in a
number of both Jewish and Christian images as a utilitarian emblem for Jerusalem.
38

Sabar’s vision of Venetian-Jewish relations is also perhaps less nuanced than
evidence demands. Here he is subject to some of the same critiques as other scholars
who have promoted Venice as a pre-modern tolerant utopia. Most problematically

37
For others who subscribe to this notion, see Abraham Melamed, “The Myth of Venice
in Italian Renaissance Jewish Thought,” in Italia Judaica. Atti del I Convegno
Internazionale, Bari, 1981 (Rome, 1983), 401-13. See also Benjamin Netanyahu, Don
Isaac Abravanel: Statesmen and Philosopher (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1982), 166-173.
38
Larry Silver, “Mapped and Marginalized: Early Printed Images of Jerusalem,” Jewish
Art: The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art 23/24:
(1997/1998): 313–324. For the appearance of the Dome of the Rock in such
representations see Pamela Berger, The Crescent on the Temple: The Dome of the Rock
as Image of the Ancient Jewish Sanctuary (Leiden: Brill, 2012), particularly Chapter 11.
84
however, Sabar’s interpretation seems to resist the terms of the image itself. The caption
explicitly dictates that the Messiah will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, implying a state
of disrepair, “Ieruscialaim edificata sia.” If Sabar is correct and Venice and Messianic
Jerusalem are analogs, it is unclear how the concept of rebuilding would apply to the
Republic without implying a polemical narrative. In this model, Venice would be
represented as imperfect, a culture in need of material reformation, rather than a perfectly
ordered society. In other words, if Sabar is correct, the image would function as a
criticism rather than celebration of Venetian society. While there was undoubtedly a
utopian discourse among some Jewish intellectuals immediately following the Spanish
expulsion that described Venice as a kind of tolerant haven, certainly by 1609 Venetian
Jews were capable of a more conflicted and cautious view of the Republic and of their
Christian neighbors.
Evidence indicates that the active biblical typology for the ghetto of Venice is not
Jerusalem, but Egypt. Recognizing this is essential, because otherwise redemption
appears as a matter of quiet evolution, rather than a radical event. The early modern
Jewish world was rife with messianic speculation following a series of historic
catastrophes: the expulsion of Jews from Spain, and the institution of the ghettoes of Italy
with their attendant intolerance—and infamously, the burning of the Talmud and
countless sacred Jewish texts during the late sixteenth century. Early modern Jews
applied a messianic doctrine to these events, interpreting the catastrophes as harbingers
for the arrival of the messianic age. As Gershom Scholem has explained, the Jewish
concept of messianic redemption has often been predicated on catastrophe, “Jewish
Messianism is in its origins and by its nature a theory of catastrophe. This theory stresses
85
the revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the transition from every historical present to
the Messianic future.”
39

Scholars of the time were quick to identify the 1492 expulsion as exactly the
catastrophe that would initiate the “birth pangs” of the messianic era—that is the
conception that redemption must be preceded by a period of intense suffering.
40
The
concept of the expulsion from Spain initiating messianic “birth pangs” was introduced by
the early modern historian Joseph ha-Kohen, “I think that the afflictions visited on the
Jews in all the kingdoms of Edom from the year 250 of the sixth millennium to the year
255 [1490-95] ‘a time of trouble unto Jacob, but out of it shall he be saved’—they are the
messianic birth pangs.”
41
Commentaries on the medieval kabalistic writings organized in
the Zohar particularly emphasized a messianic interpretation of contemporary events.
This tradition also greatly influenced biblical exegeses: Abraham Ben Eliezer Ha-Levi
wrote, “Behold Scripture in its entirety is filled with allusions to the future redemption.”
42

39
Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, (New York: Schocken, 1971), 7.
Scholem’s view is still generally accepted, although with some modifications; see
Ruderman, Hope Against Hope. For the expulsion from Spain as a case study, see Isaiah
Tishby, “Acute Apocalyptic Messianism,” in Essential Papers on Messianic Movements
and Personalities in Jewish History, ed. Marc Saperstein (New York: New York
University Press, 1992), 259-289 and Shalom Rosenberg, “Exile and Redemption in
Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century: Contending Conceptions,” in Jewish Thought
in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1984). The seminal study is Isaiah Tishby, Messianism in the Time of the
Expulsion from Spain and Portugal (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel, 1985).
40
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (London: Thames and Hudson,
1955), 246-7.
41
Joseph She’altiel ben Moses ha-Kohen in his commentary Sefer Peli’a (Rhodes, 1495).
The passage has been quoted by Scholem among others, see Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai
Sevi, the Mystical Messiah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 18, n. 13. The
concept of messianic birth pangs is initially addressed in the Talmud, Sanhedrin 98b.
42
Abraham ben Eliezer ha-Levi, Mishra Kitrin, f. 16a. Translated and cited in Rachel
Elior, “Messianic Expectation and Spiritualization of Religious Life in the Sixteenth
86
As this study has argued, Jewish thinkers of the ghetto era proposed a parallel
between contemporary exile, both exile from Spain and exile in the ghetto, and the
ancient enslavement in Egypt, the biblical period that the haggadah describes. The entire
spectacle of the expulsion was engineered by the Catholic monarchs to achieve this very
resonance. In the early modern period, revolutionary expectations were not expressed
solely by the institutionally repressed Jewish community. Giralomo Savonarola also
interpreted the events of 1492 through an apocalyptic lens.
43
Marsilio Ficino too was
greatly influenced by the trends in apocalyptic prophecy, declaring 1492 to be the
beginnings of a Golden Age.
44
There was also an active dialogue between Jewish and
Christian academics on the subject. The kabbalist and scholar of Semitic languages,
Guillaume Postel, for instance, posited a theory that the messianic age would be initiated
by the arrival of dual messiahs, one Christian, one Jewish.
45
Jewish scholars meanwhile,
employed Christian astrological predictions, adopting many wholesale as the foundations
for their own messianic expectations.
46
In 1492 the celebration of the Israelite’s exodus

Century,” in David Ruderman ed., Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance
and Baroque Italy (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 293.
43
Bernard McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of
Montier-en-Der, Joachim of Fiore, the Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola (Mahwah,
New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1979), 198 and Donald Weinstein, “Millenarism in a Civic
Setting: The Savonarola Movement in Florence,” in Millenial Dreams in Action, ed.
Sylvia Thrupp, (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 187-203.
44
Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in
Joachimism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 429.
45
Indeed, as Popkin argues, it is likely that Postel saw himself fulfilling this role,.
Richard Popkin, “Jewish-Christian Relations in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries:
The Conception of the Messiah,” Jewish History (1992): 163-177, 164 and Yvonne Petry,
Gender, Kabbalah, and the Reformation: The Mystical Theology of Guillaume Postel,
1510-1581. (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
46
See for instance, the description of Yohanan Alemanno in Ruderman, Hope against
Hope, 290-293.
87
from Egypt became the occasion of a forced expulsion, spreading Spanish Jews across
Europe, the Holy Land and North Africa.
In his commentary on the Passover liturgy, compiled soon after his arrival in
Italy, Isaac Abarbanel, the Spanish exile and prominent scholar of Kabalah, asked, “What
have we gained by the Exodus and redemption from Egypt, if we are now in Exile?”
47

Abarbanel, a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished Jewish families in
Spain, eventually settled with his family in Venice, where he wrote some of his most
significant works, many concerned with establishing a Jewish messianic doctrine.
48
In
two late works, printed fifty years after his death, Abarbanel asserted the eschatological
implications of the Spanish Expulsion and identified the relationship between historic
catastrophe and the messianic age.
49
In the following generation, the messianic
interpretation of the Expulsion remained intact, the trauma transmitted to a younger
generation of scholars. These examples reinforce Gershom Scholem’s description of
Jewish Messianism as a “theory of catastrophe.”
50

When the Republic of Venice established the first formal ghetto in the Italian
peninsula in March of 1516, the event dovetailed with events already viewed as
advancing the teleology of the messianic narrative. Gershom Scholem has persuasively
argued that the Spanish Expulsion was the key event in establishing a conception of a
historical timetable for the messianic arrival, which to a great extent facilitated the

47
Isaac Abarbanel, Zevach Pesach, p. 76a translated and cited in Gershom Scholem,
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1955), pp. 246-7.
48
Meyer Kayserling and Louis Ginzberg, “Isaac Abarbanel,” Jewish Encycopedia (New
York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1901-6), Vol. 1, 126-129.
49
Ma'yene ha-Yeshu'ah (Sources of Salvation), Ferrara, 1551; Mashmi'a Yeshu'ah
(Proclaiming Salvation), Salonica, 1526;
50
Gershom Scholem, Messianic Idea, 7
88
messianic pretenders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
51
In the case of Venice
there is indeed strong evidence to suggest a causal relationship between the Spanish
expulsion and the institution of the Venice ghetto.
52
The event must have seemed
particularly poignant for the Spanish Jews who, like Isaac Abarbanel, had recently made
their home in the Republic.
To correctly interpret the picture, we must recognize that in early modern Venice,
Jews had hardly found the messianic urban utopia Shalom Sabar argues the image
represents. The ghetto was not the carefully, centrally planned environment represented
in the Venice Haggadah. Where the urban fantasy in the image is capacious, clean,
organized, and secure, by all accounts, the ghetto of Venice was none of these. On the
contrary, life in the ghetto is consistently described as miserable and oppressive,
whatever the relative tolerance of the Venetian citizens and government. In his Midrash
Haggadah, a commentary on the Passover liturgy, Rabbi Eliezer Nahman Foa compared
the conditions in the ghetto to the enslavement of the ancient Israelites in Egypt. After
describing how “bitter” was life in exile, Foa insisted that the ghettoized Jews “[s]hould
not make for ourselves a ‘permanent lodging’ in this exile, purchasing homes and fields
and vineyards; we should remain strangers in the land, as if each day we were about to

51
In addition to the numerous citations to Scholem throughout this chapter, see the
helpful historiography in Joseph Dan, “Scholem’s View of Messianism,” Modern
Judaism 12 (1992): 117-128. Tishby was also convinced of the historical continuity
between the expulsion and later messianic movements, including Lurianic kabbalah and
the ascendance of Sabbatai Sevi. See the appendices to Tishby, Messianism. For
Tishby’s view, see M.H. Levine, “Tishby’s ‘Messianism,’” Jewish Quartery Review 77
(1987): 329-331.
52
See Riccardo Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice: A History (New York: Evans and
Company, 1987) 32-33. Calimani suggests that the expulsion from Spain, and the
consequent influx of Spanish Jews into Italy had a direct correlation to the establishment
of the ghetto, Ghetto of Venice, 47-8.
89
return to our land.”
53
The messianic implications in Foa’s criticism of the ghetto are
evident. In his metaphor, the ghettoized Jews are compared to the enslaved Israelites; the
ghetto to the slave camps of Egypt; and God’s liberation of the slaves to the impending
messianic redemption in Foa’s own time. Such a doctrine locates Passover as a crucial
moment in the narrative of messianic speculation.
This reflection on the past Exodus from Egypt in predicting the Messianic future
is not unique to thinkers like Abarbanel and Foa. David Berger explains: “The crucial
‘type,’ which left its mark on virtually every aspect of messianic speculation, was the
great redemption of the past. ‘As in the days of your exodus from the land of Egypt will I
show him marvelous things,’ (Mic. 7:15). On the most obvious level, this meant that the
overt miracles of the period of the exodus could be expected to return.”
54
According to
Berger, messianic speculation is predicated on a typological connection between
redemptive deeds in the past and in the future. Israel Jacob Yuval has persuasively
demonstrated the “intensive use made of the Exodus from Egypt as a typological model
to describe the future redemption,” particularly in the medieval period when the modern
Passover liturgy was being codified in the Haggadah.
55

One important aspect of the typological connection between the enslaved
Israelites and ghetto-era Jews, is that a parallel must also be found for the Egyptians. This
connection was easily found in the Christian populace, who in many cases profited from

53
Midrash Haggadah, 164, translated and cited in Robert Bonfil, “Change in Cultural
Patterns of Jewish Society in Crisis: The Case of Italian Jewry at the Close of the
Sixteenth Century,” Jewish History 3 (1988): 11-30.
54
David Berger, “Three Typological Themes in Early Jewish Messianism: Messiah Son
of Joseph, Rabbinic Calculations, and the Figure of Armilus,” AJS Review 10 (1985):
141-165.
55
Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in
Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 56.
90
the confinement of the Jews in the ghetto. This is an issue that Foa speaks to in his
commentary:

Pharoah and the Egyptians acted with great wisdom; when they rented their
houses to the Jews, they raised the rent tenfold, and the same was true in other
commercial dealings. But they did not know that they would not succeed in their
enterprise. On the contrary, “As they [the Jews] were oppressed, so did they
thrive,” that is, became wealthier.
56

Undoubtedly the haggadah emphasizes suffering. When viewed through the lens of
messianic doctrine, however, the intense meditation on pain fulfills a purpose; to
demonstrate to the reader that such suffering is all in service of facilitating the messianic
era.
The role of typology in the Venice Haggadah is also polemical. The Egyptians
were not only the oppressors of the enslaved Israelites, but also the victims of the
devastating plagues. To compare Christians to Egyptians, then, is not just to create a
typology between oppressors but also, to some extent, to suggest an impending
catastrophe. This was certainly recognized by one Jewish polemicist, who wrote, ‘the
Holy One, blessed be He, will in the future bring upon Rome all the plagues that He
inflicted on the Egyptians.’
57
In Rabbi Foa’s commentary, he associates the oppressive
Egyptians with his contemporary Christian neighbors just as clearly as he associates the
enslaved Israelites with contemporary Jews. We must understand the celebration of the
Passover liturgy as a reflection on both sixteenth-century Jews as well as their Christian
contemporaries. Early modern Jewish messianism looked back to the exodus from Egypt

56
Midrash Haggadah, 164.
57
See Louis Ginzberg’s translation and analysis of the “Damascus Document,” a tenth- to
twelfth-century medieval document found in the Cairo Geniza, see Louis Ginzberg, “An
Unknown Jewish Sect,” Moreshet 1 (1976), 234.
91
in imagining the nature of its own redemption. The celebration of Passover then marks a
poignant period in messianic speculation, evidenced clearly in the Passover exegeses of
Rabbis Isaac Abarbanel and Eliezer Nahman Foa. The cyclical nature of time in the
Passover liturgy is dealt with extensively in Chapter 1, but what distinguishes the
messianic arrival is that it signals the conclusion to this cycle of suffering and
redemption. Leon Modena similarly imagined redemption as a material phenomenon that
would end exile and enslavement.
58
It should come as no surprise that the Venice
Haggah presents an image of messianic redemption as the visual climax for both the book
and the Passover seder.

Navigating Space in the Ghetto of Venice
The prefatory material for the Venice Haggadah includes the following
prescription: “La sera de Pesach come si viene da Schola sia la sua tavola apparecchiata
con sopra un canestro dentro e latuga e appio e doi cucinati, cioe carne e ovo.”
59
The
acquisition of spring lamb, fresh vegetables, ample wine, and matzah—all necessary for
the celebration of Passover—would have taken the shoppers on an itinerary of the ghetto
enclosure. Indeed, preparing for reading the Venice Haggadah in 1609 would have
drawn emphatic attention to the bodies of its readers and the terms of their confinement.
In the Ghetto Nuovo, on the north side of the piazza, the ghetto’s only substantial open

58
Unlike other thinkers that read in recent events the impending messianic arrival,
Modena, counsels patience, “Even if the Messiah should delay coming twice ten
thousand years, the Jew will not depart one iota from his Torah and his faith because of
such a delay,” see Leon Modena, A Translation of the Magen Wa-hereb by Leon Modena,
ed. and trans. Allen Podet (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2001), 64.
59
“The evening of Passover as you come from the synagogue your table will be prepared
with a basket inside which is lettuce and bitter herbs, and two cooked dishes, including
meat and egg.”
92
space, the butcher’s stalls were located, their backs to the canals for the easy drainage of
blood and disposal of viscera. The shops of the wine and oil merchants and the green
grocer were located in the Ghetto Vecchio not far from the ghetto’s main gates and the
guard tower that surmounted it.
60
In the space between wine merchant and butcher lived
over five thousand Jews. In the days before Passover, many of them would have
occupied the teeming streets, shopping for food, competing for cuts of meat, and hoping
to find eggs and fresh produce before it spoiled. For the residents of the ghetto, preparing
for Passover was a performance not unlike a prisoner pacing his cell.
Passover also required the navigation of domestic space. The Venice Haggadah
again prescribes, “A prima note la sera vendeno li quattordici de Nissan, si va cercando il
chametz per tutti li lochi dove è solito che ne sia stato, per fin nelli busci e nelle fissure,
con in candelino di cera e non con torcia.”
61
All traces of leavening, as well as prohibited
grains and other substances, had to be removed from the home, and its surfaces
scrupulously cleaned. The Venice Haggadah recommended peering into dark corners,
behind furniture and in cupboards to find crumbs. An image shows a family, mother in
one frame and father and son together in another, searching vast, open, high-ceilinged
galleries with candles (Figure 2.7). The participation of men, women and children in the
cleaning process highlights the pedagogical and participatory function of the Venice
Haggadah, and the uniquely domestic orientation of the Passover seder. The caption

60
See diagrams in appendix to La città degli ebrei: il ghetto di Venezia, architettura e
urbanistica, ed. Donatella Calabi, Ugo Camerino, and Ennio Concina (Venice: Marsilio
Editori, 1991).
61
“At first night, in the evening, on the fourteenth of Nissan, go to look for the leavening
in all the places where it is usually found, even in the holes and fissures, with a small wax
candle and not with a torch.”
93
beneath the image reads, “L’ordine di cercar il chametz e annullarlo, con le sue berakoth
e abbrusciarlo.”
62

In reality, the prescription was not nearly as onerous as the image and caption
imply. Apartments in the ghetto of Venice were small, even by the standards of the
Venetian urban poor. Spaces that had once served comfortably as single-family homes in
the sixteenth century had been carved into increasingly confined quarters. By the
seventeenth century the ghetto was characterized chiefly by its population density.
63

Because the windows were frequently permanently sealed, the homes were
claustrophobic and disease spread rapidly. Nor is it possible to argue that whatever the
material shortcomings, the ghetto offered material safety and security. Indeed, the state
of the Jews was dependent upon a frequently renegotiated charter that could be
unilaterally modified. What little security the ghetto offered could evaporate
instantaneously, as it had during the tense months after the Battle of Lepanto, when the
Senate revoked the charter of the Jews and expelled them from the Veneto.
64

The reality of such living conditions casts serious doubt on Shalom Sabar’s
contention that Venice functioned as a terrestrial realization of messianic Jerusalem.
Regardless of these historiographical complications, Sabar is quite right to draw attention
to the architectural context of the image. But rather than addressing images from
Renaissance visual culture, it is essential to focus on the representations and functions of
architecture and urban and domestic space within the narrative of the book itself.

62
“The order to find and destroy the leavening, so that the blessings can be said.” Before
the formal beginning of Passover, this task had to be completed.
63
Donatella Calabi, “The’City of the Jews,’” The Jews of Early Modern Venice, Robert
C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid eds., (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001),
31-52.
64
Riccardo Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice (New York: Evans and Company, 1987), 99.
94
The days leading up to the celebration of Passover would have exacerbated the
living conditions in the ghetto and drawn attention to the terms of its inhabitants’
confinement. Thus, it is no accident that the image in the Venice Haggadah conceives of
messianic redemption in spatial terms, with the reconstructed Jerusalem as a city with
capacious streets, ordered buildings, and secure walls, with a house of worship at its
center. In many ways, the image in the Venice Haggadah represents not so much an ideal
renaissance city, as an ideal ghetto. In the image, groups of people, liberated from
ghettoes and shtettles approach from every direction, preparing to populate this new city.
The messianic arrival is thus an image of liberation and migration, a fantasy of walls
transgressed.
This drama of spatial transgression was literally performed during the Passover
seder. The arrival of the Messiah was not only an abstract theological desire, but ritually
mandated in the Passover Seder. This was particularly poignant in connection with the
shefokh. Rabbi Joseph Yuspa Hahn, a sixteenth-century rabbinic scholar explains the
custom associated with shefokh:
“After drinking, as is customary, from the cup of blessing, he grasps the fourth
cup of wine and opens the door. The moment the door is opened, he begins
reciting shefokh. And what a lovely custom it is, done in remembrance of the
Messiah, that when the recitation of shefokh begins, someone walks through the
threshold in order to demonstrate, on the night of our first redemption, our strong
faith in our final redemption.”
65

65
Rabbi Joseph Yuspa Hahn Sefer Yosif Ometz 172, par. 788. translated in Joseph
Gutmann, “The Messiah at the Seder: A Fifteenth-Century Motif in Jewish Art,” Raphael
Mahler Jubilee Volume: Studies in Jewish History, ed. S. Yeivin (Tel Aviv, 1974), 29-38
. Yosif Ometz was published in 1723 in Frankfort-on-Main, some years after the death of
Joseph Yuspa Hahn. Also see Joseph Gutmann, “When the Kingdom Comes: Messianic
Themes in Medieval Jewish Art,” Art Journal 27 (1967/68): 173-5.
95
While the Venice Haggadah necessarily rejects this tradition in association with the
shefokh, it preserves the notion that the individual worshipper could participate in
messianic redemption through ritual practice. The visual program of the Venice
Haggadah asks its readers to adopt such a belief. The notion of a participatory messianic
procession is first referenced on folio 3v, when a disguised Elijah, the prophet who will
herald the messianic arrival, appears at the door of a Venetian family’s Passover Seder
(Figure 2.3).
66
Between this initial act of liminal penetration and the climactic
representation of messianic Jerusalem, the architectural frames on every page of the
haggadah do the work of situating the reader within the context of the early modern
triumph.
Elaborate public processions, or triumphs, were ubiquitous in early modern
Europe, and frequently involved the fabrication of temporary allegorical monumental
gates that the procession passed through.
67
There is good reason to believe that Jews
participated actively in these events. A drawing of a monument sponsored by the Jews of
Livorno for the entry of Carlo, Infante of Spain and newly Duke of Parma in 1732,
documents how fully exposed Jews were to this tradition (Figure 2.8).
68
Jews were also
compelled to participate in triumphs in less than flattering or even humiliating

66
The tradition of representing Elijah in disguise at the Passover seder has a long
tradition in Jewish devotional culture, see Kristen Lindbeck, Elijah and the Rabbis: Story
and Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 161-171.
67
Patricia Fortini Brown, “Measured Friendship, Calculated Pomp: The Ceremonial
Welcomes of the Venetian Republic,” Triumphal Celebration and the Rituals of
Statecraft, Barbara Wisch and Susan Scott Munshower eds. (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 137-186.
68
The drawing, executed by the German draughtsman Marcus Tuscher, is entitled
“Macchina rapresentante la cvccagna eretta dalla Nazione ebrea in Livorno.” It is held in
the collection of the Getty Research Institute; to my knowledge it is previously
unpublished.
96
circumstances: the Jews of Rome were occasionally required to swear their allegiance to
the Pope beneath the canonical image of Israelite defeat in the Arch of Titus.
69

Venice was not immune to this tradition, and enthusiastically adopted the trend in
the sixteenth century.
70
For instance, when Henry III of France entered Venice in 1574, a
committee commissioned Palladio to construct a triumphal arch with allegorical statues
of Victory and Peace personified.
71
Like these very real monuments, each triumphal arch
in the Venice Haggadah features images of either Moses and Aaron, or David and
Solomon at the base of the pillars (Figure 2.9).
Frequently early modern “triumphs” or elaborate processions were documented in
lavishly illustrated books, which both commemorated and fossilized the ephemeral
procession.
72
Perhaps the most spectacular of these objects is a festival book produced to
commemorate the entry into Bologna of Pope Clement VII and Charles V following the
Holy Roman Emperor’s coronation in 1530.
73
Produced in scroll format, the illuminated

69
For examples of coercion, see Amnon Linder, ‘”The Jews too were not
absent…carrying Moses’s Law on their shoulders’: The Ritual Encounter of Pope and
Jews from the Middle Ages to Modern Times,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 99 (2009):
323-395.
70
This was particularly apparent following Lepanto, see E.H. Gombrich, “Celebrations in
Venice of the Holy League and the Victory at Lepanto,” Studies in Renaissance and
Baroque Art, ed. Jeanne Coutauld (London: Phaidon,1967), 62-8; and Andrew C. Hess,
“The Battle of Lepanto and its Place in Mediterranean History,” Past & Present 57
(1972): 53-73.
71
On this procession and more, see Edward Muir, “Images of Power: Art and Pageantry
in Renaissance Venice,” The American Historical Review 84 (1979): 16-52.
72
Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450-1650 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 21-22.
73
Nicolaus Hogenberg, Procession of Pope Clement VII and the Emperor Charles V after
the coronation at Bologna on the 24th February, MDXXX (ca. 1535-1539), (Getty
Research Institute, 1388-005). For similar objects, see Larry Silver, “Triumphs and
Travesties: Printed Processions in the 16
th
Century,” in Grand Scale: Monumental Prints
in the Age of Durer and Titian (Wellesley: Davis Museum and Cultural Center, 2008),
15-32.
97
prints recreate the experience of witnessing the procession, as the cortège proceeds
through arches decorated with Hapsburg eagles and other emblems and inscriptions
(Figure 2.10). However, festival books were also produced that presented fictionalized,
idealized, or symbolic processions.
74
The Venice Haggadah performs a similar task,
although the perspective is one of participation, rather than passive bystander. By
presenting both third-person and first-person perspectives of the triumphal procession,
the Venice Haggadah undermines the traditional conceit of a festival book as a
voyeuristic exercise, and transforms it into a participatory, interactive experience.
In the Venice Haggadah, it is the relationship between the thresholds represented
in the images and the thresholds represented on the borders of the page that facilitate this
phenomenon. The book historian William Sherman, describes these architectural borders
as effective paratextual devices that mediate between reader and object, creating a
“transitional zone between inside and outside and between the quotidian and the
sacred.”
75
Whether real or fictional, thresholds perform an important mediating function
for viewers. In his influential Image on the Edge, Michael Camille quotes the
anthropologist Edmund Leach, “A boundary separates two zones of social space-time
which are normal, time-bound, clear-cut, central, secular, but the spatial and temporal
markers which actually serve as boundaries are themselves abnormal, timeless,

74
For instance, Johannes Sambucus, Arcus aliquot triumphal et monimenta victor
classicae (Antwerp, 1572); this object was discussed by Sean Nelson, “Beyond Lepanto:
Johannes Sambucus’s Paper Triumph for Don John of Austria,” (Montreal: Renaissance
Society of American Annual Conference, 2011). I thank Nelson for directing my
attention to the book and for sharing his preliminary work on the subject.
75
William Sherman, “On the Threshold: Architecture, Paratext, and Early Print Culture,”
Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn
Baron, Eric N Lindquist, Eleanor F. Shevlin (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press,
2007), 77.
98
ambiguous, at the edge, sacred.”
76
Leach follows a tradition of anthropologists interested
in investigating liminal spaces and the phenomena that occur in such transitional areas.
77

For Camille, the margins of the page, like the margins of portals, are significant because
they so effectively moderate, satirize or structure the experience of the central image,
text, or physical passage.
Similarly, in the Venice Haggadah, the book’s messianic procession is structured
by the architectural borders, which the viewer penetrates visually to read the central text
that occupies the space in the void. The significance of creating, challenging, and
occupying such a liminal space was understood by artists and audiences in the early
modern period. Patricia Fumerton, describes this liminal space as essential to the
construction of early modern subjectivity, arguing that such framed views become the
perspective of a “particular person at a particular point,” detaching the viewer from the
public world.
78
The art historian John Shearman described the same phenomenon as
“particularizing the spectator.”
79
In the Venice Haggadah, the fictive architecture situates
the reader as a participant in the messianic procession, proceeding through a series of
thresholds as he reads the book. Finally, on the climactic page, he reaches the ultimate
destination, the gates of Jerusalem itself. The fictional threshold acts as a metaphor for

76
Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols are
Connected (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 35. For Camille’s
discussion of Leach, see Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London:
Reaktion Books, 1992), p. 56.
77
Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961). See also Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New
Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers, 1969).
78
Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of
Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Chapter 4, “Consuming
the Void,” 111-168.
79
John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance
(Princeton: Princeton University Press), 17.
99
the spiritual journey of redemption, and as an analog for the very real thresholds that
would one day stand open when the ghetto of Venice was liberated.
Before the final arrival in Jerusalem, the Venice Haggadah provides several
intermediate images to reinforce the notion of a progression through successive
thresholds. On folio 20r, an image depicts the Israelites attacking the Amorites, driving
them back from the banks of a river (Figure 2.11). The two crowned figures in the midst
of the retreating army are identified as Sihon and Og.
80
On the opposite side of the river,
the Israelite armies surround two walled cities, which are identified in the caption as Ai
and Jericho, Canaanite cities conquered by the Israelites in the Book of Joshua, “Sichon e
Og potentissimi re rotti in Guerra de dal paese discacciati, La presa de Iericho d il
disordine del’ Ai qui sono figurati.”
81
Neither city is mentioned in the page’s central text,
which recounts God’s many great deeds following the Exodus from Egypt. The battles at
both Ai and Jericho are dramas of penetration. At Jericho, the walls are breached through
God’s intervention—literally forced to “fall down flat.”
82
Subsequently at Ai, Joshua
keenly devises an ambush, drawing the enemy troops outside the protection of the
fortifications, and then attacking with the full strength of the Israelite army. But the
image shows the cities just before the walls are breached, in a dramatic moment of
anticipation, when the Israelite troops are still denied access, securely isolated outside the
cities’ walls. For the Israelites, these cities must be penetrated before they could enter the
ultimate threshold, the Promised Land. The typology is remarkably similar to the

80
In a number of biblical passages, Og is colorfully described as a giant, which explains
why he stands a head taller than the rest of the men in the army.
81
“The kings Sichon and Og are broken and banished from the land, the capture of
Jericho and chaos in Ai are also represented.”
82
Joshua, 6:19
100
spiritual journey in the Venice Haggadah: the thresholds that frame the Passover liturgy
must be “breached” before reaching the climax of the Seder, the declaration “Next year in
Jerusalem.”
In the classic study The Rites of Passage, Arnold Van Gennep famously
developed the concept of the threshold—both as metaphor and literal reality—to classify
and conceptualize a variety of human ceremonies.
83
With remarkable sensitivity, Van
Gennep notes that frequently in Jewish culture, symbolic and material threshold rituals
are coupled, for instance, in the case of symbolically touching the mezuzah on the
doorpost of a house to initiate a real and spiritual journey.
84
Such threshold motifs are
ubiquitous in early modern Jewish visual and material culture.
85
One evocative example
illustrates this. A seventeenth-century paroket, or Torah ark curtain, embroidered by
Simhah, the wife of Menahem Levi Meshullami, depicts the city of Jerusalem as the word
of God is revealed to the Israelites (Figure 2.12).
86
Embroidered with gold thread on rich
silk, the curtain’s iconography is based closely on the Venice Haggadah’s final image: a
revelatory moment set in a centrally-planned Jerusalem. Like the thresholds in the

83
Van Gennep divides ceremonies into three stages: rites of separation (preliminal rites),
rites of transition (liminal or threshold rites), and rites of incorporation (post-liminal
rites). See Van Gennep, 21.
84
Ven Gennep describes the mezuah ceremony as a microcosm of the “territorial
passage,” in which spiritual and geographic transformations happen during migration, p.
22.
85
For instance, see the discussion of gate and passageway imagery in Shalom Sabar,
Ketubbah: Art of the Jewish Marriage Contract (New York: Rizzoli, 2000), 17-24. For
an introduction to the genre, see Shalom Sabar, “The Beginnings of Ketubbah Decoration
in Italy: Venice in the Late Sixteenth to the Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Jewish Art 12-
13 (1986-87): 96-110
86
Vivian B. Mann, ed. Gardens And Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, exh. cat.
(New York: The Jewish Museum, 1989) 56, 276. According to Mann, the Meshullami
ark curtain is based on an earlier example with the same motif executed by Stella Perugia
in 1634.
101
Venice Haggadah, the ark curtain itself is a liminal object that mediates between audience
and Torah; it is drawn away to remove and read the Torah.
87
The projection of the
Venice Haggadah’s visual program onto this highly sacred and public object indicates
much about the haggadah’s significance and visual legacy. Historically the book
established an influential iconographical corpus; methodologically it serves as an
effective nexus for the study of Jewish visual and devotional culture writ large.
This liminal metaphor is not simply a matter of retroactively imposing
contemporary theory on early modern circumstances. Remarkably, some commentators
were sensitive to this symbolic language. The Spanish exile Isaac Aboab the Elder wrote
of the disasters of the early modern period, “It can be compared to a father and son who
were traveling on a road. The father said to the son, ‘Let this be a sign for you: when you
see a cemetery you are near to a town. So too, it is a sign when we see afflictions that the
advent of the Messiah is near.”
88
In this commentary, the period in between precipitating
disaster and messianic arrival is like the cemetery on the outskirts of the city. In Leach’s
terms, it is “abnormal,” “ambiguous,” and “at the edge.” Not, perhaps, a place to spend
more time than necessary. So too, the early modern period, with its expulsions, mass
conversions and ghettos is like the cemetery on the threshold to the city.
Divided in literal terms from the city of Venice, the Jews were separate, a liminal
people waiting to penetrate both a real and spiritual threshold. Their messianic hopes
were also understood as architectural liberation. As Leon Modena wrote in his colophon,

87
For more on the mediating function of curtains, see Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green:
Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), “The Curtain Between the Theatre and the Globe,” 208-247.
88
Nehar Pishon, Parshat Bereshit (Contstantinople, 1538), f. 11a. cited and translated in
Rosenberg, 405. Aboab was a Spanish exile in Constantinople. The book was a
commentary on Talmudic Tractate Bereshit.
102
“May our savior and son of David come to us now, and bring harmony within ours
walls.” The messianic entry into Jerusalem acts as an effective climax to this drama. This
fantasy of permeability must have resonated powerfully in an urban environment defined
by the restriction of mobility, by units of spatial and temporal containment, and in a
religious culture anxiously anticipating redemption.
89

.

89
For notions of containment, See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the
City in Western Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). Sennett describes the
Venetian ghetto as an “urban condom,” 222-240. Benjamin Ravid, “From Geographic
Realia to Historiographical Symbol: The Odyssey of the Word Ghetto,” 373-385 and
Kenneth R. Stow, “The Consciousness of Closure: Roman Jewry and Its Ghet,” 386-400
in Ruderman, ed., Essential Papers (1992).
103

Chapter 3

“In Your Blood, Live”:
Jewish Difference and the Fate of Children in the Venice Haggadah

“Blood is better than water.”
1
Sefer ha-Nizzahon Yashan

A seventeenth-century Venetian festival book describes the most popular
costumes at Carnevale.
2
Among the expected figures, including the characters of the
commedia dell’arte, appears an image of two revelers wearing “Jewish masks” (Figure
3.1). With grotesquely elongated noses and gaping mouths, the figures are immediately
recognizable to modern viewers as a specific representation of Jewish biological
difference. The image neatly disrupts several recently popular ideas about ethnicity in
the early modern world. Scholars have argued that the conception of a distinct Jewish
race is a modern construction, the result of scientific inquiry and its more dubious
cousins, such as phrenology and physiognomy.
3
Modernity was able to recognize Jewish
difference, because science provided the apparatus for it, and culture absorbed and
reflected this new knowledge. Indeed, as Stephen Jay Gould has argued, significant

1
Nizzahon Yashan, Ezekiel 16:6. For all references to Sefer ha-Nizzahon Yashan, see
the critical edition edited by David Berger, Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle
Ages: A Critical Edition of the Nizzahon Vetus, with an introduction, translation and
commentary by David Berger, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1981), 73.
2
Francesco Bertelli, Il Carnevale Italiano Mascherato Oue si Veggono in Figura Varie
Inuetione di capritii (Venice, 1642). The book is held by the Getty Research Institute in
Los Angeles, and to my knowledge is unpublished.
3
For a broader history of Jews in the scientific conception of race, see Sander Gilman,
The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991). On physiognomy and other practices, see
Judith Wechsler, “Lavater, Stereotype, and Prejudice,” in The Faces of Physiognomy:
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater, ed. Ellis Shookman, (Columbia,
SC: Camden House, 1993), 104-125.
104
agency must be attributed to academic science in constructing the biological determinism
imminent in conceptions of modern prejudice.
4

Recent scholarship argues that the early modern period presents a different
situation, a more fluid and capacious definition of ethnic difference. Cultural historians
describe a variety of methods for identifying Jewish bodies in the pre-modern world that
support this general premise.
5
Hats, badges, veils and earrings were each variously
instituted by early modern Christian authorities as markers to visually distinguish Jews
from their Christian neighbors.
6
Images document and reinforce these signifiers. In
examinations of early modern imagery, art historians point to a common iconographical
language used to identity Jewish figures, rather than the type of distinct physiognomy
Francesco Bertelli provides in the festival book.
7
The emphasis on these distinguishing
signs has been used to argue that Jewish bodies were understood as only identifiable—
and thus defined—by observable, extracorporeal characteristics.
8

4
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981).
5
Diane Owen Hughes, “Distinguishing Sings: Ear-rings, Jews and Franciscan Rhetoric in
the Italian Renaissance City,” Past and Present 112 (1986): 3-59.
6
See Hughes, and Barbara Wisch, “Vested Interest: Redressing Jews on Michelangelo's
Sistine Ceiling,”Artibus et Historiae 24 (2003): 143-172.
7
Eric M. Zafran, “The Iconography of Antisemitism: A Study of the Representation of
the Jews in the Visual Arts of Europe, 1400-1600,” (PhD diss., New York University,
1973); Ruth Melinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the
Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Ruth
Melinkoff , Antisemitic Hate Signs in Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts from Medieval
Germany (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1999); Sara Lipton, Images of
Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisée (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
8
The Italian situation is somewhat different than the visual culture of Northern Europe.
In Germany, for instance, there is a long tradition of physiognomic stereotypes in images.
See, for instance, Ruth Mellinkoff, “Judas’s Red Hair and the Jews.” Journal of Jewish
Art 9 (1982): 31-46.
105
Scholars have typically argued that distinguishing signs were necessary because
the early modern world did not possess an apparatus for recognizing Jewish ethnicity as a
biologically distinct category. And because Jewish ethnicity was not seen as biologically
distinct there was no need to create a representational language to accommodate it.
Bronwen Wilson has compellingly argued that costume, and its corollary visual
representations, was as essential to the constitution of religious identity as personal
confession.
9
The impermanence of costume, she argues, facilitated a fluid and
extracorporeal conception of identity categories that are fortunately described by post-
modern theories of performance. The ability to alter, trade and subvert impermanent
sartorial markers points to a certain fluidity of identity liberated from the biology of the
bodies that displayed these signs.
10
These ideas are harmonious with post-modern
notions of the centrality of performance in constituting a variety of identity categories.
11

Applying this theoretical model also has the convenient side effect of locating in early
modernity an enlightened rhetoric of ethnic and sexual tolerance.
12

Such a claim might seem dramatically at odds with the tradition of representing
Jews being humiliated, tortured, and executed. In a recent, well-received monograph on

9
Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, The City, And Early Modern Identity
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 120-127.
10
For an alternate view, see Valentin Groebner, Who are You?: Identification, Deception
and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Groebner
charts a variety of methods that early modern authorities used to identify bodies,
including a system of identification documents that focus on bodily signs such as scars.
11
See, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1989). For early modern applications of this theory, see Adrian
Randolph, “Performing the bridal body in fifteenth-century Florence,” Art History 21
(1998): 182-200; Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male
Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 10-16.
12
Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Norton,
1998), 34.
106
the representation of Jews in Renaissance painting, Dana Katz has argued that the
violence represented in these images functions as an articulation of policies of tolerance.
The definition of tolerance treated here corresponds to the privileges given to
certain groups of social deviants to dwell among the communities in Latin
Christendom provided such dissenters served a beneficial role in the society as a
whole and proved no threat to Christianity. The medieval notion of tolerance,
which circulated in the works of canon law and scholasticism, was thus a policy
of patientia toward nonbelievers and other outgroups inasmuch as it justified
deviance within a community that refused to accept freedom of religion or
religious plurality. Tolerance as a political concept offered limited social
forbearance to select marginalized groups while opposing policies of expulsion
and extermination.
13

Jews in early modern Italy were not subject to wholesale slaughter. But by the
comparative examples of both thirteenth-century massacre and twentieth-century
genocide, the rubric for “tolerance” is staggeringly low.
14
Katz’s description of political
tolerance also has the consequence of divorcing Jewish identity from Jewish bodies. In
this formulation, the difference between Jew and Christian is a political difference.
Emphasizing the apparent ease of subverting distinguishing signs disregards the
underlying motivation for that subversion: the desire to mitigate intense social
marginalization and its consequences, poverty, disease, humiliation. In other words, this
historiographical model might suggest that the hats and veils Jewish bodies were forced
to wear were an ultimately enlightened measure quite separate from the very real
corporeal abjection Jewish bodies suffered. For instance, Katz argues that “Relative to
the virulent aggressions against the Jews in contemporary Spain and to the Jews' loss of

13
Dana Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3-4.
14
On the recent debate about the definition and parameters of “tolerance” as a political
construct, see Jeffery J. Mondak and Mitchell S. Sanders, “The Complexity of Tolerance
and Intolerance Judgments: A Response to Gibson,” Political Behavior 27 (2005): 325-
337. The debate here is particularly significant, since it demonstrates the incompatibility
of contemporary and early modern vocabularies.
107
rights and ghettoization beginning in the sixteenth century in certain Italian cities
including Venice and Rome, the Italian Renaissance courts stand apart in their tolerance
of Jews.”
15
This comparative argument is, of course, spurious. The relative distinctions
rendered clearly by historical distance are unappreciable to the bodies enduring
persecution in the moment. Indeed, it would have been small consolation to the Mantuan
banker Daniele da Norsa that his impoverishment at the hands of the Mantuan court was
by degree less severe than a formal expulsion. Such comparisons also expose
methodological problems. Jewry policies were first and foremost sculpted by economic
expediency, not political philosophy.
16
Employing this comparative model, it is also
possible to argue that the Italian Renaissance courts were cesspools of virulent anti-
Semitism compared to both the rhetoric and reality of the Medici’s Livornina Charter in
1593.
17
While there are real appreciable differences between the policies of various
historical and geographic situations, parsing degrees of tolerance in the pre-modern
period asks us to adopt a vocabulary that is absolutely incommensurate with early
modern thought.
Instead, I argue that the various sartorial markers instituted by authorities only
function to map and publicize what the early modern world conceived as very real

15
Katz, Jew in the Art of the Renaissance, 2. Katz’s work largely reflects the excessively
optimistic historiographical models of Cecil Roth and Moses Shulvass. Cecil Roth,
History of the Jews in Italy (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1946) and Moses
Avigdor Shulvass, Jews in the World of the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1973).
16
Kenneth Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 1550-1593 (New York:
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1977).
17
The charter that established the Medici port at Livorno was specifically designed to
attract Jewish merchants from Venice and Ancona with promises of more tolerant
cultural policies. See Benjamin Ravid, “A tale of three cities and their Raison d'etat:
Ancona, Venice, Livorno, and the Competition for Jewish Merchants in the Sixteenth
Century,” Mediterranean Historical Review, 6 (1991): 138-162.

108
corporeal differences, even capable of articulation and exaggeration in the pages of
popular sources such as Bertelli’s festival book. The early modern world saw Jewish
bodies as different, and the Jewish world recognized in that difference a unique privilege,
the site of a covenant between God and the Jewish people. Chapter one described the
terms that structured Jewish reading and suggests a methodology for analyzing historical
reading in critical terms. One of my chief arguments is that the text cannot be
productively separated from the body that reads it. This chapter elaborates this
methodology with a more discreet examination of those bodies. Here I attempt to
describe the terms and meanings of the Jewish body, and point to how culture—
exemplified by the Venice Haggadah—constructs and reflects these notions. How did
Jews and Christians understand the early modern Jewish body to be “Jewish”? How did
indigenous notions of Jewish identity reflect, assimilate, and polemicize broader
European notions of Jewish identity? What did in mean to be and become a Jew in early
modern Europe?
Precise and complete answers to these seemingly pedantic questions mattered in
early modern Venice, because Jewish and Christian bodies were subject to different legal
jurisdictions.
18
Thoroughly analyzed in a path-breaking study by Brian Pullan, the case
of Abraham del Righetto, also known as Righetto Marrano, is eloquent in this regard.
19

In October of 1570, Righetto was arrested and charged with heresy. A distant relative of
the Ottoman commander Joseph Nasi, the Duke of Naxos, it is highly likely that attention
fell on Righetto during this period of heightened sensitivity to supposed Venetian

18
Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550-1670 (London:
I.B. Tauris, 1998).
19
Brian Pullan, “’A Ship with Two Rudders’: ‘Righetto Marrano’ and the Inquisition in
Venice,” The Historical Journal 20 (1977): 25-58.
109
sympathizers with the Ottoman Empire. The allegation against Righetto was apostasy.
He was accused of having converted to Christianity, and then reverting to Judaism while
living abroad, and continuing to vacillate between Jewish and Christian identities upon
his return to Venice.
20
In testimony before the Inquisition, the defendant argued that it
does not matter what costume he wears if he remains circumcised. For legal purposes,
Righetto notes that he can provide ample evidence for being Jewish, his very body,
whereas barring a document precisely recording his baptism, it is impossible for the
Inquisition to prove that he is a Christian, and hence subject to its jurisdiction:

It would be necessary to demonstrate that I had been baptized, because the fact of
living among Christians bearing the name of Christian does not prove anything of
the sort. Time and time again we have seen Christians in the Levant call
themselves by Turkish names and live among Turks for personal reasons without
undergoing circumcision or committing those actions by which one accepts the
faith of Islam, and then they return to Christianity when they come home. The
full proof that one is a Jew, which derives from living as a Jew and from
circumcision, is not a thing that can be overturned by mere hints, conjectures and
other signs—indeed, it is not by anything less than a full and perfect proof that
clearly and manifestly demonstrates baptism.
21

Remarkably, many interpretations of the Righetto episode resist the logic of Righetto’s
own argument. For Bronwen Wilson, the seeming ease with which figures like Righetto
appear to exchange identities is evidence of a sort of performative postmodern ethnic
fluidity. Wilson writes, “Instead of something inalienable and bound irrevocably to the
self, identities could be adopted as voyagers moved in between cities.”
22
But for
Righetto, the significance of circumcision is in its indelibility, which in a juridical context

20
On the use of hats to represent and subvert identity, see Benjamin Ravid, “From
Yellow to Red: On the Distinguishing Head-covering of the Jews of Venice,” Jewish
History 6 (1992): 179-210.
21
A.S.V., S.U., b. 36 “Abraam del Righetto,” petition May 1571. Cited and translated in
Pullan, Inquisition, 47.
22
Wilson, World in Venice, 120.
110
trumps the evidence of “living as a Christian,” and indisputably fixes him as a Jew. His
innocence hinges both on the evidence of his Jewish body and the evidentiary inadequacy
of Christian ritual. While scholars are fond of locating in Righetto a “malleable identity,”
his own testimony indicates the contrary position.
23
In Righetto’s own words, the
practices of living as a Christian are superficial. His Jewish identity is essential and
unchanging.
Righetto’s argument also displays a hardened cynicism toward the sincerity of
Jewish conversion to Christianity, particularly given the transience of baptism. In the
generations following the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, Christian
authorities and popular culture promoted suspicion towards Jews who may have
converted to Christianity as a matter of economic and social expedience, rather than
genuine belief.
24
In Italy, Jewish converts to Christianity transmitted this stigmatization
to their progeny.
25
Several generations of living as earnest Christians were inadequate to
expunge the taint of Judaism.
26
This was partially because the economic survival of

23
For arguments for a “malleable identity,” see Eric R. Dursteler, Ventians in
Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 106-8.
24
For a description of such “fuzzy Jews” in Italy, see Renee Levine Melammed
A Question of Identity: Iberian Conversos in Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), and Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, “Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the
Inquisition,” in The Jews of Early Modern Venice, ed. Robert C. Davis and Benjamin
Ravid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001 ), 106. For comparison to
Protestant lands, see Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and
Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999),
7-8.
25
See the various accounts in Kenneth R. Stow, “A Tale of Uncertainties: Converts in the
Roman Ghetto,” Shlomo Simonsohn Jubillee Volume (Tel Aviv, 1993): 257-81.
26
Indeed, particularly when often the children returned to Judaism. See the events
described in Cecil Roth, “`Salusque Lusitano,'” Jewish Quarterly Review 34 (1943): 65–
85.
111
neophytes depended on maintaining close relationships with the Jewish community.
27

These very concerns about Jewish recidivism exacerbated the belief that Jewish identity
resided in the blood, and not in the temporary performance of Christian ritual.
28
Jerome
Friedman has argued, “The sixteenth century witnessed the transition of medieval
religious anti-Judaism into a racial antisemitism laying the foundation for modern hatred
of Jews.”
29
In one of the most compelling displays of this attitude, the Benedictine
historian Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, Charles V's biographer, wrote in 1604:
"Who can deny that in the descendants of the Jews there persists and endures the
evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in
Negros [there persists] the inseparability of their blackness. For if the latter should
unite themselves a thousand times with white women, the children are born with the
dark color of the father. Similarly, it is not enough for the Jew to be three parts
aristocrat or Old Christian for one family-line [i.e., one Jewish ancestor] alone
defiles and corrupts him.
30

The passage succinctly summarizes the ideology of blood purity articulated in the wake
of the mass conversion and expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. The idea was
not restricted to continental Europe; a number of studies have documented a parallel
rhetoric in Shakespearean England.
31
The very notion of Jewish blood is tremendously

27
See Document 1681, F.2, l.2, f. 144r, dated February 21, 1555 in ed. Kenneth Stow,
The Jews in Rome (Leiden: Brill), Vol. 2, 728. It is interesting to note that the document
details financial transactions between a Roman Jew and a Venetian neophyte.
28
See Pullan, Inquisition of Venice, 139-141. Pullan cites the policy of confiscating the
goods of the families of new Christians who revert to Judaism as evidence of the belief
that Judaism was transmitted through blood.
29
Jerome Friedman, “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and
Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism,” The Sixteenth
Century Journal, 18 (1987), 3.
30
Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, Historia de la vida y hechos del emperator Carlos V.
(Biblioteca de autores espafioles Vol. 82) (Madrid: Editiones Atlas, 1956), 319, cited in
Friedman, 16-17.
31
David S. Katz, “Shylock's Gender: Jewish Male Menstruation in Early Modern
England,” The Review of English Studies 50 (1999): 440-462 and Janet Adelman, Blood
112
uncomfortable for modern scholars, particularly because it can be so easily subject to
distortion and abuse, and seems so anathema to politically conscious theories of identity
and performance. Highly illustrative of these problematic tendencies is Ariel Toaff’s
Passover of Blood: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Homicide (2007), which caused
widespread controversy in Italy, Israel, and the United States as much for its questionable
methodology as for its spurious conclusions.
32
Nonetheless, several recent and important
studies have attempted to locate the subject of Jewish blood as central to historical
constructions of Jewish identity.
33
What emerges in these studies is the compelling
argument that, whatever its scientific merits, the pre-modern world was invested in a
conception of Jewish biological difference that originated in the blood.
The argument that Jewish identity is based primarily on corporeal difference
allows Righetto’s case to engage provocatively with the masked revelers in Bertelli’s
festival book. Bertelli’s masks suggest the existence of popular notions of visually
identifiable Jewish differences. But the ability to persuasively “appear” as a Christian (or
a Muslim for that matter) seems to undermine this notion.
34
It is remarkable that in
Cesare Vecellio’s monumental costume book, Habiti Antichi et Moderni (1590), there is

Relations: Christian and Jew in the Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006).
32
Ariel Toaff, Pasque di sangue: ebrei d'Europa e omicidi rituali (Bologna: Il Mulino,
2007). In essence, Toaff argued that Jews actually did integrate blood into Passover rites
and practices. The book earned a public lashing from Kenneth Stow, among other
scholars, and was eventually removed from publication.
33
David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and
Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). The book was followed up
two years later with an edited volume that further explored the issues more broadly,
Mitchell Bryan Hart, Jewish Blood: Reality and Metaphor in Jewish History, Religion,
and Culture, (London: Routledge, 2009).
34
Indeed, as has often been missed in the Righetto case, Righetto was not successfully
passing as a Christian.
113
only one image of a Jewish figure, a Jewish woman in Syria.
35
For Vecellio, the image
does double duty. It generally documents the dress of wealthy Syrians, and provides the
opportunity to expound upon Jewish sartorial practices. In his commentary, Vecellio
allows a digression from a description of Syrian costume to remark on the Jewish
tendency to sartorially assimilate, noting the distinguishing sign as the only mark of
visual difference.
“They dress like Venetians, imitating other merchants and artisans of the city,
even though some of them are doctors of medicine and therefore dress differently
from people of their own kind. The doctors wear long overgarments with full
sleeves, in black, as doctors do; but to be recognized by others, they are
commanded by public law to wear a yellow cap.”
36

Vecellio seems to indicate that if his readers locate an image of a Venetian and
imaginatively exchange his black hat for a yellow or red one, they will have a reliable
image of a Venetian Jew. Vecellio mentions neither anatomy, nor confessional
difference. It is not unfair to argue that unlike later more discrete ethnographies, Vecellio
emphasizes surfaces such as textiles, draping and lace, and is generally less concerned
with the bodies that existed beneath the clothing. In their exhaustive study of Vecellio’s
Habiti Antichi et Moderni, Margaret Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones offer crucial
context for Vecellio’s career, noting that prior to the publication of his famous costume
book, Vecellio’s most popular and monumental work was a richly illustrated book of lace
patterns.
37
In keeping with this highly specialized career, Vecellio’s text is larded with
technical terminology. As Rosenthal and Jones argue, these details mattered because for

35
Cesare Vecellio, Habiti Antichi e Modérni di Diversi Parti di Mondo (Venice, 1590).
36
Vecellio, 464, translated in Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, The
Clothing of the Renaissance World: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas: Cesare
Vecellio's Habiti Antichi Et Moderni (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 516.
37
Rosenthal and Jones, 14-15.
114
Vecellio and his contemporaries “to dress was to be invested with a public identity
according to a system of fixed codes.”
38
That social meaning is imposed upon the body
by dress is undoubtedly true for a number of social identity categories.
39
But for Jews, the
situation is more complicated.
Vecellio’s charitably superficial conception of Jewish difference was not
universally held. It coexisted, in fact, with an alternate history of Jewish physical
difference. Rather than a modern invention, a rich history of anti-Semitic discourse was
already in place when Vecellio’s costume book was published. In his foundational study
of the transformation of Europe into a “persecuting society,” R.I. Moore finds that a
popular discourse that promoted Jewish biological difference, including images that
closely correspond to Bertelli’s, emerges to substantiate the first systemic, formal anti-
Jewish policies in the thirteenth century.
40
At the very least, the Jewish body was the site
of contestation and ambiguity. It is possible that Bertelli’s image functions to realize a
popular desire to fix the ambiguous Jewish body in print, and to promote the possibility
of Jewish difference to the reader. For a populace that feared both theological and
biological contamination, this conception of Jewish difference, may well have been a
comfort.
41
If Jews could be recognized despite their ability to subvert their sartorial
markers, they could be observed and controlled. The visual representation of an

38
Rosenthal and Jones, 16.
39
See Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011).
40
R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in
Western Europe, 900-1250, 2
nd
edition (London: Blackwell, 2007).
41
Although his conclusions are reductive, Richard Sennett has convincingly
demonstrated a fear of epidemiological contamination, literally a “fear of touching,” as a
factor in the establishment of anti-Jewish policies. See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone:
the Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 212-240.
115
observable Jewish biological difference—even one as crude as Bertelli’s—participates in
a system of power relations that Moore aptly describes as a “persecuting society.”
42

The Venice Haggadah’s response is remarkable because it resists reducing Jewish
identity to either a corporeal (Bertelli) or performative (Vecellio) model, although it
invests in and elaborates on both. It accommodates multiple conceptions of difference,
proposing a polyvalent model for Jewish identity. In its construction of Jewish identity—
which substantially challenges present historiographical models—the book successfully
functions as polemic, demonstrating the utility of print as a tool for resisting and claiming
power. In the Venice Haggadah, this narrative of Jewish corporeality parallels the
“maggid”—the telling—the textual section following the introductory prayers and
passages that begins to directly describe the Passover chronicle. The Venice Haggadah’s
maggid thematizes Jewish corporeality, and by extension provides a treatise on Jewish
nationality, the body politic composed of Jewish bodies.
As I argued in the first chapter, the Venice Haggadah conceives a biblical narrative
in which notions of ritual were essential to Abraham’s construction of Jewish identity.
For Abraham, his followers were a corporation defined by their rejection of idolatry and
the performance of ritual. The rejection of idolatry separated Abraham from his tribally
continuous ancestors. Despite ethnic continuity, Abraham’s people were defined and
differentiated by performance. Chapter one concluded with the Venice Haggadah’s
description of Abraham’s iconoclasm and the creation of a new and unique religious
culture. For Abraham, the Jewish covenant with God is distinguished in both
confessional (rejection of idolatry) and corporeal (circumcision) terms. Following the

42
See Moore, 27-42.
116
innovations of Abraham and the formation of a unique Jewish people, the Venice
Haggadah continues the biblical narrative with the arrival of Joseph’s brothers in Egypt.
In the history of Jewish identity, the event is seminal. As the descendants of Jacob,
whose name is also used to describe the people of Israel in the Hebrew bible, Joseph and
his eleven brothers comprise the twelve tribes that encompass the future Israelite nation.
Jacob’s sons arrive in Egypt as refugees from famine in their native land of Canaan. In
Egypt, they encounter an unrecognizable Joseph, garbed as an Egyptian prince (Fig. 3.2).
After the revelation of Joseph’s true identity, the brothers declare that they are in Egypt
only to live as migrants, to search for pasture land for their flocks. The caption beneath
the image reads, “I Fratelli di Iosef che pellegrini, dicono de esser e non [tz]cittadini.”
43

The caption engages with a passage from the haggadah text that describes Jacob’s
migration to Egypt: “He [Jacob, i.e., Israel] went down to Egypt…and sojourned
(pellegrinò) there.”
44
The caption reflects and interprets a passage from the haggadah
text by recasting it in terms of contemporary political and social alienation, redressing
Jacob’s migration to Egypt as a temporary exile from Israel.
The image of a disguised Joseph also dramatizes the kinds of negotiations carried
out in Venetian courtrooms in cases such as the Righetto episode, and the idea of Joseph
successfully deceiving his brothers further resonates with Righetto’s case. Joseph seems
to present a biblical archetype for a social dilemma familiar to early modern Venetian
Jews. The Venice Haggadah reinterprets this idea as a statement of political alienation.
Aspects of Joseph’s transformation are purely sartorial. He is given a “signet ring, robes
of fine linen, and a gold chain” (Genesis 41:42). But Joseph’s transformation is not

43
“The brothers of Joseph arrive as travelers [refugees] seeking survival, not citizenship.”
44
E discese a Mitzraim forzato per detto di Iddio E pellegrinò là.
117
purely one of costume. Joseph’s rejection of his heritage is more forceful. Pharaoh
marries Joseph to the daughter of an Egyptian priest. The couple soon produces two
sons. Rather than associating his sons with his ancestral lineage, Joseph uses the
opportunity to forcefully reject his heritage.
45
The elder son Joseph names Manasseh,
whose name (the bible informs us) means “God has made me forget completely my
hardship and my parental home,” and the younger Ephraim, “God has made me fertile in
the land of my affliction.” The tension between ancestry and assimilation seems
irreconcilable for Joseph—and he settles firmly on becoming an Egyptian. Joseph’s
complex identity issues have aggravated rabbinic authorities for centuries, and the image
seems to exacerbate rather than resolve this ambiguity.
46
Has Joseph remained a
“pellegrino,” or become a “cittadino”? In this imagining, it is unclear if the brothers are
declaring their refugee status in direct opposition to Joseph’s princely status. If so, the
caption seems to censure Joseph for his assimilation. Simultaneously, by providing a
heroic biblical exemplar, the image normalizes the behavior of those like Joseph and
Righetto, who appear to assimilate to gain some small measure of social and economic
power. In the biblical narrative, Joseph ultimately rejoins his father and brothers, and his
sons are integrated into the tribal fabric of Israel. In this sense, Joseph is tempted by
assimilation and the potential it offers, but ultimately rejects it. Joseph serves as a
cautionary tale—or perhaps as a paradigm—for those who are tempted by assimilation,
conversion and its attendant physical comforts.

45
See the insightful analysis by Aaron Wildavsky, Assimilation Versus Separation:
Joseph the Administrator and the Politics of Religion in Biblical Israel (New Brunswick,
N.J: Transaction Books, 1993), 196.
46
For instance: Midrash Aggadah [ed. Buber] 48:8, claims that Joseph’s wife converted
to Judaism, and that they had a kettubah. Midrash ha-Gadol, Vayehi 48:8–9 [ed.
Margaliot], 820–21 argues that Joseph’s sons were circumcised.
118
The caption promotes the idea of Venetian Jews as immigrants and refugees, but
distinctly “not citizens.”
47
It is unclear whether the statement is intended as criticism of
the Venetian government’s alienating social policies, celebration of Jewish difference, or
simply a statement of fact. The image and caption provides at least one model of Jewish
difference, highlighting the status of Jews as both socially alienated, but also as a distinct
legal polity within Venice. This caption reflects a vocabulary of political difference that
also appears in early modern Venice to describe the Jewish community. The Venetian
Jurist Gaspar Lonigo described the Jewish community as, “Una Repubblica da ogn'altro
Dominio separate.”
48
Lonigo finds the separation of Jewish autonomy highly
problematic, and criticizes Jewish self-government for its lack of Venetian oversight.
49

Using the same vocabulary in his apologetic Discorso circa il stato de gl'Hebrei (1638),
the Rabbi Simone Luzzatto consistently refers to the Jewish community as “la natione
ebrea.”
50
Luzzatto is in the position of having to use this particular vocabulary in his

47
In the period, the term “cittadini” had specific connotations as a description for the
Venetian middling social class. But here it appears as a general alternative to foreigners.
On the meaning of cittadini, see Monika Schmitter, “’Virtuous Riches’: The Bricolage of
Cittadini Identities in Early-Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 57
(2004): 908-969 and Brian Pullan, “’Three Orders of Inhabitants’: Social Hierarchies in
the Republic of Venice,” in Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance
Europe, ed. Jeffery Denton, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 147-68.
48
David Malkiel, “The Tenuous Thread: A Venetian Lawyer's Apology for Jewish Self-
Government in the Seventeenth Century,” AJS Review 12 (1987), 225. The idea of
Jewish political separateness also has a long Jacob precedence, Jacob Katz, "A State
Within a State: The History of an Anti-Semitic Slogan," Proceedings of the Israel
Academy of Sciences and Humanities 4 (1971): 29-58.
49
See introduction, David Malkiel, A Separate Republic: The Mechanics and Dynamics
of Venetian Jewish Self-Government, 1607-1624 (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2009).
50
Simone Luzzatto, Discorso circa il stato de gl'Hebrei (Venice, 1638). On the
reception see, Benjamin Ravid, “’Contra Judaeos’ in Seventeenth-Century Italy: Two
Responses to the ‘Discorso’ of Simone Luzzatto by Melchiore Palontrotti and Giulio
Morosini,” AJS Review 7/8, (1982/1983): 301-351.
119
defense of Jewish self-government, submitting to the bureaucratic apparatus that
structured Venetian power relations.
These formal declarations of Jewish political distinction have broader
implications. Though the caption reflects contemporary political rhetoric, it
simultaneously aligns with notions of deliberate, self-imposed alienation. In his
sixteenth-century commentary on the haggadah Eliezer Nachman Foa insisted that the
ghettoized Jews “[s]hould not make for ourselves a ‘permanent lodging’ in this exile,
purchasing homes and fields and vineyards; we should remain strangers in the land, as if
each day we were about to return to our land.”
51
This idea is strikingly at odds with the
image of Joseph, unrecognizable in the garb and affect of an Egyptian prince. The notion
of remaining perpetually in exile closely reflects conceptions of living in expectation of
an impending messianic redemption, a pervasive theme in the Venice Haggadah, and the
subject of Chapter 2.
The concept of living deliberately as immigrants is pervasive in the Passover
narrative. Jacob complies with God’s commandment to leave Canaan for Egypt.
52
And
although the family declares its intentions purely to sojourn in the land, it is in Egypt, the
haggadah declares, that Israel “becomes a nation (l’goy).” The midrashic explanation for
this passage has typically emphasized the continuity of ritual and language during the
time of enslavement in Egypt. In the tenth- or eleventh-century midrashic work, the
Mekhilta De-Rabbi Ishmael, the author notes three factors that perpetuate Jewish culture
during the exile in Egypt: the names and genealogies assigned to the tribes, the Hebrew

51
Midrash Haggadah, 164, translated and cited in Robert Bonfil, “Change in Cultural
Patterns of Jewish Society in Crisis: The Case of Italian Jewry at the Close of the
Sixteenth Century,” Jewish History 3 (1988): 11-30.
52
Genesis 46:3-4.
120
language, and the injunction against idolatry.
53
All three are performed rituals. It is as if
only through living in close contact with another civilization, Israel is able to understand
its difference. The concept is a classic phenomenological conception of alterity and
otherness.
54

But in the Italian translation Leon Modena approaches the passage differently,
avoiding the political distinction of nationhood, and adopting a corporeal vocabulary,
preferring the term “gente” over “nazione.” Despite the abundant political vocabulary
available to him, Modena articulates the Italian translation, “E fu là a gente grande—ti
insegna che erano Israel segnalati la per gente grande e forte.”
55
The visual program
elaborates this concept. Although the Israelites declared their intention only to “sojourn”
in the land, they quickly multiply—literally producing bodies (Figure 3.3).
56

Reproduction emerges as a continuing motif in the visual program of the maggid. The
Venice Haggadah equates the creation of a nation with the production of Jewish bodies.
Modena could have emphasized performative criteria providing continuity with the
rituals that appear in the Abraham narrative. Instead he uses the visual program to
elaborate a narrative of corporeal reproduction and, eventually, suffering.
On Folio 7v, the motif of reproduction and fecundity continues, with the
haggadah text wrapping from one page to the next, “E molta come dice el verso, “A

53
See Jacob Lauterbach, Mekhilta De-Rabbi Ishmael: A Critical Edition on the Basis of
the Manuscripts and Early Editions with an English Translation, Introduction, and Notes
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2000), pp. 25-26.
54
Emmanuel Lévinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999), 97-110.
55
‘“And there he became a nation” meaning that the children of Israel were great and
mighty.”
56
Israel che crescevano sì in fretta, che a Mitzraim era strada stretta; Israel was growing
so quickly that the streets of Egypt were blocked.
121
milioni come il fiore del campo diedi te e moltiplicasti e te ingrandasti e venisti con
ornamenti le poppe erano pronte e il capello tuo fiorì e tu eri nudo e dinudato.”
57
The
text is a meditation on the virtues and corporeal capacity of the Israelite women. The
image at the top of the page represents Israelite children being born and nursed (Figure 3.
4). This image of abundance is paired with an image of the enslaved Israelites at work at
the foot of the page (Figure. 3.5).
58

The pairing is suggestive, since it presents a causal relationship between the
continuity and reproduction of Jewish ethnicity and their corporeal abjection. The
haggadah text presents the logic behind the enslavement of the Israelites, “Let us deal
shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they
may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground” (Exodus 1:10).
Almost the same logic was applied during the senate vote to expel of the Jews from
Venice in 1570. During the war with the Ottoman Empire, Venetian Jews were feared to
compose an Ottoman fifth column.
59
It was the Venetian hunt for Ottoman collaborators
that resulted in the prosecution of suspicious characters, such as Righetto. The fear of
ethnic solidarity over allegiance to the Republic, which cast particular scrutiny over the
loyalty of new Christians, was precisely the same as the logic that supported the
enslavement of the Israelites.
The image at the top of 7v consists of two visual passages in a single field: to the

57
And numerous, as it is said, “I have caused you to multiply like wild flowers in the
field. And you have increased and became great and adorned with many beauties. Your
breasts are fashioned and your hair is grown, yet you are naked and bare.”
58
Par’ò che doi città fa redificare, per tesori e per grani conservare.
59
Benjamin Ravid, “The Socioeconomic Background of the Expulsion and Readmission
of the Venetian Jews,” in eds. F. Malino and P. Albert Essays in Modern Jewish History:
A Tribute to Ben Halpern (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982): 42-25.
122
left an image of a man and woman beneath a fecund apple tree, and to the right an
exhausted woman simultaneously breastfeeding two infants. The images are united under
a single caption, “Le donne de Israel che partorivano a sei a sei e come erba fiorivano.”
60

The pairing of breastfeeding (or more broadly, milk) and ripe fruit is conventional in
early modern visual culture.
61
No such incident is described in the biblical narrative, but
one does feature in a lengthy Talmudic discourse on the fertility of the Israelites as the
source of their redemption from Egypt:
“R. Avira expounded, ‘It was as a reward to the righteous women who were in
that generation that the Israelites were redeemed from Egypt. When the women
conceived, they came to their houses, and, when the time to deliver had come,
they would go and give birth in the field under an apple tree, as it is said, ‘Under
the apple tree I brought you forth from your mother’s womb.’”
62

The Israelite women are credited with the redemption of the Israelites because rather than
risk losing their children to Pharoah’s midwives, they gave birth alone and unobtrusively.
The image is subversive in several ways, since it focuses attention on the unique labor of
the Israelite women. In Jewish legal theory, breastfeeding was described as a domestic
obligation that a woman owes to her husband.
63
Here, the scene takes place in a pastoral
setting, liberated from the demands of the household economy. The title page of the
Venice Haggadah notes that the visual program is intended to appeal to a wide and
diverse audience, including women. That the images seem to celebrate the contribution

60
The women of Israel were bearing [children] six fold, like grass growing.
61
See any number of examples in Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink Gold: Abundance
and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 83-
134.
62
BT, Tractate Sotah, 11b.
63
Gail Labovitz, “’These Are the Labors’: Constructions of the Woman Nursing Her
Child in the Mishnah and Tosefta,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies &
Gender Issues 3 (2000): 15-42.
123
of women to the liberation of Israel is appropriate for this project of inclusivity.
Breastfeeding is an outstanding contribution to the iconography of ethnicity that emerges
in the Venice Haggadah. Much of the discussion of Jewish difference arises here as a
response to circumcision, leaving the contribution to Jewish identity by women highly
ambiguous.
As part of this program of reader inclusivity, an interjection of images that
celebrates and documents the contribution of women in staging and supporting the
Exodus is significant. It also fits neatly into the haggadah’s dissertation on Jewish
corporeality. Early modern medical theories considered breast milk and blood part of a
continuous system of fluid exchange. Summarizing Galenic medicine, Eugenia Georges
writes, “A woman’s breasts served as organs of ‘transmutation’ that turned blood into
milk.”
64
Reflecting the Galenic theories that still held sway in early modern Italy, the
Talmud declares, “according to the view of R. Meir, menstrual blood decomposes and
turns into milk.”
65
Like blood, breast milk had the potential to transfer a variety of
personality traits and ethnic particularities.
66
In her study of Jewish family practices in
pre-modern Europe, Elisheva Baumgarten suggests that generally maternal breastfeeding

64
Eugenia Georges, Bodies of Knowledge: The Medicalization of Reproduction in Greece
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 148.
65
BT Niddah 9a: The discussion arises in the Talmud during a debate over why
menstruation ceases during nursing. For non-Jewish models of this concept, see Claude
Thomasset “The Nature of Woman,” A History of Women in the West, ed. Christiane
Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), Vol. 2, 54.
66
For instance, Vasari reports that Michelangelo once remarked, “Giorgio, What good I
have comes from the pure air of your native Arezzo, and also because I sucked in chisels
and hammers with my nurse's milk,” Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia
Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
415.
124
was preferred to using a wet nurse, and notes that there is a strong biblical exemplar for
this prescription.
67

The infant Moses is drawn from the water by the Pharoah’s daughter (Figure 3.6).
The image of the event is presented in a single frame with an image of Egyptian soldiers
flinging Israelite children into the Nile.
68
It is to protect her son from such a fate that
Yocheved, Moses’s mother, conceals her son in defiance of Pharoah’s order and
eventually places the infant in a basket and sends him down river, and unknowingly into
the hands of the Egyptian court. According to the narrative, Moses’s older sister Miriam
applies to be a caregiver for the infant and is employed by Pharoah’s daughter. The bible
reports that Miriam approaches the princess, and asks, “Shall I go and call you a nurse
from among the Hebrew women.”
69
The exchange has engendered interpretation because
Miriam’s query seems to be unprovoked by any events or dialogue. The rabbis provide
an interpretation that frame’s Miriam’s question, supplying a missing narrative that
resolves the non sequitur.
This [Miriam’s query] shows that they had circulated Moses among all the
Egyptian women, and he would not suck from any of them.
Said the Holy One, blessed be he, “Should the mouth that is destined to speak
with the Presence of God suck something that is unclean?”
That is in line with what is written, “Whom will he teach knowledge.” (Isaiah
28:9)
To whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he make tradition
accessible? “To them who are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the
breasts” (Isaiah, 28:9).
70

67
Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 133.
68
Moscè in un arca del fiume è gettato, e dalla figliola de Par’ò fori tirato; Moses is
launched into the river in an arc, and is pulled from it by Pharaoh’s daughter.
69
Exodus 2:7
70
BT Sotah, 12b.
125
This exegesis uses Miriam’s query to argue that the infant Moses refused to accept milk
from Egyptian nursemaids because he instinctively understood its impurity. In the
biblical text, Miriam is soon sent to retrieve an Israelite nursemaid. Conveniently,
Miriam locates Yocheved and employs her to serve as Moses’s nursemaid. In this way,
Yocheved is able to continue nursing her son, protecting Moses from the consumption of
“unclean” Egyptian blood. Despite living in the Egyptian palace, Moses remains by
blood, an Israelite, remaining free of taint or even suspicion.
Regardless of the seemingly unequivocal prohibition against non-Jewish milk in
the Talmudic interpretation of the Exodus narrative, evidence of Jewish households
employing Christian nursemaids in early modern Europe (and even the Talmudic period)
is abundant.
71
This rhetoric of purity should be taken as prescriptive rather than
reflective of any lived reality. Nevertheless, the infantile preference for maternal milk
also emphasizes the intuitive connection between mother and child in the biblical text.
The infant Moses is willing to risk his life to insist on his mother’s milk. This connection
between infant and mother, exemplified in the Moses-Yocheved narrative, makes the
neighboring image of infanticide all the more emotionally intense for the Venice
Haggadah’s readers. The preceding meditation on familial devotion is designed to be
disrupted entirely by the infanticide image, inviting grief for the children who, unlike
Moses, were destroyed by Pharaoh. This juxtaposition of maternal devotion and
infanticide comprises precisely the kind of affective reaction provoked throughout the
Venice Haggadah.

71
Baumgarten also admits that the existence of Christian wet nurses working in Jewish
homes was widespread, despite several injunctions against the practice, see Mothers and
Children, 136.
126
On the earlier Folio 7v, the Venice Haggadah presented a causal relationship
between fecundity at the head of the page, and abjection at its foot. On the following
page, the relationship is reversed, with abjection at the head of the page, and cessation of
fecundity at the bottom (figs. 3.7-8).
72
The lower marginal image depicts husband and
wife sleeping in separate beds. The image is not the result of early modern prudery. The
caption adds a much needed explanation for the scene, suggesting that Israelite couples
practiced abstinence to prevent the birth and death of more children, “Marito e moglie
ogni un sol nelle piume, per non gettar li figli nati al fiume.”
73
The reproductive capacity
of the Israelite women, celebrated previously as the cause for Israelite redemption, here
stalls and eventually reverses. The biblical text that is explicated across the two pages is
Deuteronomy 26:6-7: “The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us; they
imposed heavy labor upon us…We cried to Adonai, the Lord of our Fathers and Adonai
heard our plea and saw our plight (onyenu), our misery and oppression.” The haggadah
text explains that the passage from Deuteronomy references a practice of deliberate
celibacy, “’and saw our plight’—this [means] the cessation of family life.” The textual
key is the haggadah’s interpretation of the term “plight” (onyenu), which can also double
as a synonym for sexual abstinence.
74
Together, the two folios present a four-image
program that charts a dramatic decline from the prolific production of Jewish bodies to
their destruction. The images compose a tragic prologue to the visual climax of the
Venice Haggadah’s dissertation on Jewish bodies.

72
La molta afflizion molesta e stenti, che in Mitzraim avean con gran tormenti; The many
afflictions, suffering, and hardships brought great torments upon the Egyptians.
73
Husband and wife, each in their own bed, to prevent the throwing of children into the
river.
74
See Tabory, JPS Commentary, 92, n. 22
127
The most striking and controversial contribution to the narrative of Jewish
corporeality represents Pharaoh, infected with leprosy, bathing in the blood of Israelite
children, who are ritually slaughtered at the lip of his tub (Figure 3.9). The episode bears
a remarkable similarity to an account that describes the fourth-century Roman emperor
Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.
75
Like Pharaoh, Constantine was infected with
leprosy. His pagan physicians recommended bathing in the blood of children to cure the
disease. Against the advice of his advisers, Constantine immerses himself in the waters
of baptism instead of blood, and he is miraculously healed.
76
The Pharaoh episode, as
described in a number of medieval Jewish sources is an interesting engagement with the
Constantine legend. David Malkiel has aptly traces the textual origins for the Pharaoh
legend, which are thematically suggested in the biblical narrative, but substantially
expanded in rabbinic commentaries.
77
The appearance of the story can be traced to at
least the thirteenth century, although references indicate that it originates much earlier.
The thirteenth-century Midrash ha-Gadol describes the incident:
Pharaoh had three advisers. When he contracted leprosy, he asked the physicians
what would heal him. Balaam advised him to slaughter the Jews and bathe in their

75
The story of Constantine dates to significantly after his life, and appears most
prominently in Jacopo da Voragine’s (1229-1298) Golden Legend in association with the
life of St. Silvester, Bishop of Rome during the age of Constantine. See Jacopo da
Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), Vol. 1, 64.
76
On the origins of the Constantine legend, see David Biale, Blood and Belief: The
Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California
Press), 76-77. For its representation in the visual arts, see Paolo Liverani, “Saint Peter’s,
Leo the Great, and the Leprosy of Constantine,” Papers of the British School at Rome 76
(2008): 155-172.
77
David Malkiel, “Infanticide in Passover Iconography,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 85-99. For his sources, Malkiel relies heavily on Louis
Ginzberg’s opus, Legends of the Jews, 5 Vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society,
1910-1948).
128
blood in order to be healed. Job was silent, implying agreement. Jethro heard and
fled.
78

This episode is further explicated in the Sefer ha-Yashar, a popular medieval text first
printed in Naples in 1552 and later reprinted in Venice.
79

When God struck Pharaoh with disease, he asked his scholars and magicians to
heal him. They said that he would be cured if he put the blood of little children on
the diseased area. Pharaoh accepted this advice, and sent his attendants to Goshen,
to the Israelites, to take their little children. The attendants went off, and took the
Israelites' children from their mothers' bosoms by force. They brought them to
Pharaoh each day, one at a time, and the physicians slaughtered them and applied
the blood to the diseased area. They did this every day, until the number of
children slaughtered by Pharaoh reached 375. God did not heed the Egyptian
king's physicians, and the disease grew stronger. Pharaoh suffered this illness ten
years.
80

The caption that accompanies the image, presents the narrative somewhat differently.
Indeed, the caption informs us that the blood is miraculously transformed into water,
rendering it inert, “Par’ò si lava con sangue per la lepra guarire, per pena la’acqua si
converte in sangue e lo fa languire.”
81
The image inverts the redemptive conversionary

78
Midrash ha-Gadol, ed. David Zvi Hoffmann, (Berlin, 1914), p. 20. Cited in Louis
Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, Vol. II, p. 251. There is a literary association in Exodus
exegesis regarding curative contact with Jewish bodies. According to one midrash,
Pharoah’s daughter is afflicted with leprosy when she bathes in the Nile. When she
touches Moses, she is immediately cured of the disease (Midrash, Rabbah: Exodus
(1983), 20.). On this motif, Sarit Shalev-Eyni “Purity and Impurity: The Naked Woman
Bathing in Jewish and Christian Art,” in Between Judaism and Christianity: Art
Historical Essays in Honor of Elisheva (Elisabeth) Revel-Neher, ed. Katrin Kogman-
Appel and Mati Meyer (Leiden: Brill, 2009): 191-214.
79
In Leon Modena’s, Ari Nohem, he criticized the printers of the 1625 Venice edition of
the Sefer ha-Yashar for misidentifying it as a lost biblical text, rather than a medieval
midrash. See Yaacob Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish
Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 68.
80
Sefer ha-Yashar, p. 217. See the classic, recently reissued translation, M.M. Noah,
Sefer ha-Yashar: the Book of Yashar (New York: Kessinger Publishing Company, 2007).
81
Pharaoh washes himself with blood to heal leprosy, but as a punishment, it is converted
to water, and he continues to suffer.
129
climax of the Constantine legend, degrading the transformative power of baptism in the
process.
Perhaps more than any other image in the Venice Haggadah, the image of
exsanguination is intended to promote an affective response. For all the context provided
by the haggadah text, it seems likely that upon viewing the images of infanticide, the first
recourse would not be to access a store knowledge of medieval texts, but to feel revulsion
at the images. Significantly, there is no precedent for this type of imagery in Jewish
visual culture. This was not an audience desensitized to violence by viewing images of
the Massacre of the Innocents, or meditating upon images of the broken bodies of saints.
Jews were not steeped in Christian visual culture, for the simple reason that they were
often barred from accessing the spaces in which that art was visible.
82
For this reason,
comparative study of the possible Christian sources for these images is of little use for
this investigation. Methodologically, identifying the comparative source material can
offer few insights into the interpretive practices of early modern Jews. It is only essential
to recognize that the relative visual innocence of the readers must have emphasized the
violence of the image.
What is striking is that in designing this cycle of images, Modena seeks to
accentuate the suffering of children by placing these images in a context of abundance,
reproduction and maternal bliss. The juxtaposition is deliberately dissonant. The
suffering of children is situated in a deeply emotionally intense context. But as explored
in the previous chapter, the Venice Haggadah implicates not just the emotions and
intellect, but the total body in a phenomenologically resonant reading experience. This

82
Rare exceptions existed. Leon Modena claimed to attend church to hear particularly
forceful and demonstrative orators.
130
material provides another opportunity to observe this practice. Apple imagery abounds in
Passover commentary. It has already appeared here in an image of the Israelite women
giving birth and nursing under an apple tree. Apples are also eaten on Passover chopped
and combined into a mixture with nuts and wine (charoset). Tractate Pesahim, the
volume of the Talmud concerned with Passover rituals, explains the appearance of apples
in the Passover Seder.
83
Rabbi Levi explains that apples are eaten to remember the deeds
of the Israelite women who gave birth under the apple tree. Elaborating, Rabbi Yohanan
suggests that the apples are chopped to resemble the mortar used by the Israelites in their
labors. Reconciling the two explanations, Abbaye argues that the sweetness of the apples
must be made acrid by the nuts and wine to remember the pains experienced beneath the
apple tree. The texture of the apples must also be altered to resemble the mortar. Eating
the charoset offers a multilayered corporeal mnemonic, based on both taste and texture,
and emphasized by the juxtaposition of acrid and sweet flavors. The pairing of
ingredients in the charoset parallels the juxtaposition of joyous and sorrowful images.
Again, text, image and body coalesce in an immersive reading experience.
By situating the images of infanticide within a narrative of idealized family life and
an investigation of Jewish bodies, the visual program emphasizes, rather than mitigates,
the horror of the broken bodies of children.
84
In the accompanying haggadah text, it is
not the actions of the Egyptians that alerts God to the necessity for escape from Egypt,

83
BT Pesahim, 116a
84
Diana Bullen Presciutti notes a similar juxtaposition in images from a Roman
foundling hospital. See Diana Bullen Presciutti, “Dead Infants, Cruel Mothers, and
Heroic Popes: The Visual Rhetoric of Foundling Care at the Hospital of Santo Spirito,
Rome,” Renaissance Quarterly 64 (2011): 752-799. Presciutti writes, “The upside-down
position of the child underscores the ways in which the situation has gone horribly awry,
creating a vivid contrast with the image of idealized birth and child-tending depicted in
the bedchamber,” (766).
131
but the Israelites’ response. God does not see the actions of the Egyptians, but hears the
wails of the Israelites, “E intese Iddio il gemito loro e si raccordò Iddio del patto suo con
Avraham con Itzchak, con Iaacov.”
85
What God witnesses is not the event, but the
response to it. In this way, the haggadah text models a response to the images, even if the
readers’ wails are only a faint echo of their prototype. It is no surprise that it is at this
point that the narrative of corporeality ends, the punishment of the Egyptians begins, and
the redemption of the Israelites follows.
For a tragedy long distant in the biblical past, the images of infanticide, particularly
positioned against images of fecundity, seem gratuitously spectacular, particularly since
the story of Pharaoh bathing in blood is not referenced in the biblical text. In order to
approach these images, it is necessary to return to the interpretive practices of early
modern Jews described previously: the haggadah was engaged as a contemporary source
that offered insights into the lives of its readers and described their present situation. In
particular, I will examine the infanticide images in light of Jewish-Christian debates over
the spiritual efficacy of baptism versus circumcision and the controversies surrounding
these rituals, including forced baptism and the blood libel. These crises, debates, and
controversies form a circle of blood and water in which these images are enmeshed.

Circumcision, Baptism and Forced Conversion

85
“And God heard their cries, and remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob.”

132
Circumcision and baptism were competing rituals at the frontline of a battle for
souls. The Church, intent on accelerating the apocalypse, believed that converting the
Jews was necessary for the return of Christ, and baptism was the universal signifier of
Jewish conversion to Christianity. For Jews, meanwhile, circumcision was a potent
signifier of cultural identity, an antidote to assimilation, and a marker of a unique
covenant with God.
86
Each tradition posited that its rituals offered life, whether eternal
life in Christ or life in the covenant of Abraham. Simultaneously, Christians conceived
of circumcision as a violent and bloody ritual, perpetrated on innocent Christian children,
while Jews experienced forced and coerced baptisms as a spiritual and physical assault.
While this crisis was not new, it was renewed in early modern Italy with vigor.
Forced or coerced baptism was increasingly common and figured prominently in many of
the debates about the corporate status of the Jewish community and its place in Counter
Reformation Italy. Modern scholars have submitted a number of hypotheses to account
for the institution of the Italian ghettoes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most
convincingly, Robert Bonfil explains that the “the chief purpose of every attitude taken
with regard to the Jews was that of converting them to Christianity.”
87
This necessity of

86
Spinoza acknowledged that circumcision was also the reason for the hatred of the Jews,
“They have incurred universal hatred by cutting themselves off completely from all other
peoples,” Benedict Spinoza, The Political Works: The Tractatus Theologico-politicus
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 63; for a critical and transhistorical approach to this
issue, see Sander Gilman, “Decircumcision: The First Aesthetic Surgery,” Modern
Judaism 13 (1997): 201-210.
87
Bonfil, Jewish Life, 25. For changing Papal attitudes towards the Jews throughout the
early modern period, see Solomon Grayzel, “The Papal Bull ‘Sicut Judeis,’” in Essential
Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict, ed. Jeremy Cohen, (New York: New
York University Press, 1991), 231-259.
133
converting the Jews is implicit in the Cum Nimus Absurdum (1555), the papal bull that
established the Roman ghetto.
88

The ultimate objective of the ghetto, then, was the conversion of the Jews, and
“bearing witness to the truth of the Christian faith” consisted of converting Jews to
Christianity through the sacrament of baptism. Because the Church believed that
converting the Jews would hasten the return of Christ, this effort was invested with
tremendous importance.
89
To facilitate the rapid conversion of the Jews, and on the
advice of Ignatius Loyola, the church established the Casa dei Catecumeni, first in Rome
and eventually throughout Italy, reaching Venice by 1575. While no study has fully
examined the material consequences of the conversionary pressure placed on the Jews, it
is evident that the institution of the ghetto coupled with the Casa dei Catecumeni
dramatically impacted the Jewish community.
90

88
“It is profoundly absurd and intolerable that the Jews, who are bound by their guilt to
perpetual servitude, should show themselves ungrateful toward Christians; and, with the
pretext that Christian piety welcomes them by permitting them to dwell among
Christians, they repay this favor with scorn, attempting to dominate the very people
whose servants they should be...Considering that the Church tolerates Jews in order that
they may bear witness to the truth of the Christian faith...they must show themselves to
be the servants of Christians who are the true free men in Jesus Christ and God,”
translated in Bonfil, Jewish Life, 67.
89
John Edwards, “The Friars and the Jews: Messianism in Spain and Italy Circa 1500,”
Friars and the Jews in the Middle Ages, eds. Susan E. Myers and Steven J. McMichael,
(Leiden: Brill, 2004), 273-299.
90
Kenneth R. Stow, Catholic Thought, xxxiii-xxxiv. The devastation of the
conversionary agenda can be quantified. There are several Vatican references to the
success of the conversionary programs. On November 18, 1556, reflecting the need to
provide for the upkeep of converts, Paul IV wrote that he had come to recognize this
need, ‘Considering that the number of catechumens in our Fair City each day increases
more and more’ (See the bull ‘Cum sicut acceptimus’ (18 Nov. 1556), Copie delle Bolle,
Filze, 121, Fond. Pia Casa dei Catechumeni e neofiti, Archivio del Vicariato, Rome,
translated in Stow, Catholic Thought, 219. And on November 29, 1566, Pius V wrote
that the physical facilities for housing converts had to be expanded. For having labored
assiduously: “To bring an exceeding number of them [Jews] to the faith of Christ, our
134
In the visual program of the Venice Haggadah, Jewish bodies are destroyed
through immersion in water, and Jewish bodies are liberated by passing hermetically
through water, touching none of it (Figure 3.10). As we have seen, typology loomed
especially large in reading and interpreting the haggadah. One of the key passages for
describing the function of these typologies is provided by Isaac Abarbanel.
We would rather toil for Egypt than die in this wilderness of the nations,
with its forced conversions and expulsions, where so many of us come to a
bitter end, be it by sword, hunger, or captivity, or worst of all,
abandonment of our faith.
91

The passage describes an acute crisis: the forced baptisms and conversions that plagued
the Jewish community. Medieval Jews were routinely forcibly baptized during the
crusades, and in the fifteenth century whole towns in Spain and Portugal were baptized at
sword point.
92
The tolerance traditionally assigned to early modern Italy has largely
deflected historical investigation of these incidents within the peninsula. But recent
scholarship has reinvigorated interest in the institutions and ideologies that supported
forced baptism. Benjamin Ravid declares, “One of the major threats to the peace and
tranquility of the Jewish communities of pre-emancipation Europe, indeed perhaps the

labors, with God’s kindness, have not all been in vain. A sufficiently large number of
both sexes...have accepted the Christian faith, and very many others, following their
example, have brought the total number of converts to an extremely large figure,” see the
bull, ‘Sacrosanctae Catholicae ecclesiae (29 Nov. 1556) Copie delle Bolle, Filze, 121,
Fond. Pia Casa dei Catechumeni e neofiti, Archivio del Vicariato, Rome, trans. Stow,
Catholic Thought, 220.
91
Abarbanel Haggadah, 34.
92
Cecil Roth, “Forced Baptism” in Encyclopedia Judaica, Volume 4, (Jerusalem: Keter,
1972), 183-7. On the importance of baptism in Christian communities during this period
see Louis Haas, The Renaissance Man and his Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood
in Florence 1300- 1600 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 63-88, and Richard
Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
135
most serious after physical attacks and expulsions, was that of forced baptism.”
93

Ravid’s study demonstrates that Venice was not an exception to the pervasive practice of
forced baptism during the early modern period.
He notes that the issue was bound up in the notoriously difficult relations between
Venetian civic and ecclesiastical authority during the ghetto era. When Jewish
community leaders attempted to retrieve Jewish children who had been forcibly baptized,
the result was an almost Kafkaesque cycle of bureaucratic wrangling, with jurisdiction
being passed from the Avogadori del Comun, to the Signoria, to the Ducal Counsellors to
the Savi del Collegio. In general, secular authorities were unwilling to engage in conflict
with ecclesiastical authorities over incidents of forced baptism. Similarly, emphasizing
the institutional foundations for conversion, E. Natalie Rothman has dramatically revised
our understanding of conversion in early modern Venice, arguing that conversion was an
attempt to “subject the populace to parish-based forms of social discipline and
supervision.”
94
What emerges in these studies is just how intensely forced baptism
becomes a site of institutional contestation, composing a triangle between the Jewish
community, secular authority and ecclesiastical institutions.
95

Regardless of the protests, forced and coerced baptisms proliferated in the
Venetian ghetto. The assault on Jewish children, who were seen as prime candidates for

93
Benjamin Ravid, "The Forced Baptism of Jewish Minors in Early Modern Venice,"
Italia 13-15 (2001): 259-301.
94
E. Natalie Rothman , “Between Venice and Istanbul: Trans-Imperial Subjects and
Cultural Mediation in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” (PhD diss., University of
Michigan, 2006), 156.
95
E. Natalie Rothman, “Becoming Venetian: Conversion and Transformation in the
Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Historical Review 21 (2006): 39-
75. For Rome, see Marina Caffiero, Forced Baptisms: Histories of Jews, Christians, and
Converts in Papal Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
136
conversion, was particularly egregious. Brian Pullan evocatively writes, “The
Catecumeni exhaled not only a smell of the monastery, but also a whiff of the prison-
house, and it was at its most zealous where the souls of adolescents or children were at
stake.”
96
In direct contrast to these practices, the Livornina charter issued by Grand Duke
Ferdinand of Tuscany in 1593 specifically articulated a ban against forced baptism,
indeed baptism of any minor without parental consent.
97
One can well understand why
the ban would be attractive to Jews considering the move to the Medici port: Rothman
estimates that in the first half of the seventeenth century, nearly forty percent of baptisms
at the Casa dei Catecumeni in Venice were under the age of sixteen.
98

Italian Jews recognized the dangers of this new initiative and regarded
conversionary pressure as a threat to their very existence. Isaac Abarbanel described
conversion as a “bitter end” equivalent to death, and his opinion was commonly held.
99

Consider this account of the conversion of the Roman merchant Solomone Corcos in
1585:
May the Heavens be amazed. Who can explain what pushed them to do
such a deed…may the name of this evil Solomone be blotted out…O
Lord, take your vengeance on those who bow down to vanity and spittle;
avenge yourself especially on the servants of Yeshu [Jesus] who steal the
souls of the children of Abraham.
100

96
Pullan, Inquisition, p. 275.
97
Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno,
and Cross Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2009), p. 78.
98
Rothman, Between Venice and Istanbul, n. 41.
99
This trope appears elsewhere in Jewish martyrologies, polemics, and scriptural
exegesis. For instance, see Abarbanel Haggadah, n. 71.
100
Cited in Kenneth R. Stow, “A Tale of Uncertainties: Converts in the Roman Ghetto,”
Shlomo Simonsohn Jubillee Volume (Tel Aviv, 1993), p. 260.
137
Despite the somewhat melodramatic figurative conceit, the claim that Jesus steals the
souls of Jewish children resembles many of the accusations made by Christians against
Jews in the same period.
101

And as the situation of Righetto reminds us, issues such as the sincerity of
baptism are exceptionally hard to determine. What is known, however, is that throughout
the seventeenth century, Jewish authorities attempted multiple times to negotiate a clause
banning forced baptism into the Jewish charter with the Republic. It is evident that early
modern Venetian Jews feared forced baptism, and were also concerned more broadly
with the assimilative connotations of baptism and conversion. In 1586, for instance, the
Venetian Jew Alessandro Ferro, agreed to convert to Christianity and deliver his children
to the Catecumeni. Upon hearing the news, his wife and family begged to have the
children returned, only to be denied. Alessandro, who apparently had second thoughts,
was imprisoned after an escape attempt, and the children were eventually baptized. After
his conversion Alessandro disappeared, abandoning his children to their ambiguous fate
as new Christians.
102
Stakes were high in this battle for souls, and in 1595, the prior of
the Catecumeni in Venice was dismissed from his position when he failed to prevent two
Jewish children escaping from the institution.
103

Abductions were also common. A Christian porter abducted the infant Leon
Modena when his family arrived in Venice, although family members almost
immediately retrieved him.
104
Not all children were so fortunate. In 1604, the four

101
Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2004), 25-44.
102
Stow, Catholic Thought, 173-174.
103
I.R.E.C. Not. D, fol. 46, 47 March 29, 13 April 1595, cited in Pullan, Inquisition, 276.
104
Modena, Haye Yehuda, 82
138
children of the chief Rabbi of Rome were abducted to the Catecumeni where they were
forcibly baptized and converted to Christianity.
105
The danger in these situations was
greatly exacerbated by the fact that even an illegal conversion was held to be binding and
apostasy could be punished by death. Occasionally, Jews sought justice from civil
authorities. After one Jewish child was abducted and forcibly baptized in Venice in
1615, her mother rushed to the Casa dei Catecumeni to retrieve the child. Denied access,
the mother eventually appealed to the civil authorities. Even so enlightened a figure as
the eminent Venetian jurist Paolo Sarpi ruled, “It is a more pious action, and one both
favorable and respectful towards the holy faith and religion, not to leave the child, now
that she has been baptized, in the hands of her mother, who will bring her up in the error
of Judaism.”
106
As Sarpi’s comments indicate, the Jewish children who vanished into the
Casa dei Catecumeni were rarely seen again by their families. In many ways baptism
represented a spiritual and literal death for these Jewish children and their families. The
immersion of children in water was an image all too familiar to early modern Jews, and
one with particularly tragic associations. When early modern Jews read the haggadah,
and positioned their Christian neighbors in the role of the oppressive Egyptians, the
meaning of these images was illuminated. Within these interpretive practices, the
infanticide images, which literally refer to the murder of the Israelite children, redress
baptism as a cruel and pernicious ritual, drawing attention to its literal and spiritual
hazards.

105
Cecil Roth, “Forced Baptisms: A Contribution to the History of Jewish Persecution,”
Jewish Quarterly Review 27 (1936): 117-136.
106
I.R.E.C., Not. F, fol. 90v and 91, 11 and 14 May 1615; cited in Stow, 172, and Pullan,
278. Calimani also has a more detailed account on the incident, 124-5.
139
Blood, like water, was invested with tremendous symbolic power.
107
In the
Passover narrative, there are several references to blood that also find visual corollaries in
the Venice Haggadah. Two plagues are centrally concerned with blood, including the
first plague, when the waters of the Nile are transformed into blood, as well as the final
plague when the Israelites smeared blood on the doorposts of their homes. Each of these
textual references directly corresponds to images in the Venice Haggadah.
108
Of the
numerous images that represent blood, however, one image is unique. It has no direct
textual referent in the haggadah, and, as mentioned previously, no foundation in the
biblical narrative. This is the image of Pharaoh bathing in the blood of Jewish children,
which prominently occupies the lower marginal zone of folio 9v. The text above this
image is a commentary on Deuteronomy 26:6, “And God took us out of Egypt with a
strong hand and with an outstretched arm, and with great terror, and with signs and with
wonders.” On folio 18, the haggadah text somewhat vaguely explains that the “wonders”
referenced in the biblical passage “means the blood.” In his commentary, Isaac
Abarbanel admits that the text is ambiguous and questions to which instance of “blood”
the passage refers: the plague of blood, the blood of the paschal lamb, or some other
incident?
109
In the Venice Haggadah, the image of infanticide guides the viewer to a
specific interpretation of the text—the “blood” refers to the blood of the children
represented in the image. If we accept the contention that the marginal image should be

107
David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and
Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) and Carol Walker Bynum,
Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and
Beyond, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
108
For the first plague, see Exodus 7:14-25, for the tenth plague see Exodus 11:1-12:36.
Both plagues are represented in images on Folio 19 of the Venice Haggadah.
109
Abarbanel Haggadah, 76-77.
140
read as a commentary on the central text, it is necessary to examine how the image
orients the text toward a particular interpretive scheme: a meditation on the blood of
Jewish children.
Shedding the blood of children had real and imagined antecedents in Jewish
cultural life. In the sixteenth century, the cabalist Isaac Luria would argue that the
passage from Ezekiel should be expanded to include the preceding verse. The only
extended reference to the blood of children in the Venice Haggadah is a commentary on
Ezekiel 16:6. The passage reads, “I passed over you and saw you downtrodden in your
blood and I said to you, ‘In your blood, live!’” There is a strong relationship between the
image of Pharaoh bathing in infant blood and the passage from Ezekiel. Rather than an
obscure reference, the Ezekiel quotation is best known as the central prayer in the brit
milah, the Jewish ritual of circumcision. Leon Modena described the ritual in his
seventeenth-century Riti Ebraici:

In the meantime, the circumciser is going on in his business, with his
mouth he sucks the blood, which abundantly flows from the wound, doing
this two or three times, and so spits it into a bowl of wine…Then he takes
a bowl of wine in his hand, and blessing it, he says another benediction
also upon the child, and so gives him his name, that the father will have
him called by; adding those words out of Ezekiel, Chapter 16, Verse 6: I
said to you, when you were in your blood, live: and having said so, he
takes of the wine, into which he had spit the blood of the infant, he
sprinkles the face of the child.
110

In the account of Pharaoh’s leprosy, the crux of the narrative is Pharaoh’s belief in the
life-giving properties of Jewish blood, an idea also reinforced in the passage from
Ezekiel, and in the circumcision ceremony. The symbolism in the ritual is
unambiguous—the child’s blood is sprinkled on his face as he is given his name and

110
Leone Modena, Riti Ebraici, 206.
141
enters the covenant of Abraham.
111
The notion that blood offers life enjoys a long
tradition in Jewish mysticism, which held that the blood of circumcision was a literal key
to eternal life in heaven.
112
The life-giving properties of Jewish blood understood by
Pharaoh are remarkably affirmed here. The image, a representation of gruesome
violence, emphasizes the spiritual efficacy of Jewish blood through a salutary allegory.
This meditation on the spiritual power of circumcision is not misplaced in the
Passover Haggadah. On the contrary it is perfectly appropriate. One Jewish polemic
suggests that the blood of the paschal lamb and the blood of circumcision are dually
responsibly for the redemption of the Israelites from Egypt. In providing evidence for
this conclusion, the anonymous polemicist invokes the passage from Ezekiel mentioned
above.
113
Quite similarly, a Midrash on the Passover narrative records that during the
enslavement in Egypt, many of the Israelites refused circumcision. But when Moses
prepared the paschal sacrifice and explained its significance to the Israelites, they adopted
the customs of Abraham and submitted to circumcision.
114
One can well imagine that
these accounts resonated powerfully with ghettoized Jews in an era when assimilation
again posed a very real threat to their existence. The answer to Abarbanel’s question
(“which blood?”) is illuminated through imagery; the blood described in the haggadah

111
For an account of the development of the circumcision ceremony and its significance,
see Leonard Glick, Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern
America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
112
Elliot R. Wolfson, “Circumcision and the Divine Name: A Study in the Transmission
of Esoteric Doctrine,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 78 (1987): 77-112.
113
“What God meant rather, was that he would judge the Jews innocent when he would
see the three dabs of blood of Abraham’s circumcision, of the binding of Isaac when
Abraham was willing to slaughter his son, and of the paschal lamb. Indeed, it is these
three types of blood that are also referred to in the verse, ‘And I saw you polluted in your
blood”—one—‘and I said to you, In your blood, live!’—two—‘and I said to you, In your
blood, live!’—three.” Nizzahon Yashan, Ezekiel 16:6
114
Louis Ginzberg, Jewish Legends, 364.
142
text and represented in the image of Pharoah is the blood of circumcision. Here, text and
image bind the covenantal blood of circumcision to redemption from Egypt. Translated
into the language of the early modern period, this indicates that circumcision remained a
symbol of oppositional power within Jewish culture.
The image also reflects a debate between Jews and Christians over the relative
efficacy of their respective ritual practices. It is not a coincidence that Christian
polemicists contested the passage from Ezekiel, arguing that it referred not to
circumcision, but to baptism. Directly following the passage from Ezekiel used in the
circumcision ritual is another passage, this one used by Christians to suggest that baptism
is more efficacious for salvation of the soul. The passage, Ezekiel 16:9, lends itself well
to the Christian reading, “Then I washed you with water and washed away your blood
from you and anointed you with oil.”
115
For their part, Jews were perfectly aware of this
argument, and sought to undermine it in their own polemics. Regarding this passage, the
Sefer ha-Nizzahon Yashan argues that the blood of circumcision supersedes the anointing
mentioned in Ezekiel 16:9. The polemic concludes, “So you see that blood is better than
water, as it is written, ‘Live in your blood.’ Now, what is the blood of a man in which he
lives? It must be the blood of circumcision.”
116
This debate is also expressed in the
infanticide image, which represents Pharoah’s submission to the power of Jewish ritual,
seemingly admitting the superiority of Jewish blood over the waters of Christian baptism.
As Pharoah immerses himself in a tub full of the blood of Jewish children, the image

115
Ezekiel, 16:9. For a discussion of the role of these passages in the debate of
circumcision during this period, see Glick, Marked in Your Flesh, 85-115.
116
Nizzahon Yashan, 64.
143
presents a cruel and perverted parody of baptism predicated on Jewish suffering—a
response not unsurprising given Jewish attitudes towards baptism in this period.
This meditation on the power of circumcision presents certain problems.
Circumcision is a ritual performed exclusively on male Jewish children, and Christians
raised this seeming inequality in the debate over the superiority of baptism. The
Nizzahon Yashan absorbs this argument, noting that “the heretics [Christians] ask: We
baptize both males and females and in that way we accept our faith, but in your case only
men and not women can be circumcised.” The argument is an immediately compelling
one if indeed Jewish ritual spiritually alienates female children. The polemic continues,
however, by responding that, “women are accepted because they watch themselves and
carefully observe the prohibitions connected with menstrual blood.”
117
According to this
passage, menstrual blood becomes equivalent to the blood of circumcision—a belief not
unique to this document.
118
Like circumcision, female rites related to menstruation,
including immersion in the mikveh, were highly sacralized, and provided an opportunity
for cultural continuity and community bonding.
119
The significance of menstrual blood
in the early modern period further complements the Talmudic notion that women are

117
Nizzahon Yashan, 224.
118
David Biale describes the blood of circumcision and menstrual blood as possessing a
sense of “equality.” See Biale, Blood and Belief, 103-4. For an overview of the laws
governing female ritual immersion, see Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law: The
Essential Texts, Their History, and Their Relevance for Today (New York: Schocken,
1995), 40.
119
The social historian Elliott Horowitz describes the mikveh as a female space separate
from the gaze and power of men, Horowitz, “Families and Their Fortunes: The Jews of
Early Modern Italy,” in Biale, Cultures, 576-80; along similar lines, Kenneth Stow
describes menstruation as a site of female legal recourse in matters of divorce and
remarriage, Stow, Theater of Acculturation, 78-9.
144
virtually protected in childhood by the covenantal blood of their fathers and husbands.
120

This suggests that rather than being particular to males, the potent blood of circumcision
was possessed by Jewish women as well as men.
Despite such arguments, Christians found forceful ways to dispute the power of
Jewish blood, indeed to subvert it, and the haggadah imagery engages with these issues as
well. The bloody image of Pharoah resonates with another prominent crisis in Jewish
life: the blood libel, the claim that Jews collected and used Christian blood in secret
rituals, and particularly in the creation of Passover matzah. As if to anticipate this very
allegation, the title page of the Venice Haggadah presents the entire cycle of matzah
making, from milling the flower to baking (3.11). This imagery is particularly important
here, because it is so easy to dismiss the blood libel as a geographically and temporally
isolated phenomenon. The highly specific, nearly pedantic, imagery on the title page
indicates that the blood libel was still an event that required debunking. The blood libel
was intrinsically linked to the practice of circumcision, and in the popular Christian
imagination, circumcision was emphatically associated with the suffering of Christ.
121

The death of Simon of Trent in 1475, and the accusation of ritual murder directed against
the Jews of Trent that followed, reintroduced the blood libel to Renaissance Europe.
122

120
Leon Modena devotes an entire chapter to menstruation in his Riti Ebraici, pp. 174-
180. Writing of the passage from the Nizzahon Yashan, Berger notes that this statement
complements the Talmudic notion that women are protected through the covenant of
circumcision by proxy of their husbands and fathers, as in BT Berakhot, 16a, see Berger,
Jewish Christian Debate, 339-40.
121
For accounts of Christian approaches to circumcision, see Thomas Izbicki “Leonardo
Dati’s Sermon on the Circumcision,” Friars and the Jews in the Middle Ages, eds. Susan
E. Myers and Steven J. McMichael, (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 191-8.
122
The claims that Jews used Christian blood for ritual purposes date back to at least the
twelfth century, but the incident in Trent, and the dramatic trial that followed
overshadowed previous episodes, partly because of the printing press.
145
Simon of Trent was murdered during the celebration of Passover in 1475, and the popular
(though unfounded) explanation among the Christian community, exacerbated by the
rhetoric of Franciscan preachers, held that the Jews of Trent had used Simon’s blood in
arcane rituals. Although the Jewish population of Trent was executed by 1478, the cult
of Blessed Simon continued to grow and gain adherents. By the late sixteenth century,
Simon had such a devoted following that his cult was recognized by Sixtus V in 1582.
123

Such was the popularity and zealousness of the cult that the Vatican did not renounce it
until the 1960s.

The ritual murder of Simon of Trent was imagined as a circumcision ceremony.
The image of Simon, iconically printed in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), depicts Jews
suspending the small body of Simon while directing a scalpel towards the boy’s genitals,
a creative imagining of Jewish circumcision (Figure 3.12).
124
As the cult of Simon was
perpetuated through such images, Passover was transformed into a time of particular
crisis for the Jewish community, when claims of ritual murder were renewed with
vigor.
125
But the personality of Simon of Trent is ultimately less important that the
typology he fulfilled, a model based on the corporeal suffering of Christ.
126
In pamphlets

123
For a history of Simon of Trent and the trial that followed, see Ronnie Ph-chia Hsia.
Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
124
Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Alleged Ritual Murder of Simon of Trent and its Literary
Repurcussions,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 59 (1993):
103-135. For more on the specific visual legacy of Simon of Trent, see “Searching for
Simon in Trent and Beyond” in Dana Katz, The Jew in Art of the Italian Renaissance
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2008), 119-157.
125
Anna Esposito, “The Ritual Murder Stereotype in the Trials of Trent and in the Cult of
the ‘Blessed’ Simon,” in Ritual Murder: Legend in European History, ed. Susanna
Buttaroni, (Krakow: Association for Cultural Initiatives, 2003), 131-158.
126
See the extraordinary analysis of the interdependence of the typologies of Simon of
Trent and the “classic” Jew in Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary:
146
published throughout the early modern period, Giovanni Mattia Tiberino, a magistrate
who participated in the Trent trial likened Simon’s wounds to the circumcision of
Christ.
127
Tiberino even mentions that Simon was suspended like Jesus on the cross, an
image that is realized in the Nuremburg Chronicle woodcut and other images from the
period. The circumcision of Simon of Trent was a wound no Christian had endured since
Christ himself, and a necessary mark for Simon’s hagiography.
128

Later in the fifteenth century, blood libel accusations more literally referenced
circumcision. North of Italy in Tyrnau, a blood libel trial concluded that Jews needed the
blood of Christians to “alleviate the wound of circumcision.”
129
And in Endingen, a
similar confession was extracted.
130
The trial records report that the Jewish prisoner first
claimed that Christian blood had valuable medicinal properties, but under further
interrogation admitted that “‘the Jews require Christian blood for their circumcisions.’”
Finally, the interrogator asked the prisoner, “Since you Jews all know so well that
Christian blood is so salutary and good, why don’t you permit your blood also to be made

Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2003), 41-
44.
127
Tiberino’s popular pamphlet was reprinted well into the sixteenth century, see Hsia,
Trent, 53-6.
128
It is worth noting that the circumcision of Christ presents a paradox: Christians
accepted that Jesus was circumcised, indeed celebrated the festival of circumcision, but
“resisted the physical evidence of circumcision” in their images of Jesus. These
contradictions are highlighted, although not adequately, in Leo Steinberg, Sexuality of
Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1995), particularly “Resisting the Physical Evidence of Circumcision,” 165-7.
129
Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew
and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society,
2002), 149-150.
130
These interrogations occurred under extreme duress; generally the prisoners were
tortured and interrogators suggested the answers they wanted to hear. Reading these
documents is a process that Carlo Ginzburg described as “reading behind the ears of the
inquisitors,” Carlo Ginzburg, “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” Clues, Myths, and the
Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1992), 156-165.
147
salutary, and let yourself be baptized?”’
131
According to this confession, which we must
read as a document of Christian rather than Jewish convictions, Christian blood gains its
medicinal properties through the sacrament of baptism.
132

The text of the trial records engages remarkably with the message communicated
in the imagery of the Venice Haggadah, and reveals how the haggadah’s visual program
reformulates Christian belief. By positioning Jewish blood as medicinally potent, the
haggadah image inverts the power of Christian blood and substitutes Jewish blood.
Indeed, the infanticide image enters into direct dialogue with the imagery of the
Nuremberg Chronicle and similar texts. While the myth of ritual murder maintained that
Jews required Christian blood because it was more salutary, the visual program of the
Venice Haggadah suggests precisely the opposite—that through the ritual of circumcision
Jewish blood is powerfully endowed, at least symbolically, with salutary properties,
articulated both in image and in text: “In your blood, live.”
Here it is crucial to recall the interpretive practices that informed the reading of
the haggadah, which utilized the text and imagery as a source for illuminating
contemporary life. In the allegory presented by the image in question, Pharoah is not
simply understood as an ancient oppressor, but as a character with real seventeenth-

131
The confession was canonized in the Endinger Judenspiel, a dramatic production that
proved to be one of the most popular of the seventeenth century see R. Po-Chia Hsia, The
Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany, (New Haven: Yale
University, 1988), 29-42 and Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews, 150.
132
Alternately, David Biale argues that early modern Christians conceived of communion
as a source of their blood’s desirability, “Since the blood of God is to be found in the
bodies of Christians who have taken communion, Jews might want to steal such blood for
themselves,” Biale, Blood and Belief, 83. See also, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner,
“’Pharaoh’s Bloodbath’: Medieval European Jewish Thoughts about Leprosy Disease and
Blood Therapy”, Jewish Blood: Reality and Metaphor in Jewish History, Religion, and
Culture, ed. Mitchell Bryan Hart (London: Routledge, 2009), 99-115.
148
century corollaries. As the king of the Egyptians, or the Christians according to this
interpretive scheme, perhaps these corollaries were royal, imperial or even papal ones.
This interpretation reveals the polemical power of the Venice Haggadah’s visual
program. This image exemplifies the properties of “oppositional resilience” and allows
the marginal Jewish image to challenge Christian hegemony.

149

Chapter 4

Moses and the Golem:
Necromancy and the Politics of Unbelief

In 1579 the Inquisition accused Antonio Saldanha, a lapsed Observant Franciscan
living in Venice, of secretly converting to Judaism. Despite his suspicious and highly
suggestive relationships with a number of Venetian Jews, the charges were disproved
definitively, for Saldanha was not circumcised. Unable to convict Saldanha of judaizing,
the Inquisition turned to the next charge against him: necromancy. According to trial
transcripts, Saldanha was accused of contacting spirits in a scheme to locate buried
treasure. He and several of his compatriots were ultimately convicted of these charges.
1

This intersection of alleged Jewish heresy and the occult was not remarkable or unique.
In the seventeenth century, nearly half of the cases tried by the Venetian Inquisition
involved allegations of witchcraft or sorcery, often amended to charges of religious
heterodoxy.
2
Yet practicing necromancy was a matter of degree. While it was
undoubtedly a small minority of Jews, and Venetians in general, who consulted spirits for
financial gain, virtually all early modern Venetians—Jews among them—practiced some
form of popular magic, providing ample pretense for legal prosecution.
From the perspective of early modern legal history, such exercises were not
unprecedented. For instance, sodomy trials, even where sodomy was ubiquitous, were

1
Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550-1670 (London:
I.B.Tauris, 1998), 104-105
2
Pullan, Inquisition, 9-10.
150
notoriously used as pretense for targeting political enemies.
3
These legal maneuvers
perhaps partially account for a sensitivity towards unorthodox occult behaviors in the
ghetto during the seventeenth century, leading Leon Modena to declare that, “[The Jews]
account it a very great sin to give any credit to, or have any faith in any kind of divination
whatsoever, or to Astrology, Geomancy, Chiromancy, or to any fortune-tellers, or the
like.”
4
The Venice Haggadah features an image of necromancers in a patently polemical
context (Figure 4.1). The text above the image is the shefokh, a conventional excerpt
from the Psalms typically included in the haggadah in association with messianic
imagery, “Pour out Your fury on the nations that do not know You, upon the kingdoms
that do not invoke Your name, for they have devoured Jacob and desolated his home.”
5

The caption beneath the image, composed by Modena, reads, “Consumato sia le regni
ignoranti, Che servono a demonii a credono a negromanti.”
6

The image itself is extraordinary. To my knowledge it is innovative and unique
both in the history of Jewish visual culture in general, and haggadah imagery in
particular. In previous editions of both printed and manuscript haggadahs, the shefokh

3
Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in
Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Rocke demonstrates that
sodomy was selectively prosecuted, typically for political reasons. A similar system is
described in Cynthia Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of
Castlehaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Herrup’s essential thesis is that
Castlehaven’s sodomy trial was an expedient excuse to punish the earl’s political and
social transgressions.
4
Leon Modena, Historia de' riti hebraici, vita ed osservanze de gl'Hebrei di questi tempi
(London, 1650), 223.
5
Psalms 79:6, all references to texts in the Haggadah refer to the standard JPS
Commentary on the Haggadah, ed. Joseph Tabory and David Stern, (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society of America, 2008), 53-55. In his description of the Passover liturgy
in his Riti Hebraici, a text often more interesting for its omissions, Modena describes
each of the Psalms, but omits the shefokh. He clearly was anxious about the implications
of this prayer for his non-Jewish readers.
6
“Let the foolish nations perish, who serve devils and believe in necromancy.”
151
page was related to messianic imagery, injecting contemporary polemic into the historical
conception of Jewish redemption. The image in the Venice Haggadah is a radical
departure from these previous examples. Here are two groups of figures, clustered to the
left and right of an unremarkable landscape. On the left, three figures hold long slender
rods, strongly reminiscent of the Mosaic rod that accompanies Moses throughout the
Venice Haggadah. Significantly, one of the men holds a skull under his arm. A fourth
figure, nude, with lumpy irregular flesh, hovers ambiguously among the three
necromancers. The group at right presents a contrast; here are four black figures in
Ottoman costume: two beat large kettledrums, while a crowned figure and an attendant
stand together at the far right. At the fore, a group of smaller figures, apparently children
or pygmies, dance around a blazing fire.
The caption makes quite clear that these figures are necromancers, although the
image suggests that necromancers are a diverse group. Partially this chapter is an
iconographic investigation, identifying possible sources for this innovative imagery. But
more significantly, I hope to interrogate the association between necromancy and the
polemically charged text printed above the image. The relationship is hardly transparent,
and clarifying why necromancy is identified as a site for Jewish animosity requires
further investigation—particularly when Moses’ sorcery is emphasized elsewhere in the
haggadah’s visual program. The image presents other provocative aspects.
Representations of race in the early modern period are fraught with historiographic
complexities, and this situation is no exception. This image is evidently an unflattering
representation of black Ottomans, indeed it resonates visually with imagined cannibalism
and barbarity in accounts of the new world. But these figures are not singled out for their
152
belief in necromancy; the group at left is almost certainly intended to represent Jews. By
extension, the Jews represented here share whatever negative associations are implied in
this image of black Ottomans.
The association between Jews and necromancy and Jews and the Ottoman Empire
is made literal in the Edict of Justice, the Inquisition’s formal call for informants.
According to the Roman Cardinal Francesco Albizzi, a seventeenth-century proponent of
expanding the Inquisition’s jurisdiction in Venice, the edict should call for information
on “Mohammedans, Saracens, Jews, or other Infidels, or those in any way apostate from
the faith, or those who, in any way have invoked or invoke, either explicitly, or tacitly,
the Devil, or have given or give him honor, or involve themselves in whatever magical
experiment of Necromancy, of Incantation, and other superstitious actions.”
7
By the
seventeenth century, the Inquisition had initiated a new era of vigilance over suspect
practices within Italy’s borders.
8
For the Jews, this was felt poignantly in Venice in the
wake of Lepanto, when animosity towards the Jewish community was amplified due to
allegations of Jewish-Ottoman complicity and an increased sensitivity to heterodox
belief. The situation of the Jewish community in this context departs from the current
historiography of the post-Lepanto period.
9
While the general scholarly consensus is that

7
Francesco Albizzi, Risposta all’historia della sacra Inquisitione (Rome, 1678), 333-
335, cited in Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550-1650 (London:
Blackwell, 1989), 37. See also Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
8
Carlo Ginzburg’s work has generally focused on the extreme vigilance of the
Inquisitional during this time within Italy’s borders. The classic study for witchcraft is
the case of the benandanti in Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian
Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
9
On the generally self-congratulatory sentiment in Venice as well as the dissenting
voices, see Benjamin Paul, “’And the Moon has started to bleed’: Apocalypticism and
Religious Reform in Venetian Art at the Time of the Battle of Lepanto,” The "Turk" and
153
fear of the Ottoman Empire drastically tapered after Lepanto, the years following the
conclusion of the war was marked by an escalating series of anti-Jewish policies.
10
The
particular danger for Jews in this period was an assumed intimacy both between Jews and
the occult, and Jews and the Ottoman Empire. The imagery in the Venice haggadah
seems to be a rejection of both of these associations.

Moses the Sorcerer
Much of the drama in the Passover narrative revolves around a series of exchanges
between Moses, his brother Aaron, and the Egyptian court. Appearing before Pharaoh
and his courtiers, Moses and Aaron perform a series of supernatural acts. For the first,
Aaron’s rod is transformed into a snake. When the rods of Pharaoh’s sorcerers also
transform into snakes, Aaron’s snake promptly swallows them. Pharaoh is skeptical, his
heart “hardened” against the Israelites, and he refuses to acknowledge the evidence for
God’s greatness. The plagues follow, concluding with Pharaoh’s temporary (and quickly
rescinded) release of the Israelites. The rods of Moses and Aaron are absolutely central in
this drama, marking the intervention of God’s will in the phenomenal world. God and
Moses seem to understand that the Israelites and the Egyptians both will need visual,
tactile evidence for the existence of this invisible God. The rod functions perfectly as a
prop: it is emphatically visual and perfect in its theatricality. God’s remarks to Moses,

Islam in the Western Eye, 1450-1750: Visual Imagery Before Orientalism, ed. James
Harper (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 67-94.
10
It was not until after the successful conclusion of the war that the Jews were targeted
for expulsion. Benjamin Ravid, “The Socioenomic Background of the Expulsion and
Readmission of the Venetian Jews, 1571-1573” in Essays in Modern Jewish History: A
Tribute to Ben Halpern, ed. Frances Malino and Phyllis Cohen Albert (East Brunswick,
N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1982), 27-55.
154
like stage directions, are designed for maximum dramatic effect. But the rod also forces
Moses to inhabit the role of an Egyptian sorcerer, adopting the pagan vocabulary of
miraculous divine intervention to convince Pharoah and the hesitant Israelites of God’s
greatness.
In the Venice Haggadah, God’s donation of the rod to Moses is dramatized in an
historiated initial in the middle of folio 9v (Figure 4.2). Here, God’s arm extends down
from the heavens grasping the rod, while Moses waits to receive it. However dramatic,
the image interprets or metaphorizes rather than reflects the biblical text. In the third
chapter of Exodus Moses’s rod appears as a divine transmutation of his shepherd’s staff,
which he carries in the land of Midian. The object is not divinely wrought. But while
charging Moses with the responsibility of liberating the Israelites, God seems to invest
the rod with supernatural power, allowing it to “perform” miracles. The rod is central in
displaying to Moses, the Israelites, and eventually to the Egyptians, God’s supernatural
power. God offers these spectacular, supernatural acts in response to Moses’ suggestion
that the Israelites will be skeptical of a God they cannot see. Moses asks, “What if they
do not believe me and do not listen to me, but say: The Lord did not appear to you?”
(Exodus 4:1). God proceeds to impress Moses by transforming the rod into a snake, an
early demonstration of the feet he will perform in Pharaoh’s court. God charges Moses,
“Take with you this rod, with which you shall perform the signs” (Exodus 4:17). The
chapter closes with the Israelites convinced by God’s signs.
The demand for visible signs originates with Moses, who accurately predicts the
Israelite need for a visual interface with the non-visual world after many generations
living among the idolatrous Egyptians. After their liberation from Egypt, this need does
155
not simply evaporate. On the contrary, it plagues the skeptical Israelites in the desert as
they continue to demand evidence for God’s presence from a beleaguered Moses. When
Moses and his miraculous rod do not respond with an adequate sign, the Israelites
manufacture one. Although it has no implicit power, the rod becomes the visual
substantiation of God’s will. It transforms an invisible, unknowable God, into an
accessible personality whose acts and deeds are identifiable in the visual, sensorial world.
The rod, like the Venice Haggadah itself, is a phenomenological locus, which mediates
between visible and invisible worlds.
11

God repeatedly refers to the rod itself as a “sign” (Num. 20:8).
12
The haggadah text
reflects this vocabulary, “And with signs—this refers to the rod. As it is said, ‘And you
shall take this rod in your hand, wherewith you shall do the signs.” As if to eschew the
possibility for a divine, miracle working object, the text carefully explains that the rod is
simply his pre-existing shepherd’s crook. The early modern exegete Isaac Abarbanel
writes,
“How can signs refer to the staff when the staff was merely the vehicle for bringing
about the signs, not a sign in itself, as is clear from the supporting verse?” “When
the Haggadah says that signs means the staff, it does not mean the staff itself but
rather the five plagues which Moses brought on through motioning with his staff—
blood, frogs, lice, hail, and locusts.”
13

Abarbanel’s commentary potentially attributes to Moses a supernatural agency, or at least

11
The rod appears multiple times in this capacity throughout the Exodus narrative,
including Exodus 7:17: Aaron’s rod turns the waters of Egypt to blood; Exodus 8:1: The
Plague of frogs; Exodus 8:12: Plague of lice; Exodus 9:23- Moses’s rod creates hail;
Exodus 10:13: Moses’s rod summons the locusts; Exodus14:16: Moses’ rod splits the red
Sea; Exodus 17: Moses summons water from stone; 17:1-7; Exodus 17:9: Rod used in
battle with the Amalekites.
12
William H. Propp, “The Rod of Aaron and the Sin of Moses,” Journal of Biblical
Literature, 107 (1988): 19-26.
13
Abarbanel Haggadah, 77-78.
156
identifies Moses as the agent of God’s supernatural acts on earth. Indeed, each of these
plagues is accompanied by an admonition by God for Moses or Aaron to raise their rod
and initiate the miracle. The demonstration of supernatural power in the Passover
narrative is problematic for an early modern Jewish culture that denied the existence of
post-biblical miracles (or at least for whom miracles were far less frequent than for
contemporary Christians). Maimonides, for instance, denied the existence of miracles for
most of his academic career, before admitting that God planned some of the apparent
miracles in the Exodus narrative during the initial creation of the world.
14
This is the
very purpose of the rod; it is not a miraculous relic, rather it serves as a divine prosthesis.
Rather than performing miracles himself, Moses only appears to. This distinction
separates Moses from the sorcerers of Pharaoh’s court.
Throughout the Exodus narrative, the rod is also meant to signify evidence in a
juridical sense. While the Israelites are impressed by God’s demonstration of power,
Pharaoh remains unconvinced. Pharaoh’s skepticism has been problematic in the biblical
exegetical tradition, because God suggests throughout the narrative that he has
“hardened” Pharaoh’s heart, apparently encouraging his skepticism.
15
Regardless
Pharaoh refuses to believe in God’s divine power, instead identifying each of Moses and
Aarons’s miracles as provincial parlor tricks. Pharaoh is unable to believe the evidence
before him, or more accurately, does not agree that the signs are evidence of an

14
For instance, that God designed the water in such a way that they were “programmed”
to split at the very moment Moses raised his staff, although his staff itself had no
incluence on the waters. See, Y. Tzvi Langerman, “Maimonides and Miracles: The
Growth of a (Dis)Belief,” Jewish History 18 (2004): 147-172.
15
David M. Gunn “The ‘Hardening of Pharaoh's Heart’: Plot, Character and Theology in
Exodus 1-14,” Art and Meaning: Rhetoric in Biblical Literature, ed. David J. A. Clines,
Alan J. Hauser, David M. Gunn (Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
Press, 1982): 72-96.
157
omnipotent and knowable God with whom Moses communicates.
Moses’s identity as a sorcerer is certainly not eschewed in the Venice Haggadah.
Along with the initial that illustrates the donation of the rod, Moses appears at the bottom
margin of alternating pages, holding his rod in one hand, and the rounded tablets of the
Ten Commandments in the other (Figure 4.3). Moses’s intervention is even more
pronounced in some images. The plague of boils, not one of those that involved God’s
commandment to wield the rod, is illustrated with Moses and Aaron standing with
outstretched arms as the boils fly from their fingertips, through the air and attach to the
Egyptian victims (Figure 4.4 ). Most striking of all, however, is a large image that
illustrates demons performing torments (not all easily identifiable as plagues) upon the
Egyptian landscape (Figure 4.5). The caption reads, “Demonii deputati sopra li
elementi, Per dare a Mitzraim pene e tormenti.”
16
The demons are also described in the
body of the haggadah text as “una comagnia de angeli cattivi.” The image seems to
imply that although Moses gestures with his rod to visually represent the inception of the
plagues, it is invisible demons under God’s direction that physically administer the
torments. The image draws emphatic attention to the otherwise brief and marginal
mention of the involvement of demons (or evil angels) in delivering the plagues to the
Egyptians in the biblical text.
The rod, in the narrative, parallels the very confrontation that the haggadah
proposes: the tension between faith in God and the phenomenology of material
experience. The rod is selected for its signal theatricality, and for its potential dialogue
with the Egyptian rhetoric of sorcery and early modern notions of magic. But the very

16
“Demons command the elements to torment and make miserable the Egyptians.”
158
signs designed to speak to Pharoah, are the very signs that are rejected as insufficient
evidence. Moses’ identity as a sorcerer is complex. Recently, Alexander Nagel has
argued that in representing Moses, Christian Renaissance artists and their theological
advisers were forced to confront a particular “controversy.” Although Moses’ magical
activities facilitate the redemption of the Israelites, they are also strongly indicative of his
Egyptian heritage.
17
Indeed, a number of early modern accounts locate Moses as the
transmitter of ancient Egyptian esoteric knowledge from Egypt to the west through
kabbalah.
18
Along with his other roles, Moses becomes the father of early modern
hermeticism. According to Nagel, Christian Renaissance artists approached
representations of Moses with this ambivalence in mind. Even while demonstrating how
the bible’s greatest prophet acts a sorcerer, the Venice Haggadah takes a polemical stance
against a number of magical practices. In describing Moses as a sorcerer and associating
him with pagan practices, the book seems to occupy a position of skepticism. Instead of
diluting or deflecting Moses’s role as a sorcerer, the Venice Haggadah situates it in a
critical context, associating it with suspect practices such as necromancy.

17
Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011). Nagel is particularly interested in Andrea Riccio’s Moses/Zeuz
Ammon of 1513, which represents Moses in the act of summoning water by striking a
rock.
18
Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Occasionally, Miriam is also folded into
this trajectory. Various hermetical sources describe an amorphous “Miriam the Hebrew,”
or “Miriam the Jewess” as an important transmitter of alchemical knowledge. See
Raphael Patai, Jewish Alchemists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 60-80;
81-94.
159
Necromancy and the Jews
The address of these occult practices in 1609 is appropriate given the persistent
tendency of the Venetian Inquisition to associate Jews with heterodox occult practices.
Perverse conceptions of Jewish worship were rooted in the mythological origins of
European witchcraft.
19
Indeed, necromancy as a broad set of practices was thought to rely
on a mythological corpus of pseudo-Solomonic texts preserved and transmitted by the
Jews.
20
This belief informs the identity of the figures on the left in the Venice Haggadah
image. Details in the image echo specific passages in Jewish texts; the skull appears in a
Talmudic description of Rabbinic necromancy, which Modena evidently provided as
source material to the anonymous draughtsman:
He who inquires of the dead — all the same are the one who raises up the
dead by divining and the one who makes inquiry of a skull.
What is the difference between one who makes inquiry of a skull and one
who raises up the dead by witchcraft?
For the one who raises up the dead by witchcraft — the ghost does not
come up in his normal way and does not come up on the Sabbath.
But the one who makes inquiry of a skull — the spirit comes up in the
normal way and comes up on the Sabbath.
It goes up — but where to? Lo, the skull is lying before him.
Rather say, It answers in the normal way and it answers on the Sabbath.
21

This passage occurs in Sanhedrin, the juridical tract of the Babylonian Talmud, in a
discussion of the appropriate punishment for witchcraft, and on the distinctions between
various magical practices. The detail of prognostication using a skull resonates with the
Venice Haggadah image.

19
Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), 33-88 and Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The
Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1983).
20
Martin, Witchcraft, 44-47
21
BT Sanhedrin, 65b.
160
Necromancy appears much earlier in Jewish texts, most prominently, during
Saul’s consultation with the witch of Endor in 1 Samuel 28:3-25. In the biblical text, the
witch’s necromancy is a specific practice, an ability to communicate with the deceased
judge Samuel, who seems to appear in ghostly form. Saul’s understanding of
necromancy is clear. He commands his men to “Seek me a woman that divines by a
ghost.” (1 Samuel, 28:7). If the Venice Haggadah caption refers specifically to this form
of biblical “necromancy,” then it seems the figure appearing behind the magicians is
some kind of revivified corpse or ghostly apparition. But if the caption refers more
broadly to “necromancy” as a set of magical practices, then it considerably broadens the
potential interpretations available.
The resolution to this imagery is neither in the bible nor haggadah text, but in the
Talmud, which also supplies the source for the image of prophecy using a skull. In a
passage adjacent to this description of prognostication, is the first appearance of a golem,
or artificial man: “Rabbah created a man. He sent it to R. Zira, who talked with him, but
he did not answer him. He said to him, “You have come by means of enchantment, go
back to the dust you came from.”
22
The Talmudic description of the golem is brief but
eloquent. In it, the rabbis indicate that the golem was an artificial being, created by man
from the soil and imbued with life through enchantment. But the golem is also incapable
of speech, unable to respond to Rabbi Zira’s conversation, and apparently susceptible to
destruction through rabbinic speech. The golem legend has produced great interest, both
in scholarship and in popular culture. In his study of pre-modern golem literature, Moshe
Idel argues that the history of this genre is essentially one of both scientific and spiritual

22
BT Sanhedrin, fol. 65b, p. 345.
161
exceptionalism. Because the rabbis were the only mortals capable of recreating life, they
were superior to pagans and gentiles who labored endlessly to produce artificial life.
23

Prescriptions for creating a golem could be highly detailed. In an anonymous
thirteenth century commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah, the author describes an elaborate
process consisting of sculpting the golem from soil, inscriptions, verbal incantations,
circumambulation and dance.
24
Meanwhile, golem recipes provided by medieval
kabbalists such as Eleazar of Worms and Abraham Abulafia focused on the specific
combinations of magical letters and permutations of the divine name.
25
In these
formulations, the golem is created from mud, and animated by using mystical
combinations of letters. Yohanan Alemanno argues that the golem can be produced
through purely linguistic-magical means, and does not require any substance or material
at all.
26
This trope of the animating powers of Hebrew letters is already familiar from
Chapter 1, in which the Zohar provides an account of anthropomorphic letters
collaborating with God to produce the phenomenal world.
27
The concept is paralleled
in the Sefer Yetzirah, “He hath formed, weighed, transmuted, composed, and created
with these twenty-two letters every living being, and every soul yet uncreated.”
28
The
creation of the golem was a non-divine microcosm of divine creation. Moshe Idel
explains,

23
Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial
Anthropoid (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).
24
Gershom Scholem, “The Idea of the Golem,” in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism,
trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1965), 158-204.
25
Idel, Golem, 20-21.
26
Idel, Golem, 170-175.
27
Haqdamat Sefer ha-Zohar, ed. and trans. by Daniel C. Matt (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004), Vol. 1, p. 11.
28
Sefer Yetzirah, 2:2.
162
“By creating an anthropoid, the Jewish master is not only able to display his
creative forces, but may attain the experience of the creative moment of God, who
also has created man in a similar way to that found in the recipes used by the
mystics and magicians. Paraphrasing a statement of Glanvill, we may describe the
Golem practices as an attempt of man to know God by the art He uses in order to
create man.”
29

By the sixteenth century, the account had greatly informed the narrative of the creation of
artificial life. The kabbalist Yehudah Albotini (d. 1519) wrote a manual for a variety of
mystical practices. On the use of mystical combinations of letters, Albotini wrote:
All the creatures were made from the twenty-two letters and their combinations
and their permutations and as fire by nature warms, and water cools so do the
letters by their nature create all sort of creatures…the other prophets and pious
men in each generation, by means of the combination and permutation of letters
and their movement, used to perform miracles and wonders and turn about the
order of Creation, such as we find it explained in our Talmud that Rava created a
man and sent it to R. Zera.
30

Abraham Yagel was interested in whether or not the creation of the golem was a form of
technology or magic. This parallels the discussions occurring in alchemical circles at
precisely the same time. Yagel’s premise was that Kabbalah was science, not
superstition, and the creation of the anthropoid represented its greatest potential
achievement. One can well imagine what Modena would have thought about such a
claim, and why disbelieving such a claim was so important. Yagel writes:
“And even if he creates … a man, it is permitted as the scholars told us. For a
man will be able to do this through the wisdom of nature; he only will be unable
to give him the spirit of life in his nostrils…as Giulio Camillo wrote in his book;
also the wise man, the author of De Occulta Philosophia: and Roger Bacon, along
with other scholars, both recent and ancient, who offer instruction among
themselves and their disciples to people so that they can change their initial nature

29
Idel, Artificial Anthropoid, xxvii.
30
Yehudah Albotini, Sefer Sullam ha’-Aliyah, 165. Gershom Scholem, Kiriat Sefer, 22
(1945), p. 165, translated in Idel, The Mystical Experience, p. 37.
163
and produce things and new creatures, removing and replacing forms according to
the composition of the different kinds of substances.”
31

Ruderman argues, “Creating life was seen not as a perversion of nature but as a pure and
holy act in which man could confirm that he was created in the divine image and
endowed with divine creative powers.”
32
Many of the sources that Yagel references here
fall into the genre of natural magic.
33

Despite Yagel’s assurance that creating a man from dust is accessing the spirit of
divine creativity, William Newman has noted that there are profound differences between
the indigenous Jewish tradition of the golem and the creation of an artificial being in the
western alchemical and hermetical tradition. The golem is not an attempt to create
human life by chemical means, but an act of “religious magic,” while the quest for the
homunculus is “natural magic.”
34
As Newman demonstrates, the alchemical
homunculus, reinvigorated by Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, is a “wet” process of
combining fluids (particularly menstrual blood and semen) and in vitro fertilization of a
fertile cow. The alchemical homunculus is a result of medical technology. Further,
Newman adds, the novelty of the Paracelsian homunculus is that it is a wonderful,
superhuman creature, endowed with prophetic abilities. The golem is not endowed with

31
David Ruderman, The Perfect Kinship: Kabbalah, Magic and Science in the Cultural
Universe of a Jewish Physician (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 102-113.
32
Ruderman, Perfect Kinship, 112.
33
On Camillo, see Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1941), Vol. 6, 431.
34
William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 183.
164
intelligence, or even flesh. He cannot speak, he cannot reason. If the creation reflects the
likeness of the creator, then the golem paints a grotesque portrait of its maker.
35

There are some tantalizing indications why Modena might have selected these
two Talmudic passages for criticism here in the patently polemical context of this image.
A constant theme in Modena’s skepticism is the Talmudic logic that sanctioned some
supernatural practices while forbidding others. Modena’s own student, Joseph
Delmedigo evidently took seriously the creation of the golem, celebrating the virtues of
the ancient sages who were able to create artificial men.
36
For his part, Modena refused
to believe that his former student was sincere in his defense of these practices, arguing
that Delmedigo’s work was intended to be ironic.
37
Nevertheless, Delmedigo’s work was
not outside the canon of early modern Jewish thought.
38
That this arcane project—the
creation of the golem—is specifically criticized in the Venice Haggadah, indicates a
public, rhetorical disavowal of such work, however well accepted it was among some
early modern Jewish intellectuals.
In his Kol Sakhal (Voice of a Fool), Leon Modena’s 1622 critique of Rabbinic
culture, he cites several of these source passage as evidence of a streak of irrationality in
the Talmud, and in the minds of its authors.
39
In the section on “Sorcerers and diviners

35
See William R. Newman, “The Homunculus and His Forbears: Wonders of Art and
Nature,” in Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, ed.
Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 321-346.
36
Joseph Delmedigo, Mazref la-Hokhmah (Warsaw, 1890), 47-48.
37
On Modena’s reception of Delmedigo’s work, see Isaac Barzilay, Yosef Shlomo
Delmedigo (Yashar of Candia): His Life, Work and Times, (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 280-91.
38
See David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern
Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 139
39
Modena believed in the incompatibility of mysticism and modern scientific thought,
essentially rejecting the kabbalah. For Modena’s approach to rationalism versus
mysticism, see Ruderman, Jewish Thought, 118-152. Ruderman discusses Modena’s
165
and magicians,” Modena asks, “How can anyone of understanding who reads the Gemara
not be amazed and astounded upon seeing that its words ‘are filled from the East and are’
filled with soothsaying ‘like the Philistines.’”
40
Modena was particularly disturbed by the
pedantic classification of witchcraft, and found the preoccupation with these practices a
kind of tacit endorsement. Mocking the parsed definitions in the Talmud, Modena
writes, “The necromancer and the soothsayer and one who consults the dead practice
foolish things performed with the skull and bones of the dead in a place of burial, until
they imagine that they have some existence and reality.”
41
The wording closely reflects
the caption written in Judeo-Italian by Modena in the Venice Haggadah, which criticizes
not just the practices of necromancy, but those who believe in them.
42

Despite Modena’s desire to establish distance between contemporary Venetian
Jews and suspect occult practices, there is no figure that more clearly evidences an
involvement in such practices than Modena himself. In his writing on Leon Modena and
the Kol Sakhal, the scholar Ellis Rivkin evocatively described the space of Modena’s
ghetto this way, “The very air was filled with paradoxes, contradictions, and conflicting
ideologies.”
43
Indeed, Modena’s autobiography is littered with references to a wide
variety of occult practices, several of them illegal in Venice. For instance, Modena

displeasure with his former student Joseph Delmedigo who graduated from Padua only to
become a Sabbatean, and his composition of the Ari Nohem, his critique of kabbalah.
40
Kol Sakhal, 146. For all references to Kol Sakhal, see the critical edition of the
document in Talya Fishman, Shaking the Pillars of Exile: 'Voice of a Fool,' an Early
Modern Jewish Critique of Rabbinic Culture (Stanford University Press, 1997).
41
Kol Sakhal, 146-7
42
In some ways this legalism precisely reflects the legal vocabulary and practice of the
Venetian Inquisition, see Jonathan Seitz, ‘‘The Root is Hidden and the Material
Uncertain’’: The Challenges of Prosecuting Witchcraft in Early Modern Venice,”
Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009): 102–33.
43
Ellis Rivkin, “Leon da Modena and the Kol Sakhal,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 38
(1948), 246.
166
copied—and later illegally printed—and sold books of “arcane remedies,” a crime
carefully monitored by the Inquisition.
44
The Rabbi had extensive astrological charts
created to predict the date of his death, and had his palm read as well.
45

In his autobiography, Modena lists over two-dozen professions that he has
engaged in. Among these, creating and peddling amulets and arcane remedies are
conspicuous additions.
46
In a letter to a fellow Rabbi, Modena admitted manufacturing
and selling sought-after paper amulets encased in copper to Christian customers that
would ostensibly increase sexual performance.
47
The perception that Jews maintained a
special knowledge of the occult is not isolated to the well-known rabbi. According to
records of the Inquisition, “In 1643, Domenico Temponi claimed that a Jew, Isaac, had
taught him Hebrew words written on paper and placed under the wing of a cockerel
would enable the cockerel to lead him to buried treasure.”
48
And these conceptions were
not only reserved for the gullible; Cardinal Giovanni Caraffa, the future Paul IV—burner
of the Talmud and institutor of the Roman Ghetto—was convinced that a Jewish magical

44
Modena’s friend, Beretin, was accused of selling one of these books, and ultimately
died during interrogation, Modena, Haye Yehudah, 36b, 168-169. For all references to
Haye Yehudah, see the critical edition edited by Mark R. Cohen, The Autobiography of a
Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: A Translation of Leon Modena’s Haye Yehudah
(Princeton: Princeton University, 1988).
45
Modena, Haye Yehudah, 18b, 110-111.
46
On amulets, see Shalom Sabar, “Childbirth and Magic: Jewish Folklore and Material
Culture,” and Elliott Horowitz, “Families and their Fortunes: The Jews of Early Modern
Italy,” 582-586 in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York:
Schocken, 2002), 672-722 and Julie-Marthe Cohen, The Ghetto in Venice: Ponentini,
Levantini e Tedeschi 1516-1797 (Amsterdam: Jewish Museum Netherlands, 1990).
47
The letter is cited in Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-
1676 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 745.
48
Martin, Witchcraft, 98.
167
text was circulating among the Roman Jews, and sent representatives to recover it.
49
The
notion that the occult had roots in Jewish antiquity extended to other spheres as well. It
was commonly accepted that Moses founded the science of alchemy, and that his wisdom
was passed down through arcane Jewish texts. Raphael Patai writes, “Throughout much
of the history of alchemy there was a persistent tendency to attribute a Jewish origin to
alchemy as a whole.”
50
Perhaps justified by this tradition, Modena and his son were both
ardent practitioners of alchemy, apparently to the point of enduring persistent nosebleeds
from sublimating mercury.
51
Less elaborate practices, such as astrology, bibliomancy,
and chiromancy, all seem to have been part of the fabric of folk religion in the early
modern ghetto.
52

Rejection and Resistance
The close assumed association between Jews and the occult, and the Inquisition’s
increasing aggression in prosecuting these cases, provides ample explanation for an
image that publicly rejects the occult. But because the image of necromancers
specifically refers to a Talmudic text and represents ancient Rabbis, the image provides
other polemical targets as well. It is worth noting that, like the Venice Haggadah, early
modern Christian orthodoxy viewed the rabbinic period with tremendous skepticism, and
widespread censorship was implemented to prevent the diffusion of the Talmud, because,
in Christian orthodoxy, the Talmud represented a history of extra-biblical exegesis that

49
Kenneth R. Stow, Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth
Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000, p. 45
50
Patai, Jewish Alchemists, p. 10.
51
References to alchemy are littered throughout Modena’s autobiography: Modena, Haye
Yehudah, 5b, 9b, 14a, 15b, 16a, 34b.
52
See Haye Yehudah, 5a for a discussion of fortune-telling practices.
168
distracted the Jews from converting to Christianity.
53
While this is surely a concept
Modena was familiar with, his rational critique of the mystical inclinations of rabbinic
culture can also located in a broader theological tension between Venice and Rome.
Talya Fishman argues that one of the consistent themes of the Kol Sakhal is the
superiority of Venetian Jews and their ability to triumph over an ancient past riddled with
irrationality and unproductive scholarship. Fishman describes this theme of
exceptionalism as an engagement with the Venetian cleric and jurist Paolo Sarpi’s
challenge to centralized Roman authority and criticism of the Jesuit order in the same
period.
54
Between 1606 and 1607, the years directly preceding the publication of the
Venice Haggadah, Venice itself was under papal interdict and tensions between Venice
and Rome were high, in no small part as a result of Sarpi’s leadership and philosophical
guidance.
55
The interdict was the result of a political and economic power struggle
between Venetian authorities and Pope Paul V, and its practical consequences included a
ban against performing the sacraments. Venice responded by expelling the Jesuits from

53
Kenneth Stow "The Burning of the Talmud in 1553, In the Light of Sixteenth Century
Catholic Attitudes Toward the Talmud," Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 34
(1972): 435-59; and Paul F. Grendler, “The Destruction of Hebrew Books in Venice,
1568,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 45 (1978): 103-130,
and the survey, Frank Edward Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian
Eyes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
54
Fishman, Voice of a Fool, 16-21; See Pullan, Inquisition, 15-16 for debate between
Francesco Albizzi and Paolo Sarpi over the expanded jurisdiction for the Inquisition in
Venice as related to the Jews.
55
Sarpi has generally been neglected since a series of thorough studies by David
Wootton. See most recently, Francis Oakley, “Complexities of Context: Gerson,
Bellarmine, Sarpi, Richer, and the Venetian Interdict of 1606-1607,” The Catholic
Historical Review 82 (1996): 369-396.
169
all Venetian territories, financially isolating the Vatican, and offering intellectual support
to the protestant reformation.
56

In his later work, Modena signals an awareness of and approval for Sarpi, who
frequently sympathized with Venetian Jews in legal matters. While connections between
Sarpi and Modena are tantalizing and each undoubtedly knew of the other, their
prospective relationship has never been subjected to study. It is evident however, that
both participated in a uniquely Venetian program of cultural resistance. Because the
Venice Haggadah image participates in the same rhetorical vocabulary as the Kol Sakhal
and adopts the exceptionalist rhetoric of Venetian political philosophy, the image
expediently affirms Jewish commitment to the virtues of the Venetian Republic.
Like Sarpi who found charismatic Jesuit propaganda objectionable, and Modena’s
Kol Sakhal, which similarly polemicizes mysticism within Jewish tradition, the image in
the Venice Haggadah identifies its enemies as practitioners of irrational and heterodox
behavior. During the early modern period there is a substantial Jewish tradition of
criticizing mysticism because of its perceived popularity among Christian hebraists. As
early as the fifteenth century, even before the printing of the Zohar in 1560, Leone di
Vitale described Jews who adopted kabalistic practices as “going over to the

56
For general background on the events of the interdict, see William J. Bouwsma, Venice
and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter
Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 339-416. For the full text
of the interdict and relevant commentary in David Chambers and Brian Pullan, Venice: A
Documentary History, 1450-1630 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 225-227.
For the political legacy of the interdict, see Richard Mackenny, “’A Plot Discover’d?’
Myth, Legend, and the ‘Spanish’ Conspiracy against Venice in 1618,” in Venice
Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797, ed. John
Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 185-216.
170
Christians.”
57
And yet, any number of early modern Jewish intellectuals engaged in
Zohar scholarship earnestly. Given these polarized views of kabalah, there is
considerable historiographical debate among contemporary scholars about the role and
status of Jewish mysticism in early modern Europe.
58
Most recently, Yaacob Dweck has
produced a compelling monograph that focuses principally on Leon Modena’s late
polemic against kabbalah, Ari Nohem (The Lion Roars). Ari Nohem was composed late
in Modena’s life, nearly thirty years after the printing of the Venice Haggadah. During
those years, the Rabbi had experienced dramatic declines in his fortune and health. His
most promising student Joseph Hamiz, who had attended the University of Padua had
become a mystic, greatly disappointing Modena and prompting the creation of Ari
Nohem.
59
The text, which circulated only in manuscript until the nineteenth century,
systematically confronts and dismantles key texts in the kabbalistic canon.
As Dweck compellingly argues, Modena’s Ari Nohem is partially a work of
historical scholarship that seeks to undermine the biblical provenance of the Zohar. But
more essentially Modena’s polemic is a work of intellectual skepticism. Modena found
the Zohar’s proponents to be preposterous in their promises for spiritual enlightenment
and was appalled at the many ways the text was marshaled to support belief in an
irrational, supernatural world. In the terms of early modern intellectual history,
Modena’s carefully articulated skepticism can be described, in the words of Lucien

57
Bonfil, Jewish Life, 103.
58
Moshe Idel, “Differing Conceptions of Kabbalah in the Early Seventeenth Century,” in
Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987), 137-200.
59
On the relationship between Modena, Hamiz, and Joseph Delmedigo, see David
Ruderman, Jewish Though and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 118-152.
171
Febvre, as an act of “unbelief.” Febvre described the concept of unbelief as a problem
that emerges from a specific tension evident in the work of early modern intellectuals.
60

Febvre argued that atheism, or more broadly religious or spiritual skepticism, was
unavailable as an intellectual position in early modern Europe. However much early
modern intellectuals appear to contemporary, secular scholars to occupy positions of
critical skepticism, they were all, at root, sincere believers in the existence of a
supernatural God. Febvre’s point becomes more provocative in his argument that
conventional early modern orthodoxy included a program of beliefs that extended far
beyond a circumscribed and intellectually tidy belief in God. Among this sprawling
theological morass of popular folk beliefs, was an indefatigable confidence in a wide
range of supernatural phenomenon, including miracles, witchcraft, divination and
necromancy.
In his study of the relationship between high literary culture and popular
conceptions of the supernatural, Stephen Greenblatt documents how drama in particular
becomes a depository for a host of conflicting and ambivalent feelings about the
afterlife.
61
The fact that Jacobean and Elizabethean drama is populated by ghosts,
miraculous visitations, and hauntings, even while English orthodoxy was being scrubbed
clean of these traditional vestiges of a vibrant Catholic past, suggests that there was a
need for discussion and parsing of these phenomena. Along with Shakespeare and
Marlowe’s preoccupation with the supernatural, we find a scientific culture equally

60
Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of
Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). The
original was published in French in 1942 as Le probleme de l'incroyance au XVIe siecle:
La religion de Rabelais.
61
Stephen J. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 3-10.
172
engaged in problems of unbelief. Jean Bodin compiled witchcraft anecdotes with no hint
of incredulity.
62
Robert Boyle occupied himself with alchemy.
63
Galileo and Kepler
practiced astrology.
64
Ulisse Aldrovandi chased dragons.
65
As Febvre declared: "men in
1541 never said impossible."
66

Similarly, in 1609 it was possible for Modena, a man so evidently offended by
subtle whiffs of irrationalism even in the canonical works of his own religious tradition,
to also place faith in amulets, bibliomancy and sorcery. Dweck points to Modena’s brand
of self-conscious and carefully articulated public skepticism as a characteristic of
modernity, and notes that his particular criticism of mysticism reappears in many of the
works of the haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Intellectual
historians also identify the opening decades of the seventeenth century as a period of
radical transformation.
67
While Febvre’s position is that no substantial intellectual

62
Jean Bodin, De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (Paris, 1580), see Daniel Pickering
Walker, Spiritual & Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (University Park: Penn
State University Press, 2000), 171.
63
Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle’s Alchemical Quest (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
64
Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and
Celestial Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
65
Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early
Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 17-47.

66
Febvre, Problem of Unbelief, 441. The full quote is worth repeating in its entirety,
“We are told that a man who had been beheaded took his head in his hands and started to
walk down the street. We shrug our shoulders and inquire into the fact no further—we
would feel ridiculous. Men in 1541 never said impossible. They did not know how to
have doubts about the possibility of a fact.” See also, Fabián Alejandro Campagne,
“Witchcraft and the Sense-of-the-Impossible in Early Modern Spain: Some Reflections
Based on the Literature of Superstition (ca. 1500-1800),” The Harvard Theological
Review 96 (2003): 25-62.
67
Scholarship since Febvre has complicated this picture. As David Wooton has argued,
Febvre’s position is that no substantial intellectual apparatus for genuine skepticism had
yet been developed in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries David Wootton,
“Lucien Febvre and the Problem of Unbelief in the Early Modern Period,” The Journal of
173
apparatus for genuine skepticism had yet been developed in the late sixteenth century,
David Wooton’s portrait of Paolo Sarpi has convincingly demonstrated that unbelief was
possible as a rhetorical position even among clerics just a few decades later.
68
It is not
coincidental that the Venetian jurist—and contemporary of Modena—emerges as the
exemplar for modern skepticism. By adopting a vocabulary of skepticism, despite the
beliefs he may have held privately, Modena positions the Venice Haggadah strategically
to participate in broader Venetian programs of criticality and cultural resistance. In other
words, by 1609, it was possible to describe something as “impossible” in a calculated and
self-conscious context. The image of the Rabbinic necromancers creates a fiction of
Jewish separation from the occult, but also strategically asserts Jewish loyalty to the
Venetian state and signals Modena’s own cosmopolitanism.
Understanding the political advantages of articulating unbelief allows early modern
culture to manipulate expectations. This is also active on the opposite side of the image,
in the image of black magicians. For the enigmatic image of the black-pygmy figures, I
have yet to locate particular visual precedents, but it seems to reflect a particular visual
trope resonating in print culture in the early modern period. One late sixteenth-century
engraving by Theodore de Bry, which would certainly have been known to the
anonymous artist of the Venice Haggadah, presents the type of visual sources that may

Modern History 60 (1988): 695-730. See also P.O. Kristeller, “The Myth of Renaissance
Atheism and the French Tradition of Free Thought,” Journal of the History of Philosophy
6 (1968): 233-43. In particular, David Wooton’s compelling portrait of Paolo Sarpi’s
skepticism has convincingly demonstrated that unbelief is detectable at historical
distance, if not commonly promoted and widely publicized in the period. David
Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
68
David Wootton, “Lucien Febvre and the Problem of Unbelief in the Early Modern
Period,” The Journal of Modern History 60 (1988): 695-730.
174
have served as general inspiration for the ritual of dancing around the fire (Figure 3.6).
69

For a German redaction of Thomas Hariot’s account of Virginia, printed in 1593, de Bry
provided a provocative title page that depicts Native Americans cooking human body
parts over a fire, and larger figures in the architectural borders of the page actually
consuming them.
70
De Bry’s images are not in any sense anthropological; rather the
notion of a coven-like gathering around a fire becomes an emblem, a highly conventional
image of pagan or religiously heterodox behavior like Macbeth’s witches.
71
The sinister
cauldron in the Venice Haggadah functions similarly, participating in this iconographical
trope, but also challenging it with provocative departures. The most striking and
deliberate of these is the representation of the figures as black Africans.
At least partially, this striking representation of race is the result of linguistic
wordplay. The English term necromancy, which contemporary scholars have equated
with the early modern Italian word negromantía, is a misleading translation. The two
words have entirely distinct etymological origins, necro from the Greek for dead, and
negro from the Latin for black. Thus in Italian and Judeo-Italian, negromantía literally
refers to black divination, or black magic. In the early modern period, negromantía
encompassed a broad number of practices including, but not limited to, divination
through consulting the dead.
72
This distinction seems to have been known in the early
modern period as well. In John Florio’s 1611 dictionary the Italian negrománte is

69
These prototypes from western print culture are apparent other places in the haggadah,
and seem a likely visual general source for the image. Thomas Hariot, A briefe and true
report of the new found land of Virginia, (Frankfurt, 1590).
70
Theodore de Bry, Dritte Buch Americae, darinn Brasilia ... aus eigener erfahrun in
Teutsch beschrieben (Frankfurt, 1593).
71
Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, Jews have been central in the medieval imagining
of witches’ covens and similar imagery, see Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 63-88.
72
Martin, Witchcraft, 87.
175
defined in English as a nigromant, and negromantía as nigromancie in English.
73
This
indicates that the Latin root was the active one during the period, preserving the notion of
“black” magic. Nothing indicates that Jews maintained any unique systematic attitudes
towards blackness as a racial category, although an ethnographic interest in sub-Saharan
Africa appears in Jewish texts, particularly after the discovery of the New World when it
was necessary to place geographic regions into a Jewish cosmology. Of course, Jews
were aware of slavery; later in the seventeenth century, Leon Modena’s son would depart
for Dutch Brazil, where he would write to Modena of the proliferation of black slaves.
74

Early in his career, in 1609, Modena likely had access to a set corpus of texts not
unlike those available to contemporary Christians. Abraham Farissol’s Iggeret Orhot
Olam, a cosmological world history first published in 1525, was certainly one that he
knew. Farissol, a court Jew in Ferrara, had no firsthand experiences with black Africans
in an ethnographic context, and David Ruderman has demonstrated that Farissol relies
substantially on Francanzano Montalboddo’s Paesi novamente, of 1507. Indeed, parts of
Farissol’s work seem to be lifted wholesale and translated into Hebrew. This fact makes
it difficult to argue that Jews maintained monolithic, culturally specific attitudes towards
black Africans as a distinct racial category. Further complicating this is Farissol’s
original contribution to the project—a commentary on the ethnography of sub-Saharan
Africans. In it, he writes sympathetically of their cleanliness, beautiful art making and

73
John Florio, Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionary of the Italian and
English Tongues, (London, 1611), 330. The Oxford English Dictionary still records a
listing for “nigromancie,” as it remains in common usage in the Caribbean.
74
For the presence of black Africans in Europe and European knowledge of the slave
trade in the seventeenth century, see see Kate Lowe’s introduction in Thomas Foster
Earle and Kate Lowe, eds., Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1-14. Lowe almost exclusively associates black
presence with slavery.
176
excellent seamanship. Farissol adds that he sees much to admire in their political system
as well.
75

Modena was also undoubtedly familiar with Isaac Abarbanel’s biblical
commentary, published in the early sixteenth century. When editing the second edition
of the Venice Haggadah in 1629, Modena would synthesize Abarbanel’s haggadah
commentary and include it in the marginal zone, indicating that he knew and respected
Abarbanel’s scholarship. A Spanish exile, Abarbanel undoubtedly knew black Muslims
in Iberia, before the expulsion. It is possible to read in his commentary a situating of
ancient Africa in a Platonic metaphor of the tripartite soul. In this schema, the three sons
of Noah: Ham, Japheth, and Shem each represents an aspect of the soul. Ham, the father
of Cush, is rather unflatteringly associated with primal nature, the most irrational aspect
of the soul.
76
Ham is described as dark and ugly and may have been associated with a
kind of emblematic or metaphorical concept of Africa, but it is difficult to gauge whether
this kind of biblical exegesis can be read in practical, contemporary terms. It seems that
these texts offer few insights into actual attitudes towards black Africans, and it is
entirely inappropriate to read such writings as commentaries on Jewish attitudes towards
black Muslims in the early modern period in general.
77

75
David B. Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of
Abraham Ben Mordecai Farissol (Cincinatti: Hebrew Union College Press, 1981), 134-
36.
76
On Abarbanel’s description of Biblical Africa, see Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac
Abravanel, Statesman & Philosopher: Statesman and Philosopher (Cornell University
Press, 1998), 142
77
For a contrasting interpretation from mine see Abraham Melamed, The Image of the
Black in Jewish Culture: A History of the Other (London: Routledge, 2003), 178-189,
Melamed somewhat vulgarly reads Abarbanel’s commentary as a reflection of
contemporary beliefs, a view that is persuasively complicated by Jonathan Schorsh, Jews
and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
177
The second issue here is the representation of the necromancers as Ottomans.
78

Just as with the representation of Jewish witchcraft, this calculated choice demonstrates
Modena’s attempt to write a fiction of separation between Jews and an offensive other—
in this case the Ottoman Muslims. In fact, Jews benefited from the Muslim possession of
Constantinople because safe harbor was offered to Iberian exiles by the Ottoman court.
As scholars have persuasively argued, living conditions for Jews were generally far
superior in Muslim territories than in Christian communities, particularly in
Constantinople, where Jewish culture flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and well into the modern period.
79
Strong relations between Ottoman and
Venetian Jews were particularly important in the realm of trade, where Jews maintained
some of Venice’s crucial economic contacts with Constantinople.
80
But this closeness
also engendered tremendous suspicion of the Jewish community. It was the Ottoman-
Jewish General Joseph Nasi who conquered Cyprus for the Ottoman court and who posed
a considerable threat to Venice in the late sixteenth century.
81
Suspicion of Jews in

and “Portmanteau Jews: Sephardim and race in the early modern Atlantic World,” Jewish
Culture and History 4, no. 2 (2001): 59-74.
78
On Venetian images of black Africans around the time of Lepanto, see Paul Kaplan
“Black Turks: Venetian artists and perceptions of Ottoman ethnicity,” in Harper, Islam in
the Western Eye, 41-66.
79
Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews of the Middle Ages (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995). And Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople:
Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2006), 103-129.
80
Benjamin Arbel, Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern
Mediterranean, (Leiden: Brill, 1995); and Benjamin Arbel, “Jews in International Trade:
the Emergence of the Levantines and Potentines,” in The Jews of Early Modern Venice,
ed. Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001): 73-97.
81
Constance H. Rose, “New Information on the Life of Joseph Nasi Duke of Naxos: The
Venetian Phase,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 60 (1970): 330-344; Cecil Roth, The
House of Nasi: The Duke of Naxos (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America,
178
supporting Joseph Nasi, and collaborating with the Ottomans during the run-up to
Lepanto came perilously close to resulting in total Jewish expulsion from Venice. A
secret report from the Council of Ten, not published until the eighteenth century, reads,
“And we see the very great esteem in which the entire Jewish nation holds this Joseph
Nasi especially since he was named Duke of Naxos; and he is considered the chief leader
of those Jews, with whom he concurs in all things.”
82
The document surely presents a
calculated and polemical hyperbole—all evidence indicates that Venetian Jews were
loyal subjects, even if their condition was relatively poorer than Jews in Constantinople.
Still, the possible collaboration between Ottomans and Jews remained a concern well
after Lepanto. It was addressed for instance, around 1600, when a new charter for the
Venetian Jews was negotiated.
83
Ultimately, rather than documenting the culturally rich
and financially lucrative history of exchange between Venetian Jews and the Ottoman
east, the Venice Haggadah publicly renounces such relationships.

Fictions and Power
It is evident that the image of necromancers proposes several elaborate fictions
about the Jewish community and it’s standing in Venice. It seems necessary to consider
what significance this process held for the book’s authors and readers—and what it
means for historians. Ultimately, the creation of these images, and the fictional postures

New Edition, 1992). Unfortunately, little has been written on Nasi since Roth’s
biography was originally published in 1948.
82
Valiero, Dell’utilità che si può ritrarre delle cose operate dai Veneziani (Padua, 1787),
cited in Riccardo Calmani, The Ghetto of Venice (New York: Evans, 1987), 100.
83
The charter was re-negotiated in 1589, and Jewish trade with the Ottoman empire
subsequently increased. Benjamin Arbel has identified multiple instances between 1594
and 1612 of the Venetian bailo expressing concern with Jewish involvement in this
sphere. See Arbel, Jews in International Trade, 94
179
they present, is an act of self-fashioning—a forging of community identity. This identity
was meant to be legible both by outsiders—the censors and the power structure they
represented—and Jewish readers. This chapter has been concerned with the content of
this self-fashioning, and not what the process of making fictions—of self-fashioning—
indicates about Leon Modena and the Jewish community. For Stephen Greenblatt, the
ability to fashion identity unambiguously signifies power: “Power, whose quintessential
sign,” Greenblatt writes, “is the ability to impose one’s fictions upon the world, the more
outrageous the fiction, the more impressive the manifestation of power.”
84

Unfortunately, contemporary scholars have made little space for visual culture to
operate this way for early modern Jews. Indeed, if recent studies are to be believed,
Jewish figures were only visualized in the art of early modern Italy to subject them to a
repressive Christian gaze, reinforcing rather than challenging power relations between
Jews and Christians.
85
This approach described rather anachronistically and
problematically as the “iconography of anti-Semitism,” positions Jews as perpetual
victims in an irredeemably unbalanced system of power.
86
This is a model famously
criticized by Salo Baron as “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.”
87
That Jews

84
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(University of Chicago Press, 2005), 13.
85
Dana Katz has problematically promoted the notion that the monolithic “Jew” was only
visualized as a kind of punishment; see Dana E. Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian
Renaissance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
86
The term was originally coined by Eric Zafran in his influential dissertation, and
employed widely within the field of Jewish visual culture. Eric Zafran, “The
Iconography of Antisemitism: A Study of the Representation of the Jews in the Visual
Arts of Europe, 1400-1600” (PhD diss., New York University, 1973).
87
On the debates about the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” see David
Nirenberg’s historiographic essay in his introduction, David Nirenberg, Communities of
Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), 3-17.
180
are exclusively and consistently described as victims of Christian symbolic violence in
the visual realm leaves little room to conceive of a distinct Jewish visual culture capable
of articulating Jewish experience, and even less so, a visual culture capable of agency and
resistance.
More perniciously, by ignoring the capability of Jews to transcend repression,
such contemporary scholarship has perpetuated a remarkably resilient claim of Jewish
passivity and effeminacy. Paul Breines writes, “Modern, postreligious, racial anti-
Semitism presented a double image of the Jew: first, as the wielder of immense economic
power and second, as physically weak, repulsive and cowardly.”
88
It is this weakness
that seems so prevalent in the models of recent art historians. During the waning days of
the Third Reich, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “The Jews are the mildest of men, passionately
hostile to violence.”
89
Like the “iconography of anti-Semitism,” this model seems to
create a position for Jews only as victims, never perpetrators of action. But for Sartre,
even the receding shadow of the Holocaust did not render this position inevitable.
Perhaps with the recent examples of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the insurgent
activities of the Haganah in mind, Sartre elaborated, “the moment he ceases to be passive,
[the Jew] takes away all power and all virulence from anti-Semitism.”
90
The image of
necromancers in the Venice Haggadah potentially represents such a moment.
The social historian Elliott Horowitz has drawn attention to Sartre’s initial
comment, juxtaposing it with the legacies of Jewish resistance, particularly violent

88
Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American
Jewry (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 126.
89
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (New
York: Schocken Books, 1995), 117.
90
Ibid, 137
181
resistance, in the face of institutional repression.
91
In early modern Italy there are several
examples of individual and corporate Jewish resistance that seem to comprise the
redemptive moments that Sartre describes. Some of these instances called for political
and economic mobilization, such as the widespread Jewish boycott of Ancona after the
execution of twenty-four marranoes in 1556, a boycott lead by Joseph Nasi and his
family.
92
This along with numerous successful appeals to popes and regional rulers,
comprise a kind of macrocosmic corporate action. On a more local and personal level,
the situation was no different. In 1642, when hooligans threatened the property of Jewish
shop owners in the ghetto, the Venetian Jews responded with force, fending off the
looters with improvised cudgels.
93
And young Venetian Jews participated actively in the
battagliole, the ritualistic Venetian neighborhood brawls. In one exceptional 1637
skirmish, a young Jew pummeled an opponent, who later turned out to be a police
captain.
94
Setting such extreme examples aside, it is evident that Jews were capable of
exercising very real physical resistance, particularly when threatened.
Such an existential threat was posed to the Jewish community of Venice
beginning in the late sixteenth century, when the activities of the Inquisition and
systematic attempts at conversion threatened to decimate their community. Occupying
one of the few positions available to them, Jews mobilized the printing press and visual
culture as a form of resistance. Granted, this act is not nearly as overt as a boycott or a

91
Elliott S. Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 187.
92
William Orbach, “Shattering the Shackles of Powerlessness: The Debate Surrounding
the Anti-Nazi Boycott of 1933-41,” Modern Judaism 2 (1982): 149-169.
93
Robert C. Davis, The War of the Fists: Popular Culture and Public Violence in Late
Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 26.
94
Ibid, 26.
182
ritual battle, but as James C. Scott has noted, “Most of the political life of subordinate is
to be found neither in overt collective defiance of powerholders nor in complete
hegemonic compliance, but in the territory between these two polar opposites.”
95
Self-
fashioning, the making of fictions, is an exercise of power, and the existence of the
phenomenon in this context is surely as significant as the content of the fictions
themselves.
As for the specifics of necromancy and its visualization here, it is evident that
Leon Modena effectively exploited the polemical opportunity provided by the text of the
shefokh. The image is situated in a rich constellation of meanings. Here, the rejection of
the occult is imagined as a practice that defines the collective beliefs of the Jewish
community. The image also deflects accusations of witchcraft aimed at the Jewish
community toward the nebulous pygmies and Ottoman Turks. In the polemic against the
occult, Modena also draws attention to the contradictory and ambivalent attitudes towards
the mystical and occult present in early modern Jewish belief.

95
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 136; James C. Scott Weapons of the Weak:
Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987),
“Hedgemony and Consciousness,” 304-350.
183

Conclusion

Roger Chartier has asked, “How did increased circulation of printed matter
transform forms of sociability, permit new modes of thought, and change people’s
relationship with power?”
1
As historians of the early modern period continue to reassess
the impact of print, it is necessary to subject Jewish print culture to the same rigorous
interrogation. Indeed, David Ruderman has recently declared, “The impact of the printed
book is a critical dimension in understanding the emergence of an early modern Jewish
culture.”
2
These issues are particularly relevant for Jewish visual culture. With no
significant examples of monumental public art, the images diffused through print were
the most widely known in the Jewish communities of Italy and throughout Europe.
Consequently, print culture is a necessary vehicle for describing the network of objects
and practices that composes Jewish visual culture.
Simultaneously, print is also critical in understanding the relationship between
Jews and Christians in early modern Italy. To date, the single most provocative treatment
of the intersection between print culture and Jewish-Christian relations is Kathleen
Biddick’s Typological Imaginary which argues that print was marshaled as a strategy for
composing a polemical Jewish ethnography, reconceiving Jewish bodies as “paper Jews”

1
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe
Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1994), 3.
2
David Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2010), 99.
184
that might more efficiently be circumscribed, disciplined and erased.
3
For Biddick, the
attempted exclusion of Jews from access to print technology amplified this phenomenon.
She calls for scholars to “rethink the colonial discipline of European ethnography as
emerging not in an imagined encounter of the Old and New Worlds, but within graphic
conflicts between Christians and Jews.”
4
As a medievalist, intimate with Christian
devotional culture, Biddick convincingly documents the Christian side of this dynamic,
presenting a nuanced understanding of the relationships between printed images and
persecution. Neglected in her study, however, is the Jewish response. This study
attempts to provide it by describing how Jews used printed images to document their
presence and beliefs.
Like its enigmatic editor Leon Modena, the Venice Haggadah presents an object
rich in complexity and occasional contradictions. My first chapter addressed the major
historiographical stumbling block to the academic study of Jewish visual culture: the
long-held myth that Jews were incapable of producing art, either by aesthetic insensitivity
or orthodox prohibition. On the contrary, Jewish reading practices were intended to
evoke the same kind of affective reactions promoted in some Christian conceptions of
visual culture. Nonetheless, the production of images within the Jewish community is
deeply engaged with a unique construction of history, and a continuous awareness of the
religious commitments that differentiated Jewish devotional practice.

3
Kathleen Biddick has elsewhere written of typology as a strategy for persecution, see
The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania, 2003).
4
Kathleen Biddick.pp. “Paper Jews: Inscription/Ethnicity/Ethnography, The Art Bulletin
78 (1996): 594-599; 595, fn. 3.
185
Shifting attention to a specific motif, the second chapter explored images of
messianic redemption in the Venice Haggadah. These images do more than simply
illustrate the narrative of the Exodus from Egypt. Indeed, they articulate in visual form
current debates over the future of Jewish souls that figured prominently in Jewish-
Christian relations, particularly during the celebration of Passover. So deeply influential
were images of the messianic arrival, that messianic pretenders in the early modern
period based their performances on images that appear in the haggadah. Instead of
investing in the notion of a personal, charismatic messiah, the Venice Haggadah
conceived of spiritual liberation in spatial terms, describing messianic Jerusalem as an
ideal ghetto, secure and capacious, with a house of worship at its center. This conception
of the messianic age relies substantially on notions of typology that situated Jewish
experience within cycles of persecution and redemption.
The Jewish body was a site of contestation in early modern Venice. Modern
scholars have typically eschewed questions of Jewish biological difference, focusing
instead on the variety of distinguishing signs used to visually mark the Jewish body. In
Chapter 3, I argued that a discourse of Jewish biological difference existed in the period,
and that Jews were capable of recognizing it and marshaling it to their advantage. This
debate also engaged with the competing rituals that marked confessional differences
between Jew and Christian: circumcision and baptism. The Venice Haggadah attempts to
negotiate a place for the Jewish body by promoting its difference as a site of privilege.
The final chapter explores a single provocative image, a representation of Jewish
and black Muslim necromancers. I argued that this image allowed the Venice Haggadah
to compose several fictions about the early modern Jewish community, disavowing
186
popular notions of Jewish association with the occult and Jewish association with the
Ottoman Empire. The fashioning of this communal identity, I argue, is ultimately a
manifestation of power, a far cry from the hopelessly unbalanced power relations that are
often assumed to underlie the visual representation of Jews in early modern Italy.
Print, as it emerges through the lens of the Venice Haggadah, is not a vehicle for
persecuting and punishing a Jewish minority. Nor does the fact that formal restrictions
prevented direct Jewish access to the printing press diminish Leon Modena’s capacity to
create a visual program that powerfully articulated the perspective the Jewish community.
As late as the eighteenth century, it was possible to declare, “Come and let us hail the
printers, for if it was not for the art of printing in these difficult times, the Torah would
have been forgotten from Israel. Praised be their efforts through the help of the Lord.”
5

So wrote the exegete Rabbi Joseph Teomim at the very threshold of the modern age. The
visual program of the Venice Haggadah embodied debates, addressed crises, and allowed
Jews to probe contemporary events that impacted their lives. The invocation issued by
Rabbi Joseph cited here suggests that objects such as the Venice Haggadah were
tremendously powerful in their ability to adapt, perpetuate and transform traditional texts.
The Venice Haggadah reaffirmed communal bonds and fashioned cultural identity,
assuming new relevance in the era of the ghetto, as Jews strived to develop their culture
despite external efforts to eradicate it. The Venice Haggadah was a fixture in the Jewish
community throughout this turbulent time. Its images, filled with ambiguity and

5
Rabbi Joseph Teomim, Pri Megadim (Frankfurt, 1785). The passage is cited in Moshe
Rosenfeld, “The Development of Hebrew Printing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries,” in Leonard Singer Gold, ed. A Sign and a Witness: 2,000 Years of Hebrew
Books and Illuminated Manuscripts (Oxford University Press, 1988), 100.
187
interpretive possibilities, provide an invaluable window into the cultural world of the
community that produced it.

188

Figure 1
Childbirth Amulet
(Italy, Seventeenth-Century)
Jewish Museum, New York
189

Figure 2
The Wise Son
Sefer haggadah shel Pesach (Mantua Haggadah)
(Rufinelli, Mantua, 1560), fol.6r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
190

Figure 3
The Messianic Arrival (with acrostic)
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 24r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
191

Figure 4
Acrostic Spelling Name of Leon Modena
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 24r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
192

Figure 1.1
Joseph ibn Chaim
Artist’s Colophon with Anthropomorphic Letters
Kennicott Bible
Iberian, 15th century
The British Library
193

Figure 1.2
Visual Volvelles
Abraham Abulafia, (d. 1280)
Chayei ha-Olam ha-Ba (Life of the World to Come)
Northern Italy, 15th Century
Private Collection
194

Figure 1.3
Israel David Luzzatto
Ecclesiastes in Micrography
Venice, 17th century
The Jewish Museum, New York
195

Figure 1.4
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609), fol. 14r
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
196

Figure 1.5
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 14v
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
197

Figure 1.6
“This is Maror”
The Golden Haggadah
Northern Spain, 1420
The British Library
198

Figure 1.7
Tisha B’av (Mourning the Destruction of the Temple)
Sefer ha-Minhagim (Book of customs)
Giovanni di Gara, Venice 1600, fol. 48r
Oxford, Bodleian Library
199

Figure 1.8
Tisha B’av (Mourning the Destruction of the Temple)
Sefer ha-Minhagim (Books of customs)
Giovanni di Gara, Venice, 1593
Oxford, Bodleian Library
200

Figure 1.9
The “Reader” Explicating Passover Foods
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 3v
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
201

Figure 1.10
The “Reader” Attending the Binding of Isaac
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 6r
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
202

Figure 1.11
The Idolatrous Ancestors of Abraham
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 5v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
203

Figure 2.1
The Messianic Arrival
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 24r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
204

Figure 2.2
The Arrival of Elijah
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 3v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
205

Figure 2.3
The Arrival of Elijah
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 3v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
206

Figure 2.4
Joel ben Simeon (Feibush Ashkenazi of Bonn)
Shefokh page (The Arrival of the Messiah)
Washington Haggadah, Northern Italy, 1478
The Library of Congress, Washington DC
207

Figure 2.5
Shefokh page (The Arrival of the Messiah)
Sefer haggadah shel Pesach (Mantua Haggadah)
(Rufinelli: Mantua, 1560)
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
208

Figure 2.6
Solomon Molkho’s Processional banner.
(Northern Italy, 1532)
Jewish Museum, Prague
209

Figure 2.7
Searching for Chametz
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 1v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
210

Figure 2.8
Marcus Tuscher,
Macchina rapresentante la cvccagna eretta dalla Nazione ebrea in Livorno
1732
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
211

Figure 2.9
Labors of the Israelites with David and Solomon
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 4r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
212

Figure 2.10
Nikolas Hogenberg,
The procession of Pope Clement VII and the Emperor Charles V after the
coronation at Bologna on the 24 February 1530
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
213

Figure 2.11
Battle at Jericho and Ai
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 20r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
214

Figure 2.12
Simhah, the wife of Menahem Levi Meshullami
Ark Curtain for the Scuola Italiana (Venice, completed 1673)
Jewish Museum, New York
215

Figure 3.1
Revelers with Jewish Masks
Francesco Bertelli, Il carnevale italiano mascherato
(Venice, 1642)
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2556-728)
216

Figure 3.2
The Brothers before Joseph
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 7r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
217

Figure 3.3
Fertility of the Israelites
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 7r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
218

Figure 3.4
Under the Apple Tree
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 7v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
219

Figure 3.5
Under the Apple Tree
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 7v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
220

Figure 3.6
Death by Drowning/Moses Drawn from the Water
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 8v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
221

Figure 3.7
Abjection of the Israelites
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 7v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
222

Figure 3.8
Celibacy of the Israelites
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 8r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
223

Figure 3.9
Pharaoh Bathing in Blood
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 9v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
224

Figure 3.10
Crossing the Nile
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 11v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
225

Figure 3.11
Making Matzah on the Title Page
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
226

Figure 3.12
The Ritual Murder of Simon of Trent
Hartmann Schedel
Liber Chronicarum (Nurmberg Chronicle)
(Nuremberg, 1493)
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
227

Figure 4.1
Golem and Necromancers
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 17v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
228

Figure 4.2
The Rod of Moses
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 9v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
229

Figure 4.3
Sages Studying the Haggadah with Moses and Aaron in Margins
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 4v
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
230

Figure 4.4
Plague of Boils
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 10r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
231

Figure 4.5
Demons Tormenting the Egyptians
Seder haggadah shel Pesach (Venice Haggadah),
Giovanni di Gara: Venice 1609, fol. 11r
Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York
232

Figure 4.6
Theodore de Bry,
Dritte Buch Americae, darinn Brasilia ... aus eigener erfahrun in
Teutsch beschrieben (Frankfurt, 1593).
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
233

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract 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

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Creator Glatstein, Jeremy (author)

Core Title The watching night: print, power and Jewish vision in early modern Italy

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Art History

Publication Date 11/06/2013

Defense Date 10/14/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag history of the book,Jewish art,Jewish visual culture,Jews and the Renaissance,Jews and Venice,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Roberts, Sean E. (committee chair), Howe, Eunice (committee member), Rosenthal, Margaret (committee member)

Creator Email glatstein@mac.com,jeremyglatstein@outlook.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-344681

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