The letter “I” that begins the Latin translation of the first book of the Hebrew Bible is shaped by an unusual series of illuminations in the 13th-century Abbey Bible from Bologna, Italy. The letter’s vertical body is composed of blue, ochre, and gilt rondelles, illustrating each day of the Creation. But the letter’s elongated base shows another set of events: the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The message is that those three events form the foundation of the entire Creation, giving meaning to all of earthly history. It becomes impossible to read the text without being made aware of these implications. In this way, the primal origins outlined in the Hebrew book, B’reishit, are transformed and reinterpreted for the Christian reader.

This Bible was on display in 2022 at the Getty Museum’s exhibition, Painted Prophecy: The Hebrew Bible Through Christian Eyes, an exhibition in which many aspects of Jacob Wisse’s discussion of this theme in Mosaic were evident, particularly repeated pictorial attempts to turn the descriptions and narratives of the Hebrew Bible into allegorical anticipations of Christianity. In a Latin version of a 13th-century psalter, for example, an illumination accompanying Psalm 68 shows King David—the presumed author of the psalms—wrestling with a winged demon. Though the text promises that all such enemies would be vanquished by God, here, the implication is that the actual vanquishing will be done by a figure painted above the king—the Son of God, descendant of the House of David. David’s psalms and David’s triumphs prefigure a future salvation. Of course, this repeated approach also lessens the centrality and importance of the Hebrew Bible itself.

This polemical impulse, which Wisse describes in his essay, may be even more potent when it emerges in illuminations instead of free-standing art works, because the modified interpretations are literally embedded in the text. In many Gothic cathedrals, the effect is even more physically potent than that: the building itself becomes a demonstration. In a recent book, Paris and Her Cathedrals, R. Howard Bloch, who teaches French and humanities at Yale, notes that the 12th-century cathedral at Saint-Denis near Paris contains many images from the Hebrew Bible that are meant to serve as an “anagogic” prelude to Christianity.

A stained-glass window in Saint-Denis, for example, chronicles the life of Moses. But this is not the Moses of the Hebrew text; he wearing a pointed hat like those mandated for Jews in medieval France. Another window is a response: it chronicles the birth and infancy of Jesus. The giving of the law in one window is answered by the implied overcoming of the law by faith in the other, and a new hierarchy of understanding is thereby established.

Such juxtapositions are so deeply woven into the symbolic language of the cathedral that few could miss the central message: Judaism itself was being supplanted. This remained an unquestioned aspect of Catholic belief for centuries. So it is no surprise that this sense of a superannuated religion could also be readily applied to the Jews themselves, with all their supposed narrow (and national) interests, who were now displaced by the new Christian dispensation, universalist and transnational in its pretense.

It is not difficult to see the remnants of this conviction even today. The perversities of pro-Hamas demonstrations and the contorted condemnations of Israel embedded into university life treat Jewish particularity or nationalism as a primitive offense against an enlightened universalism. This is asserted with enough sleight of hand that its inversion of the truth is hardly noticed. I have even seen an entire museum exhibition proclaim its own ecumenicism with one hand, while—knowingly and unknowingly—displacing Jewish history and belief with the other. This was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2016 exhibition, Jerusalem 1000-1400; Every People Under Heaven; I have drawn attention to its many contortions and distortions here in Mosaic.

But still, as Dr. Wisse points out, Christian artists have also treated the Hebrew Bible in ways that are free of these polemical impulses. Or, if even if they were attracted by the Christian religious implications, this became irrelevant because they are lured by the texts themselves which are replete with physical and worldly detail, precise in their descriptions, and resonant with implications beyond the theological. The texts are pictorial. And a painterly realism often discloses their non-religious preoccupations—ethical, dramatic, psychological.

Such an approach to the text also had to have been accompanied by an attentiveness to the language that first brought these events to life, to the prose and poetry of biblical Hebrew. A special kind of advocacy along these lines arose in the 16th century under the watch of English Protestant Hebraism. It isn’t that Christian Hebraists did not care about the allegorical use of the Bible or did not believe in its supposed prophetic meanings; but their attention was so close to the language and to the texts—ranging from the Tanakh through to mystical literature—that Hebraism took on its own life as a discipline.

In 1566, for example, Thomas Neal, then Regius professor of Hebrew at Oxford University wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth I on her visit to the university, urging her to continue to support the study of Hebrew that her father, Henry VIII, had enshrined at Oxford. Neal’s letter began with a Latin poem accompanied by the image of a tree. This tree, he said, represents Hebrew learning: “Its boughs have grown with pride, Elizabeth, from your coins./ God the Creator first planted it in the Garden of Eden, and ordered humanity to speak in Hebrew.”

It was accompanied by two other messages to the queen that were written in Hebrew. A paper by Aaron D. Rubin and Gary A. Rendsburg offers a translation of the first which I cite in full. With its biblical echoes and its sincerity, it illustrates how closely connected some aspects of Protestant Hebraism were to the humanist ideals of early modernity, invoking “ha-Shem” and the virtues of peace, knowledge, study, lovingkindness, wisdom and goodness:

1. Were King David to ask me, I would say about Saul, who died in battle
2. at the hands of the Philistines, that he was the one who clothed them in crimson and finery,
3. and who placed ornaments of gold on their garments. All the more so we are obliged to say
4. about you, O greatly honoured Queen Elizabeth, for on your account
5. the Lord has blessed us with all goodness. Because in your kingdom He has set our borders
6. in peace, and He has removed all cruelty, so that your people may live securely.
7. And those who seek knowledge have set their hearts to study in peace that which
8. they desire to comprehend. Therefore, we thank you forever, all of us together and I
9. individually, more than all others, with all our might. And you astonish us with your lovingkindness,
10. and your great mercy abounds over us, by giving to us those who teach and inst-
11. ruct us in the courses of all knowledge and all wisdom. Please continue
12. to promote goodness for us each day, and to grant us repose and quietude for our studies,
13. so that we will always have cause to pray to the Lord under your peace
14. with all goodness.
16. May ha-Shem keep you and grant you length of days,
17. and an abundance of joys in His presence, and delights
18. at His right hand for eternity. Amen

Interestingly, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where this document is kept, traces its origins to Sir Thomas Bodley, who had served as an ambassador for Elizabeth I and was also a Hebraist. A half century later, devotion to the language of the Hebrew Bible led some Puritan writers to argue that Hebrew should become the language of the New World. As Neal’s poem suggests, the language itself seemed to possess attributes that were reflected in the character of the stories being told. And the biblical narratives impressed their character on the language in turn.

This attentiveness to the Hebrew Bible—even if not to the Hebrew language itself—also had an impact on the art music tradition (a subject that would require considerably more attention than I can give it here). G.F. Handel, a German composer living in England, created oratorios that were drawn directly from the narratives of the Hebrew Bible; works such as Israel in Egypt and Esther are transmutations of the original narrative, with no explicit musical or textual references anticipating Christian salvation. (In Esther the plea for mercy—deemed a Christian virtue—is put in the mouth of Haman. At the very least, such examples suggest much contemporary Western culture is losing out by failing to treat the narratives of the Hebrew Bible—and their language—as an essential part of our cultural patrimony.)

In thinking about Wisse’s resonant analyses, another question arises. If the language and texts of the Hebrew Bible offer a different lure than Christian interpretations that are imposed on them, what, apart from the doctrinal, is the nature of that difference? Here it might be suggestive to compare Christian illuminations of Hebrew texts with Jewish illuminations of the same texts.

Christian illumination significantly influenced Jewish illumination (and there are even instances when the illumination of Hebrew texts were done by Christian artists). In 15th-century Italy, for example, one recurring Christian motif portrayed the Virgin with a unicorn on her lap; the unicorn had a symbolic association with Christ. But the unicorn also took on a symbolic importance in Jewish illumination; unicorn hunts could become allusions to episodes of persecution of the innocent. It isn’t always clear, though, how to interpret such symbols when they appear in unexpected contexts. A 1472 Hebrew Bible from Italy shows a woman with a unicorn along with an image of Adam and Eve about to eat the forbidden fruit. How is this to be interpreted? Was a Christian illustrator involved, pointedly adding a Christological allusion like the base of the I at the Getty? Was it a reminder of innocence’s vulnerability at the moment when it was about to be lost?

But Jewish illumination still seems to have a different character. The extraordinary Kennicott Bible was created in northwestern Spain in the mid-1470s, less than twenty years before the expulsion of Jews from Spain, by the scribe Moses ben Asher (Moses ibn Zabarah) and the artist Joseph ibn Hayyim. The Hebrew text is vocalized and has cantillation marks throughout. Gilded carpet designs mark divisions between sections and books. Some illuminations are extensions of the script, as in the examples of micrography in which miniscule letters of the text are shaped into images or geometrical designs. Ritual objects, particularly menorahs, also make an appearance, along with illustrations: an illumination for the book of Jonah shows the whale swallowing the prophet just under a boat in which two oblivious noblemen converse.

But the overall tone draws on other traditions. Islamic-influenced geometric arabesques appear here, as do fantastical mythological creatures. The illuminations are largely celebrations, explosions of exuberance and fancy. There seems to be little attempt to illuminate the text in an interpretive fashion. This could also be a way of treating the Hebrew narrative as something inviolate while associating its reading (and vocalization) with contemplative and playful pleasure.

This is, of course, quite different from the familiar examples of Christian illumination. Illumination and illustration are secondary, sensual offerings, not delivering an interpretation or directing how the text is to be understood. It is almost as if they were attending not to the text’s meaning but to the text’s effects or even to its place in the reader’s life.

That is the impression made by the illumination and illustration that can be found in the Washington Haggadah created in 1478 and now in the Library of Congress. It is signed by Joel ben Simeon, who worked as a scribe in both Italy and Germany (a facsimile has been published by Harvard University Press).

There are some straightforward images, as in the almost cartoonish images of the four sons—the simple son is a jester with a drum, while the wise son sits in a straight-backed chair with an open book. There are also a few elaborate medievalesque images of the plagues and the exodus.

What is most remarkable are the domestic scenes involving preparations for Passover. A man pours wine into goblets. A servant pumps bellows on a fire. On the page on which “Dayenu” appears—a song celebrating the accumulated benefits of divine assistance ranging from the Exodus to the Israelites’ entry in the promised land—a woman is pictured warily holding out a cup of broth to a half-drunken, begoitered man—a vagabond welcomed into the home—who is sitting near a spit of roasting Paschal lamb.

Many of the illustrations, in fact, are images of Passover as put into practice, a real-world fulfillment of the Haggadah’s commands that we look upon its story as if it were happening now and to each of us. The illustrations remind us that while we recall the crossing of the Red Sea, we are not actually fleeing slavery. We are reading discussions about how to recall it along with descriptions of the ritual practices we engage in during such recollections. We are in the midst of the ordinary in these illustrations, seeing ritual coming into being; we look up (or at this Haggadah) and see food being made ready along with the difficult practices of charity. This is actually how the story happens for each of us.

The images make us aware of the personal and particular. What we see around us isn’t always pretty. There are difficulties and human failings. But they are there too in the text’s narratives. And the interplay is something that changes over time, with each ritual re-telling, whether of the Haggadah or the Hebrew Bible. The reader’s annual ritual re-reading may illuminate the text, but the text also illuminates its reader. As it is re-read, any illustration of what is described in the text becomes less important than what we see around us; that is why the emphasis is on the text’s effects on us rather than on hammering home what it is actually saying. As for that, well, that we must work out as we work out the lives we live under its guidance. Is this, perhaps, one of the points of Jewish textual illumination?