Reed O’Mara
(June 2025)
In the summer of 2023, on a trip to London to research Hebrew illuminated manuscripts at the British Library, I met Laura Feigen, a PhD candidate at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Like me, Laura focuses on illuminated manuscripts made by and/or for Jewish communities in the Middle Ages. Little did I know that this meeting would result in a years-long collaboration. In Laura’s West Hampstead apartment, feeling the kind of excitement that only results from meeting someone who shares the same passion for a very under-researched topic, Laura and I came up with an increasingly ambitious plan to support a burgeoning area of study within Jewish art history—the long lives of medieval Judaica, Hebraica, and Jewish architecture. We felt that Jewish art, as representative of communities that were repeatedly transformed and moved by internal and external forces, can highlight ideas related to collective memory and cultural identity. Works of art and architecture uniquely trace the history of particular Jewish communities by mapping their migrations and traditions across generations and geographies.
This past May saw the culmination of those plans with the international two-day symposium, Tracing Jewish Histories: The Long Lives of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, Judaica, and Architecture. The symposium sought to open new dialogues on the long lives and afterlives of medieval Jewish art writ large, initiating discussions about the ways in which works of art and architecture continued to bear witness to the richness of Jewish life and culture long after they were created. An early case study for registering interest in this topic came in the form of a conference session sponsored by the International Center for Medieval Art at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds that Laura and I put together. Titled Afterlives and Legacies: Interventions in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, the session focused solely on manuscripts with layered histories of use, but it opened the door for thinking more seriously about what an entire symposium on the theme of long lives and afterlives could do for Jewish art history at this particular moment, when so many in our field are (re)considering the place of Jewish culture within medieval and modern history as well as histories of collecting and display. (You can learn more about the Leeds session here).
Sponsored by the Department of Art History and Art at CWRU, Sam Fogg, the Mellon Foundation, and The Medieval Academy of America Graduate Student Committee Grant for Innovation in Community Building and Professionalization with additional support from The Courtauld, the symposium featured five sessions and eighteen speakers. Opening and closing remarks were given by Tom Nickson (The Courtauld) and Elina Gertsman (CWRU), respectively, with the latter offering an extended response to the themes and topics of the entire symposium. The first four sessions of the symposium covered topics from spolia in synagogue architecture to the “conversion” of objects and spaces from Jewish to Christian purposes, all the way to the tracing of objects’ provenances across time and place. The final session, a curatorial roundtable titled “Problems and Priorities: The Acquisition and Display of Jewish Material Culture in Museums,” opened conversations around the importance and sustained difficulty of including Jewish material culture in (particularly canonical or encyclopedic) museum displays. Facilitated by Elizabeth Morrison (J. Paul Getty Museum), the productive conversation featured Simona Di Nepi (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Riva Arnold (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Alice Minter (Victoria & Albert Museum). The symposium brought together scholars from universities, libraries, and museums across the U.S., U.K., Spain, Germany, and Israel. Graduate students from CWRU and The Courtauld volunteered at the symposium as session chairs and merit special recognition: Tess Artis, Allison Boroff, Sarah Frisbie, Claudia Haines, Darren Helton, Olga Morgalyuk, Natalia Muñoz-Rojas, and Sam Truman.
From its inception, Laura and I were committed to making object-based study the centerpiece of the symposium. To that end, we sought to arrange a session to view Judaica in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Alice Minter was instrumental to making this vision come to fruition. I believe that the faces of the speakers who attended the handling session say it all!
Ultimately, this symposium would never have been realized without the support of Elina Gertsman, who repeatedly exclaimed “Go for it!” and offered words of encouragement and advice at the exact moments when Laura and I needed to hear them the most. I am so grateful to her and to the others who continually invested in our ideas with excitement and energy, among them all our volunteers and speakers, but especially Riva Arnold, Alixe Bovey, Simona Di Nepi, Alice Minter, Elizabeth Morrison, and Tom Nickson. It is my feeling that this symposium would never have taken place if not for the sustained invaluable support the joint art history program between CWRU and the Cleveland Museum of Art gives to its graduate students.
A recording of Tracing Jewish Histories: The Long Lives of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, Judaica, and Architecture is now available on The Courtauld’s YouTube channel (Day 1 and Day 2). You can find the symposium’s webpage at the following link: https://tinyurl.com/mr2w5p5d.
