ABSTRACT
The art of papercut, or cutting designs in paper or in parchment, is a traditional Jewish creative art form. The earliest record of papercuts dates back to a humorous text from 1345: “Milḩemet ha’et ve’ha’misparaim” (The Battle of the Pen and the Scissors) written by Rabbi Shem-Tov ben Yitzhak ben Ardutiel of Spain. Then it is mentioned in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries regarding the development of papercut in Central Europe. Ketubbot and the Book of Esther embellished with papercuts, common among Italian Jews, came from that period. This art form reached its peak in the nineteenth century due to the widespread use of paper at every social stratum. Papercuts from that period come mostly from Ashkenazi Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe and from Sephardic Jews living in the Ottoman Empire, especially in Turkey. This art was known to the Jewish population living in North Africa as well as to Jews from Iraq and Syria; alas, only a few items from that population survive. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the art of papercut was introduced to the United States by immigrants from Eastern Europe, where the art form began to disappear by the mid-twentieth century. The tradition was revived in the 1960s in Israel and in the United States and, later, in Poland and continues to develop.
