 everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's event. My name is Elana Tahan and I'm the curator of Hebrew and Christian-oriented collections at the British Library. Today we are presenting a lecture by Professor Mark Epstein on the strange and unusual world of Hebrew manuscripts. This is one from a program of events supporting our exhibition, Hebrew manuscripts journeys of the written word which is running at the British Library. The exhibition provides a snapshot of the range and richness of Hebrew manuscripts in the British Library's collection and reveals the power of the written word to bring people together. Just a little housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions during the event you can submit them using the questions box below. A selection of questions will be taken by Professor Epstein at the end of the event. Use the menu above to provide us with feedback on the event and also to donate to the British Library. The British Library is a charity. Your support helps us open a world of knowledge and inspiration for everyone. You'll find social media links below the video in case you want to continue the conversation on other platforms. You can also find out more about this event and read a short biography of the speaker. Now without further ado we return the time over to Professor Mark Epstein. Good evening. I'm so glad to be back here at the British Library. I'm honored to be asked to speak in connection with the stunning exhibition of Hebrew manuscripts currently on view. If you haven't seen it you must. And I'm delighted that my presence here was encouraged by the great Dr. Ilana Tahan, a dear friend whose kindness and helpfulness are legendary and sustaining. Her intellectual and practical support have been a mainstay of my scholarship over the years. I'd also like to sincerely thank Jonah Albert, Becca Godley, and John Steathridge for their organizational and technical support and for their tolerance of my various ticks, eccentricities, and quirks. This evening I want to try to get at a part of Jewish history that is difficult to access. It's a deep dark place where archives and documents will avail us little. I want to get at the inner dimensions of Jewish consciousness and to do so by looking at aspects of book culture that are often ignored or discounted or discarded as peripheral or marginal. Together we'll interpret those sources as exciting clues on the trail of new discoveries and innovative observations about Jewish history and society. We'll be exploring two manuscripts made in the late 1320s in the late Constance region of what is now Germany, the Duke of Sussex Ashkenazi Pentateuch on the left, and the first volume of the tripartite Macher on the right, both among the stars of the British Library's unparalleled collection. We'll be examining aspects of what I call their internal iconography. Now when I say that we'll examine internal iconography in these manuscripts, I mean the relationship between the spectrum or the hierarchy of monstrous hybrid and human figures in the manuscript. Let me say at the outset that I'm aware that monsters, hybrids, or distorted facial types that we explore here have parallels in manuscripts made for non-Jews. These creatures, however imaginative, were not invented from whole cloth. They emerged from model books of particular workshops which were involved in the production of manuscripts for both Jews and Christians. Now if you're interested in historical questions concerning style and its genealogies, I think you will find that they've been covered with admirable comprehensiveness by Professor Sarit Shalevani in her wonderful study of the late Constance School of Manuscript Illumination. The question for me, as it always is, is how monsters and hybrids are used in particular manuscripts made for Jewish patrons relative to the other images in the same book. I mean look at the contrast here for instance between the noble knight and the horrible monster. Also for the purposes of tonight's talk, I will begin with the assumption that all avoidance of the image for religious reasons in art made for Jews have as their origin interpretations of halachot, Jewish religious laws stemming from and relating to the second commandment which famously prohibits certain types of image making. Now as with any commandment of Torah law, the ambiguities of the second commandment led to a variety of approaches to the avoidance of the image. Here you see the opinions of two sages who were born about a century apart regarding what was forbidden and what permitted in the representation of human and animal forms. Rabbi Ephraim of Bon at left was more lenient overall allowing animal forms whilst prohibiting the human face. The maharam about a century later at right was less lenient prohibiting all human and animal forms. And the various approaches to images in turn influence the variety of ways in which the avoidance of the human form and or the incorporation of the animal form was handled from manuscript to manuscript meaning of course from community to community from patron household to patron household. Now if you're interested in the halachic the legal parameters and their effect on art made for Jews you really must read the extremely thorough and convincing analyses of Dr. Jofia Budda and Professor Eva Fromovich. Building on all they have taught me I'm developing a working typology of the trajectory of Jewish attitudes toward the refusal of the image in the late 13th and 14th century. One group of interventions involves the erasure or distortion of human faces. In one of the earliest surviving examples of medieval Jewish manuscript commissions the Munich Rashi or the Würzburg Rashi of 1233 human faces were completely erased and this was after the manuscript was received by the patron. They are replaced with nothing else blanks erasures. This is of course quite a radical intervention. A milder version of this practice and one that was not undertaken post facto but premeditated on the part of the people who commissioned the manuscript is the distortion but not the erasure of facial features in some later manuscripts. So erasure to distortion. In another group of manuscripts human faces are erased and replaced with other faces animal or hybrid. It seems that once the patrons had the aim of facial erasure they took and ran with it using the erasure of features and their replacement with other features not only to satisfy the legal strictures but also to say something about particular characters in the narratives they depicted. In the Griffin's Head Haggadah illuminated probably in mind around 1300 there are both blank faces used for Gentile characters and lion eagle hybrid or griffin faces used for the Jews. The blank and replaced heads are deployed in order to articulate ideas about entire groups of people Jews and Gentiles in a manner much more efficient and effective than could have been accomplished by other means. I'll elaborate further on this idea as we proceed but now on to The Monsters. This is the opening page of the book of numbers in the Duke of Sussex Ashkenazi Pentateuch. Here four knights hold banners with the symbols of the major tribes camped around each of the four sides of the word Vahidaber and God spoke the visual manifestation of the logos the divine word and thus the divine presence which stands in here for the tabernacle in the wilderness. Of course the most bizarre images here are the grotesque hybrid monsters that threaten but cannot harm the unarmed Israelite knights. They interestingly represent a number of ethnic types. We have a fair blonde head maybe English, Germanic or Scandinavian. We have a red-headed florid-cheeked Celtic fellow. We have a dark-skinned head with African features and hair and we have a dark-skinned figure with a face with a sort of Phrygian cap associated with the east perhaps and Arab. The human heads that comprise this little pocket ethnography are actually relatively naturalistic. We can after all recognize the ethnicities that are intended. Their expressions however are mocking grotesque disorderly and the fact that they are fixed to monstrous bodies makes these various non-Jewish types mirrors of the sort of monstrous anti-Jewish images one finds in art made for Christians in the period. Jews could be represented with animalistic faces in art made for Christians. They're evil exaggerated features here Caiaphas the High Priest and his henchmen contrasting with the even and regular features of the good Christians like Jesus here brought before him in judgment. But this type of visual slur was so well known that had it been simply adopted in Jewish manuscripts there would have been confusion about who the animalistic faces were intended to represent. So when Christians are depicted as monstrous they are very clearly reversals of these anti-Jewish types as you can see. But in order that we identify them as the non-Jewish pursuers of Jews they are typically shown as hunters or persecutors as here with this demonic hunter with his matching dog kind of looking like a Dr. Seuss character chases after the Ayelet Ahuvim the the beloved doe, Matnat Sinai the gift of Sinai the Torah or by association the Jewish people and their singular treasure. In the case of the image we've been discussing in order to make clear the non-Jewishness as well as the particular ethnic variety of the Gentile adversaries it was necessary to allow them fairly naturalistic facial features limiting the monstrosity to their facial expressions and their bizarre bodies. There's thus a strong contrast between the negatively caricatured and stereotyped Gentile monsters in this illumination and the more noble characterizations of the Israelite Jewish types. The images of the Gentiles are monstrous disorganized and mocking. The images of the Israelites are not only human but exemplary noble and dignified types. The four faces of these knights of the tribal chieftains as knights contrast with four rather grotesque faces in the tripartite moxer a manuscript made by a workshop very closely allied with the one that made the Duke of Sussex Pentateuch. Here the grotesque heads represent the four winds blowing into paradise from the four corners of the earth. The images of the heads are thus personifications of the far reaches of the globe depicting races who live in quote-unquote the each corner of the earth. There are two lighter skinned heads and two redder skinned ones. Now it's unclear which races these figures are intended to represent in fact they seem to have been meant more generally to epitomize others peoples at a distance at extremities from the viewer. The same manuscript includes many figures that combine non-European ethnic features with monstrous bodies. I'm working through them all as part of my project on race and otherness in the margins on the extremities as I term it of medieval manuscripts made for Jews. So we have an appropriation of anti-Jewish imagery and its reformulation as monstrous anti- Gentile caricature. This occurs both in the tripartite moxer as you see and in the Duke of Sussex Pentateuch. The images have come full circle. We have a perfectly understandable flinging back of visual denigrations in the direction of their origin. This is not the sort of thing we teach our children to do but it's completely natural in the context of being a persecuted minority. Here art rather than imitating life imitates art with the result uncomfortable for modern progressive people to witness that monstrosity could cut both ways and that those medieval Jews were capable of giving as good as they received. That monstrousness as we've been observing often involves hybridity but it's important to note that though hybridity may seem monstrous to us not all hybrids are monsters. Some hybrids serve to reify and externalize traits of collective characteristics that could not otherwise be represented among a group. In my forthcoming book People of the Image, Jews and Art, a substantial unit traces the trajectory of the development of the hybrid in art made for Jews. Following the research of Professor Eva Fromovich I begin with the legal parameters as well as the sociological conditions that seem to have occasioned the post facto erasure of human faces in the earliest surviving illuminated manuscript commissioned by Jews from Christian artisans the Munich or Vortsburg Rashi of 1233 here the faces were erased as I said after the manuscript was received by the patrons do it seems to concerns about portraying the human cabinets. I then move on to a discussion of the use of hybridity to obviate facial features while at the same time moving toward a way of reifying the characteristics of individual persons. Here at the opening of the book of Esther in the Ambrosian Bible of 1236 to 38 we see a hashfarosh king of Persia. His face has been replaced with that of a bear the rabbinic symbol of the Persian empire. It's interesting to note by the way that the bear face itself was later erased or defaced let's say at a later time when halachic that is Jewish legal trends had again shifted and animal heads as well as human features were deemed to be problematic so in the afterlives of these manuscripts we can glean a lot of sociology and history of law. Now this trajectory naturally concludes in the development of hybridity to externalize aspects not of personal but of national character. The crusader era Jewish martyrs and murdered of Mainz were described as being lighter than eagles graver than lions to do the will of their creators. For this and other reasons I've discussed elsewhere Jews were depicted with lion eagle hybrid faces in the griffins at Hakata which was created as I mentioned probably in Mainz around 1300. Now I take it you can discern the problem to which the use of the lion eagle or griffin hybrid was the solution. Think about it how would you characterize all Jews in a given work of art? How would you visually distill some sort of Jewish essence in order to emphasize that all persons depicted were Jewish? I mean of course without the money bags hooked noses hunched backs or avid avaricious expressions I mean if you wanted to avoid this sort of negative stereotype. The problem is that without the negative stereotype there is in fact nothing in common which would visually identify all Jews. All the people I'm showing you right now are Jews for instance there's no uniformity or commonality among them that characterizes them visually. So the solution of the patrons who commissioned the griffin at Hakata was to use the lion eagle hybrid that is the griffin image to externalize and reify collective or national characteristics that could not otherwise be represented among a group that concentrated essence of that group. They sought to show that Jews as a group of people were noble and spiritual and that they were members of a holy covenant with God. For medieval people using symbols was the clearest and most explicit way to accomplish this even if the resulting images seemed bizarre and difficult for us to read in 2020. Now a different approach to facial aviation, substitution, hybridity and Jewish covenant in holiness is proposed in the iconography of the tripartite moxer. This monumental manuscript containing poetic interpolations of the liturgy for the high holiday and festivals was illuminated in the decades after the griffin's head Hakata in the Lake Constance region as I said before. As its nickname the tripartite moxer suggests it's now divided into three parts and housed in three different collections. I'll be looking primarily at part one which Ilana has in her expert care at the British Library. This is a volume more than any other fetish object I can think of that I have often fantasized about taking home for the night. At first glance the manuscript's authorship appears to have taken the most lenient Jewish legal approach we have yet witnessed to display in the human countenance since it allows the depiction of complete normal individualized human faces. Yet a closer look reveals that such faces seem to be permissible only as long as they are male. The face of nearly every female figure in the manuscript has been replaced with the face of a beast. Now to the 21st century I the griffin-headed Jews and the griffin's head Hakata may be puzzling and the violence implied in the blanking out or erasure of the faces of non-Jews in the same manuscript can be disconcerting. But these animal-headed female figures in the tripartite moxer, especially when contrasted with their human-headed male counterparts, are shocking. Indeed the authorship of this manuscript seems to have been makil or lenient on halacha, that is Jewish law around the use of images, but makipid or stringent on misogyny. The iconography is a true puzzle and the various solutions proposed by excellent scholars fail to satisfy entirely. When analyzing art made for medieval Jews, our alterity, our distance from the historical context that gave rise to the images, makes the meaning of some of its iconographies difficult to decipher. This is especially true for strange or unusual iconographies such as that of animal-headed humans. Now this is of course compounded when the zoosephalism, the animal-headedness, is limited to particular here female figures. As a result, any interpretation is open to debate. Still regardless of any potential interpretation, the simple fact that animal heads are applied exclusively to women in the tripartite moxer seems indisputably misogynist and intended to impugn their very humanity. Given that the male figures have normal, noble, and for the most part handsome faces, whereas the human countenance of the female figures is replaced with animal heads, one is hard pressed to conclude that anything other than inferiority associated with animality is included to the women depicted. Now in People of the Image, I describe a hierarchy within the iconography of the tripartite moxer. It's rich, it's complex, and I like this part. It's not entirely watertight. Some of it I feel I've solved. Of course that's only until one of you solves it again one day. In other cases I'm close, and in still other cases I'm perplexed. There are a few elements that are anomalous that don't fit into the hierarchy so neatly. So if you're familiar with the manuscript and you miss a discussion of a certain iconography, rest assured I am working on it. Again, I could not have done this work without recourse to the masterful research of Dr. Jofia Buda and Professor Sarit Shalev Eni. The hierarchy, as I understand it thus far, looks something like this. The main cast in terms of frequency of representation consists of monsters and monstrous human hybrids, and then of figures representing the biblical Israelites in the narrative scenes from Scripture illustrating the various liturgical poems in the manuscript. The monsters are wonderful, by which I mean they are hideous, deformed, disordered, hybrid, oppositional. They clearly represent the forces of chaos, lawlessness in the sense of the lack of Torah, and demonstrate a lack of spiritual refinement. At the other end of the spectrum entirely are the Israelite men who receive the Torah on Mount Sinai. They have completely human faces. They're purposeful, graceful, beautifully accoutred, and by context and their prayerful and attentive behavior pious and spiritually refined. And hovering somewhere in between the grotesque monsters and the dignified Israelite men, we have the Israelite women. These are human animal hybrids. They are not, it is important to stress, human monster hybrids, but human animal hyrids. Through them, the patrons explore a means of characterizing women as a collective, as a group of people. The fact that in the tripartite moxer, animal hybridity is reserved for women alone, makes these figures more ambiguous and much more ambivalent than those in the griffin set, where there are both male and female griffin-headed humans. Then there's the supporting cast, so to speak. The first of this category are the two female figures who represent the sign of lirgo in the two sets of zodiac illustrations. The countenances of these personifications are obviated or obstructed, but no facial substitution is made. You see, not being women of flesh and blood, symbolic females do not merit the negative commentary that animal faces would represent. As mere signifiers, they're not subject to the physical quote-unquote frilities of women, nor do they possess the potentially damning seductive power that disgraces and defames real women, and causes real women, even the holy women of the biblical narratives, to pose a mortal threat to men by, as Jophia Buddha has said, their gaze and our gaze, male gaze at them. The rabbis of the Talmud created a myth involving the imagined capture and imprisonment of the personification of sexual desire. Rather than destroy desire, they decided that since the sexual urge was necessary for the world to continue, they would blind desire and let it go. So, too, these figures are also blinded and let go, so to speak. They're slightly disfigured by the removal of an eye or the effacement of the face, but they're allowed to exist on the page as female personifications. The figures of the laborers, peasants or villains, being male, required neither obviation nor substitution, but being underclass and real rather than personifications and symbolic, they are graced or, shall we say, disgraced with distorted, rough countenances, bulbous noses, slitted eyes, protruding lips. In this manuscript, such distortion is the common fate of a class, the peasantry or laborers, whether Gentiles, as in these examples from the laborers of the months, or biblical Israelite men, as in the scenes from the Book of Ruth. Their Israelite blood fails to trump their underclass status. Note the contrast between the more refined features, pointed nose, thin lips, blonde hair of Boaz, and the lumpy-featured, thick-lipped, dark-haired countenance of his workers. Now, the tripartite moxer also depicts contemporary, that is medieval Jewish men. First, many of the biblical Israelite men are shown with the Judenhut, the Jewish hat, and contemporary garb. They are meant to do double duty, as it were, representing the contemporary Jewish man as his own biblical ancestor. I recall from my youth in dim antiquity, a somewhat ribbled comic song titled, I'm My Own Grandpa. This is a variation, I would say, on that theme. But there are two other Jewish men, dressed in contemporary garb, who are not meant to be biblical Israelites. One has had his head replaced with that of an eagle, but it's unclear when this was done. The illustration of suspiciously reworked and requires further examination. The other figure, which is in much better condition, has a completely human face and sports a Judenhut, a Jewish hat. The contrast between these two figures is one of the anomalies I mentioned that I discuss in the people of the image. But the bottom line here is that contemporary Jewish men are not depicted in the tripartite moxer as monstrous. They exist somewhere on a spectrum between the symbolism of Jewish transcendence represented by the eagle head in parallel to the figures in the griffin's head. To the completely human and consummately dignified. As the kids today so annoyingly say, it's all good. Okay, so much for contemporary medieval Jewish men. Only one final group remains. Now, it's a group that could easily escape notice because, well, it's not there. The group I speak of is contemporary that is medieval Jewish women medieval Jewish women contemporary Jewish women in this manuscript were neither a faced, nor were their faces replaced with those of animals. They were simply excluded completely and thus erased. It's admittedly difficult to retrospectively distill pizche halacha halachik that is legal judgments from the art we see before us. But the iconography clearly depicts certain things and avoids others obviates certain features obfuscates others erases some things, replaces others. This evidence seems to point to the idea that it was only identifiable female biblical characters with whom the patrons felt compelled to deal in the creative manner of facial substitution. Neither the symbolic female zodiac signs, nor the contemporary medieval Jewish women seem to oppose a similar threat. Now contemporary Jewish women, as you see here, were well represented in other manuscripts. For instance, in the griffin's head, we have at left couples at contemporary Passover tables. The man and the woman sit at each extremity of the table. The women are not involved by and large in the ritual. But we also have this amazing depiction on the right of the Seder, the Passover Eve celebration at home of messianic times, complete with the restored Passover sacrifice at the far right below where women and men are not separated but sit together and where women lift the ritual wine cups along with the men. But there appears not to be a single representation of a contemporary woman in the tripartite moxer. Contemporary women are thus neutralized by simple omission. The discrepancy between the approaches the griffin's head and the tripartite moxer is further proof of my oft-repeated contention that there can be no single unified theory of zoosephalism of animal-headedness in medieval art made for Jews. Indeed, each and every patronage context is different and unique. So here, in the tripartite moxer, while all female faces must always be effaced in some way, even those of symbolic females, it is the female figures that appear as particular women within narratives that occasion the strongest negative characterization. Women are animals, with all that that implies, as both rabbinic sources in antiquity and contemporary texts from Franco-Germany, from Ashkenaz, warn us they are primitive, servile, capricious, intellectually defective, and lustful. And yet, alongside this shameful negativity which pushes the female figures into the realm of the non-human and additional messages conveyed, these women embody certain values oppositional to that symbolic expression of inferiority. They are ingeniously, we might say, transparently depicted in such a way as to allow positive human traits such as beauty, order, emotional sensitivity, and piety to shine through the animal guises in a manner that actually acknowledges the human nature of the figures. They're not static masks or emotionless, hieratic heads, like the animal-headed gods, excuse me, of ancient Egyptian pantheon, nor are they reifications of the way in which the Holy Spirit overshadows and eclipses the human qualities of the evangelists in Byzantine and Insular Art. As in the Gryphins head Hakadah, the artists have allowed the human expressions to shine through. These are human animal heads, truly hybrid. Clearly, the patrons felt a mandate to obviate the faces of the Israelite women due to what Dr. Jofia Buddha has described as the problematics of the female gaze and of gazing at women, so they charged the artists to depict these women with animal heads. But these female human animal hybrids, unlike the monsters, are neither brutish in their aspect nor erratic and disorganized in their behavior. And frankly, given the many foley monstrous depictions we've been examining, the women could easily have been depicted as totally monstrous, hideous, deformed, disorganized, undignified, oppositional. But let me be crystal clear, the positive humanity of these figures does not counterbalance their negative animalization. The primary message of the iconography indisputably remains that women's nature is inferior to men's nature and that women are in some sense non-human. Yet in spite of their disgraceful and disfiguring status as women slash animals, they are graceful. They cut beautiful figures. They are orderly, emotionally sensitive and pious virtues that would be highly complementary for men are actually applied to these women as well, making them qualities that transcend gender into the realm of the potentially universally human. So in the midst of the retrograde misogyny of showing women as animals, the authorship, the patrons, and the artists they commission somehow rally to depict women as humans. I'll tell you another thing. Although contemporary, that is medieval Jewish women appear to be absent, as I said, from the iconography, given the fact that Jewish women are rarely depicted with any special Jewish garb, except for covered heads, in the case of married women, which is common in the depiction of most medieval women, Jewish or otherwise, it's entirely possible that these animal headed women are meant to do the same sort of double duty imputed to the Israelite men at Sinai. They might represent both biblical Israelite women and contemporary women, which makes my closing modest observations even more interesting in my opinion. It might just be that these biblical Israelite slash contemporary Jewish women are represented as being, so to speak, ahead of the men in some ways, even as they stand modestly behind them. Although they rise neither to the level of the priesthood is symbolized by Aaron's larger size and Bishop's miter, about which many have written, nor to that of prophecy is indicated by Moses' elevation. They stand physically on the same level as the male Israelites, and this I think is important. While the eyes of the male Israelites are directed forward toward the mediation of the divine presence through Aaron's priesthood and Moses' prophecy, the Israelites say to God, speak not to us, but speak through Moses to us, lest we die, right? So they're looking toward a mediated experience. The eyes of the women are directed upward toward the source of revelation. The first woman in particular is situated directly below and is gazing upward at the enormous golden aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, of the word adon, Lord. In both rabbinic literature and the mystical literature of Ashkenaz, the aleph represented revelation itself, Anohi, the first principle, the voice of God, in particular the unmediated experience of the ineluctable divine presence. This figure is holding a book, which has been noticed by several scholars and variously interpreted. But to me what's important is that she's not looking at the book. Her eyes instead and significantly are on the original, not the mediated source of revelation. Her eyes, to paraphrase the great Zora Neale Hurston, are watching God. In this sense, she resembles the virgin Anunciate, who deliberately turns away from the text on the lectern in favor of the direct experience of revelation and in doing so is overshadowed, indeed impregnated by the Holy Spirit, by the Word of God. The prayerful hands, the uplifted eyes of all the beastly women here bespeak this sort of direct connection with divine inspiration. One woman gazes directly at Moses and Aaron. I think that this is deliberately intended to mitigate the idea that women do not receive revelation through quote-unquote the usual channels as well, right? But perhaps, as my wife suggests, she's just looking at the men, which would mitigate the idea that all women are pious and focused only on the divine. I love the fact that images like this can be read in so many ways. Regardless, the body language of the majority of the female figures does impute to them a special, albeit provisionally spiritually refined status in spite of their omnipresent female animality. This is confusing to the 21st century mind. For us, evil, whether it's racism or anti-Semitism or misogyny, for instance, deeply and irretrievably taint everything it touches. How can we view the films of such and such a director when we know that he's coerced women or listen to the music of a 19th century composer who was an anti-Semite? How can we live in proximity with statues and monuments that celebrate so-called heroes who were, in retrospect, racists and imperialists? Furthermore, and if you know me, you know I don't shy away from contemporary analogies, how many Jewish women have been told by their pious and arguably well-meaning Orthodox friends that although those Jewish women seem to be legally disadvantaged in traditional Judaism, they are in reality treasured and valued because they have an inner spirituality that men just don't have. And that's why women don't need to perform the commandments. Men have mitzvah's commandments, they need them. Women by way of contrast get their spiritual sustenance directly from the source. Folks, I don't advocate this sort of justification for keeping women just disenfranchised from full participation in Jewish life and ritual religiously. But what I believe is beside the point here, the point is that Jews in early 14th century Ashtonize, Franco-Germany may have been telling their women and their communities and themselves the very same Bubbamyces, the very same fairy tales that one might hear in Golders Green or Stamford Hill in Muncie or Crown Heights today. This image may represent just such an apologetics. At the end of the day, the graceful, beautiful, orderly, emotionally sensitive, pious, yet animal-headed women of the tripartated Massar are a testimony to a particular paradox of the medieval mind, which in the normal course of things maintain that it was possible to hold two seemingly diametrically opposed interpretations of a single symbol at one and the same time and without contradiction. In the Palm Sunday sermon of the 12th century theologian Honorius of Autan, for instance, the devil, who according to 1st Peter, quote, skulks about seeking whom he might devour, is figured as a lion, seeking to undermine divine sovereignty to open persecution of the weak and defenseless. Yet just a couple of folios further on in the Speculum Ecclesia in his sermon for Easter Sunday Honorius tells us that the lion signifies Christ, who's called the lion of Judah. So which is it? Is the lion the devil or is it Christ? The answer, both simultaneously and without contradiction. I am not valorizing the observation that to the medieval mind contrary or contradictory values could be held in equal and simultaneous esteem. I'm not covertly suggesting, for instance, that we in the 20th century, 21st century, use the idea of an inherent women's spirituality to keep women down and out of full religious participation. I'm merely reflecting upon an aspect of medieval consciousness. Like Honorius' lion, hybrids and art made for medieval Jewish audiences could assume positive or negative valence, depending on the context and the intent of the iconography. And they could sometimes bear both kinds of meanings simultaneously. And female hybrids in particular, specifically those in the tripartite moxer, could express positive values in spite of their animality. As humans inhabiting a complex and confusing world, it behooves us to learn to live with and appreciate uncertainty, paradox, contradiction, and alterity. For it is in the interstices, the gaps between the things we know and understand and can relate to, and the things we don't know, don't understand and can't relate to, that we can glean the most cogent and lasting insights about our culture, our religions, our histories, and ourselves. Thank you very much. I'm now ready to answer some questions. So, let's see. Okay, we have a question from, from Julie Harris. Hello Julie. If there's no unified system of so ascephaly and medieval Jewish art in Ashtonizing manuscripts, can one speak of a Jewish visuality? Right, I think you can speak, it's an excellent question, of course. Julie's another one of my great heroes. One can speak, if not of a Jewish visuality, then of a provisional and pragmatic approach. In other words, if the first manuscripts had faces erased because they were received and the patron said, oh my god, there's a face here, we didn't intend that, right? And then patrons started saying, well, if we have to erase faces, can we replace them with something else? How you replace them and what you replace them with would have been ad lib, right, would have been up to each patronage configuration. So, I think it's, you know, there is Jewish visuality, but is there a Jewish visuality? Is there a singular sort of approach? I would say no. Okay. In the book, do you propose any further solutions for the ethnic monsters? Good question, also. I'm thinking about the ethnic monsters and trying to sort of tally where they come from, which ones seem African, which ones seem European, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm trying to place each of them in its proper context. I'm even interested, by the way, in the Duke of Sussex Pentateuch in the Four Knights around the Tabernacle, because they seem to me to be manifesting four distinctive facial expressions, which might be associated with the humors, right? So now I'm doing a study, a sort of layered study of the way mystical texts in this period and place looked at the four humors and whether they were correlated with the various, the four major tribes camped around the Tabernacle. The difficulty is that when you look at images that are, that portray emotion or are meant to depict the humors, let's say, human characteristics, they are A, abstract, and B, it's subjective what you're seeing. So that area, the area of emotion, I have a unit in my new book on emotion in art made for Jews of the Middle Ages, is a tricky area to navigate. On the other hand, if we claim that it's all speculation, we shouldn't say anything, then we're stuck in a morass of interpretive paralysis. And at my back, I always hear times, winged chariot hurring near. If I have something to say, even if it's speculative, I'll say it, I'll bounce it off you, the public scholars and others and see where we take it together. Okay, another question. Does the Phrygian hat nullify the normal face? Because the Phrygian hat on that Arab monster, the Phrygian hat is used very often to indicate foreignness or even monstrousness. I would say that the Phrygian hat is just a placeholder to differentiate between the Arab, the African head, which shows close cropped hair, or kinky hair, right? And the Arab head, which has a similar complexion, right? But this way, we sort of situate this person in the east rather than the south of Europe, the extreme east rather than the extreme south. I think it's a place marker for that. Are the women in the tripartite moxer shown with animal heads to prevent the male viewer from becoming aroused? Or, you know, on the other side, from invading there, that is, the image is privacy. So, you know, I quote, I mentioned and quoted a lot, Dr. Jofia Budda, as well as Professor Sarichalov-Ani and Dr. Professor Eva Firmovich, each of them, to some degree, has dealt with this question. The most developed treatment is in Budda and Shalev-Ani and it really, it's clear, it's obvious, I think, from what they wrote and from your own observation, it would be natural to think that both, you don't want to gaze at women, right? And that women's gaze, and this was, I think, an innovation of Dr. Budda, women's gaze itself is a dangerous thing. But this idea of invading their privacy, that the male gaze would be on the woman, the biblical woman, and therefore would be inappropriate from her perspective, even though she is just shown in two dimensions, is both a very smart, a very sensitive and a very charming suggestion. So, I like that. I mean, I, look, the protagonists are no longer around to be interrogated. So, we're never going to get answers to these questions. All we can hope to do is to build up what I call a plausible constellation of possibilities. And in a plausible constellation of possibilities, you can have two things just as an honoris existing in the same time, interpretively as well. So, the woman gazing at the men might just be a reminder to us that women also get revelation through the normal channels, don't think they're all, you know, these spiritual giants, or it might be as Agi, my wife said, right, you know, that women like to look at men, especially in synagogue, right? And those things are not contradictory. They may exist at the same time. Okay. Oh, question. You guys are a smart audience. Okay. Robert Marcus is the animalization of the feminine face, the way of diminishing the lustful nature of the male gaze. Yes, I think we've covered that. I talked a little bit about emotions. Monsters have a very limited range of emotions. Someone asked about emotions. Monsters have a limited range of emotions, right? They range from, you know, insane to ferocious, right? But these women you see, and the men too, they have an inwardness, they have a reflectiveness, they have a directedness in the Gryffindor's head, it's fabulous. Everybody in spite of these bizarre Gryphon heads is going around, you know, with consummate seriousness, doing their business, interacting with each other, smiling or frowning. It's remarkable what this relatively simple art can do when it comes to the expression of emotion. Jason Lieberman. Jason, hi! I've never met Jason Lieberman, but we've had an extensive correspondence, and he is one of the smartest people out there, although he's not an academic. Good for you, Jason. Okay. In the Duke of Sussex manuscript, can you explain the seemingly nonverbal communication going on between the Israelite Knights, right? So they're each looking at each other in a certain way. So I've postulated in a little article, I think I published it in Mosaic or something, I have to dig it out, but it's certainly in the book about the emotional, the inner emotional life of these figures. And they are, they are engaged in some kind of interaction with each other, but I don't think it's a conversation going on as much as each is in their individual realm, acting out a certain kind of personality, right? Or humor, sanguine, choleric, melancholy, right? You know, each of these is represented by a different facial look, and you do have that. The monsters on the other hand are mocking each other, and they're amazing. I have to give a shout out. I have to say something. I don't know how many people are here or what, you know, if it's mostly academics or mostly laypeople. Jason Lieberman is one of these people who wrote me out of nowhere. He lives in Florida. He works, you know, he has a business, right? And started making observations about manuscripts. We've had a correspondence, mostly him, because I don't get back as often as I should, where he makes these observations that I never could come up with. The more eyes on something, the better. And that's the great thing about the British Library and about digitization. Anybody anywhere in the world can get on the website and make, if you have a pair of eyes, make as cogent observations as we've made here. So thank you, Jason, and to all others like you. And you must keep on looking. That's, you know, I say to my students, looking good, meaning you're looking well. You see things well. Okay. Other questions? Anything? Nothing at the moment comes through. I have to say, the first time I walked into the British Library and met Alana Tan, and she guided me through the, you know, all the requisite applications and, you know, requests, et cetera, et cetera. It was such a thrill and a pleasure to be able to interact with somebody who's not only knowledgeable about what's in the collection, but interested in what's in what's in the collection, right? Because it's one thing to say, you know, I have 17, you know, Coptic Bibles and 12 Haggadahs, right? But to be interested in iconography, I mean, her book, Hebrew manuscripts, which was published in the British Library series with one on Christian, one on Islamic manuscripts is really a masterpiece and very, very thoughtful one. You know, being in this field, you sometimes get the feeling that you are, you know, an expert in this field. It's like being in the penthouse apartment of a one-story building. Like there's like six other people in the world who are interested in this stuff. But the truth is that as I hope I demonstrated here, and you know, just listening to your questions and comments, it opens up worlds to be able to look at something that so many hundreds of years old and understand that it's not just about dates and style and color and hand shapes and eye shapes, right? But there are human beings. There were human beings behind all of these things. And they were human beings who had emotions like us, who had politics like us, you know, we have a tremendous alterity from them. We're very, very distant from them in many ways. But looking at the work that they commissioned and the commissions themselves, Jews ordering manuscripts for non-Jews, collaboration, right? Truly a magnificent area to study whether you are a professional or a hobbyist. So you all have my email, maepstein at vassar.edu. And I sincerely hope that if you have further questions or you just like to get in touch or you have observations, no observation is too crazy for me. I'm very, very interested in what people see in manuscripts. I often miss stuff. You know, I've missed stuff for 30 years and a student will come and say, this is, you know, did you notice? I'm like, what? No, I didn't notice. But now you have, right? When I first started writing about the Griffins head hug that time and published it, someone wrote me this email that said, Professor Epstein, after 100 years, you seem to have definitively solved the mystery of the Griffins head hug data. And I shot back an email as one does on email, kind of annoyed. And my email said, no, I've only solved it until you solve it again. And indeed, that is what we should be doing as scholars of medieval art made for Jews. We should be seeking, we should be humble about what we don't know, seeking solutions and inviting others to come and solve it again after we've even apparently solved it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for joining us today. A very special thank you goes to Professor Mark Epstein and also to you, our audience. We have an exciting range of events linked to the Hebrew manuscripts exhibition. Do please keep an eye on the what's on pages on our website for more information. Thank you very much again for joining us today.