Animal Affinities: Monsters and Marvels in the Ambrosian Tanakh (original) (raw)

'The Breath of Every Living Thing': Zoocephali and the Language of Difference on the Medieval Hebrew Page

Art History, 2023

The most remarkable feature of the Hammelburg Mahzor, a fourteenth-century German High Holiday book, is the inclusion of zoocephalic figures: humans with beastly heads. The purpose of this essay is to explore the semiotics and phenomenology of this specifically Jewish visual idiom, and to suggest that its presence lies at the intersection of language, philosophy, poetry, and history. In the Mahzor, zoocephaly signals distinction that collapses temporalities, tests the limits of alterity, and engages in a sophisticated word–image play that strives to establish visceral connections with the community of the manuscript’s users. Hammelburg zoocephali invoke the fragility of the human condition by establishing reverberating relationships between themselves and other inhabitants of the Mahzor’s pages: echoes of many, avatars of none. Outwardly monstrous yet emphatically human, these zoocephali prove to be particularly excellent images to think with about the place of Hebrew manuscripts in the long history of medieval visual culture.

Animal Attraction: Hidden Polemics in Biblical Animal Illuminations of the 'Michael Mahzor

2018

The Michael Mahzor, produced in Germany in 1258, one of the earliest illuminated Mahzorim, is a two-volume prayer book containing liturgical poems for the Holy Days and the 'four special Sabbaths,' when liturgical additions are made to the regular weekly chapter reading during the month of Adar. The manuscript is copiously illuminated, with animals adorning the opening words of the liturgical poem, and contains a militant iconographical plan, including knights and fighting warriors. The relationship between text and image in illuminated manuscripts is important, because they need to be 'read' together in order to understand the illuminations in their immediate and general context. The novelty of this study is in a holistic reappraisal of the manner in which we think about illustration in connection with text. This paper addresses three scenes containing animals in the Michael Mahzor: El Mitnase, Mich. 617, f. 4v; Zakhor, Mich. 617, f. 11r; and Kol Nidrei, Mich. 627, ...

"Biblical translations and cross-cultural communication: a focus on the animal imagery", Semitica et Classica 8 (2015), p. 33-43 [uncorrected proof]

In this contribution I will focus on bestiaries as privileged subject-matter to analyze semantic variations deriving from the translations of the Bible as a space of cultural encounter. Through specific examples-such as formicaleon, deer-goat, behemoth, sirens and so on-the semiotic value of monstrous creatures in the Hebrew Bible, in the Greek Septuaginta and eventually in Jerome’s Vulgata, will be investigated. I will explain the reasons why processes of cultural interaction become more evident in the case of monstrous or “aporetic” animals (i.e. animals that cannot be included in ordinary taxonomies). Finally, with reference to Christian commentaries ad loca, I will show the cultural proceedings underpinning the translation and the interpretation of the biblical bestiary.

Biblical Creatures: The Animal as an Object of Interpretation in Pre-Modern Christian and Jewish Hermeneutic Traditions

Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 2018

This issue of Interfaces explores the question of how Jewish and Christian authors in pre-modern Latin Europe thought and wrote about some of the animals mentioned in the Bible. To them, thinking about animals was a way of thinking about what it means to be human, to perceive the world, and to worship God and his creation. Animals' nature, animals' actions and animals' virtues or shortcomings were used as symbols and metaphors for describing human behavior, human desires, human abilities and disabilities, and positive or negative inclinations or traits of character.Both Christian and Jewish medieval and early modern scholars wondered about how they could possibly delve into the deeper layers of meaning they assumed any textual or extra-textual animal to convey. Not surprisingly, they often had to deal with the fact that a specific animal was of interest to members of both religious communities. A comparison between Jewish and Christian ways of reading and interpreting bi...

The Hebrew Bible and the ‘Animal Turn’

Currents in Biblical Research, 2020

Animal Studies refers to a set of questions which take seriously the reality of animal lives, past and present, and the ways in which human societies have conceived of those lives, related to them, and utilized them in the production of human cultures. Scholars of the Hebrew Bible are increasingly engaging animals in their interpretive work. Such engagement is often implicit or partial, but increasingly drawing directly on the more critical aspects of Animal Studies. This article proceeds as a tour through the menagerie of the biblical canon by exploring key texts in order to describe and analyze what Animal Studies has brought to the field of Biblical Studies. Biblical texts are grouped into the following categories: animals in the narrative accounts of the Torah, legal and ritual texts concerning animals, animal metaphors in the prophets, and wisdom literature and animal life. The emergence and application of zooarchaeological research and a number of studies focusing on specific ...

The Animal in the New Testament and Graeco Roman World June 15-17, 2023

Given the ubiquity of animals and the remarkable density of animal language in the New Testament and its world, remarkably little scholarship has been devoted to understanding them. What insights emerge when we de-center the human to bring non-human animals and notions of animality to the center stage? This conference explores these questions. Applying an Animal Studies paradigm to Antiquity, these papers decenter the human to address non-human animals as subjects. They identify ways in which humans find themselves and others to be like animals, addressing basic notions of human and animal nature. They highlight the human-like traits in animals, such as sentience, subjectivity, and intentionality. They question the human/animal distinction, and interrogate the demonic, angelic, and monstrous spaces in between. This event is funded by the DFG project hosted in Mainz: "The Ancient Fable Tradition and Early Christian Literature" (

“Animals and the Gaze at Women. Zoocephalic Figures in the Tripartite Mahzor”

Animal Diversities, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Alice Choyke, 136-164. Krems, 2005, 2005

Zoocephalic figures constitute a separate class within the fauna of medieval book illumination. These half human-half animal creatures are present in Christian as well as in Jewish manuscripts. The focus of my study will be on the zoocephalia found in Hebrew codices with special emphasis upon a festival prayer book, the so-called Tripartite Mahzor.