ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the evidence with the aim of describing the political and intellectual milieu in which the paradoxical and modern notion of Jewish art was first formulated. When the Vienna Genesis was published in 1895, the Landesmuseum in Sarajevo had already acquired the Sarajevo Haggadah from a long-established sephardic family. The 1898 publication of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Hebrew illuminated manuscript from fourteenth-century Catalonia, is a celebrated event within the small world of historical scholarship on medieval Jewish art and Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. The monographic publications of the Vienna Genesis and the Sarajevo Haggadah are also similar in that their historiographic importance has matched the art-historical significance of the manuscripts themselves. The endurance of the myth of Jewish aniconism within the scholarly academy is a factor that helps to explain the trajectory of Jewish art studies since 1898. The publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia marks the moment of Jewish art's acceptance into mainstream Jewish intellectual culture.
