ABSTRACT
It is a story of a passage from cultural mimicry to cultural translation made possible by a dialogue in the everyday between minoritised Jewish patrons and scribes on the one hand, and Christian illuminators on the other. Jewish patrons had not previously commissioned manuscripts illuminated with narrative images. There were drawn illustrations in the form of micrography. An ancient Talmudic procedure called 'annulment of idolatry', which involved partial and strategic defacement by 'idolaters' of specific facial features before their Jewish owners could legitimately take possession, may have been invoked to compel a Christian to deface the images before Joseph ben Moses took possession. The elect and the damned are thoroughly human, but they have animal heads. It is possible that such animal-headed creatures in Latin prayer books provided the illuminators of the Hebrew Bible with artistic resources for the concealment and masking of the human face.
