ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the theme of 'Jewish aniconism' from the perspective of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the nineteenth-century intellectual movement that sought to forge a modern European Jewish identity with the help of historical-critical inquiry. The Wissenschaft des Judentums had little affinity with art and the visual. Working in the spirit of early nineteenth-century cultural nationalism, Leopold Zunz had little choice but to base his approach on that of contemporary philology, a discipline which was then celebrated as the ultimate tool for diagnosing a nation's cultural content and quality. In his footsteps, The Wissenschaft developed a hermeneutic that was highly sensitive to national features like language and literature, while showing a consistent neglect of universal values such as beauty and aesthetics. When, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, judische Kunst finally found its way onto the Wissenschaft's agenda, its interpretation continued to rely on the textual and historical strategies of national philology.