Itinerant Sephardic Judaica

In recent years, a number of American encyclopedic museums have shown growing attention to an area traditionally ignored by the art historical canon: Jewish ritual art—or Judaica. ¹ With exception made for the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which have been respectively collecting and displaying Judaica since the early 1980s and the late 1990s, such initiatives by nonspecialized American art museums surfaced in the 2010s (at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) and the 2020s (at the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston). ² This late awakening is especially perplexing when considering that Judaica is, by its very nature, encyclopedic: Jewish ceremonial items form a wide-ranging field, spanning geographic regions, periods, and media. The exceptional variety is living testament to the diversity of Jewish visual culture across history, and to the consistent adoption by Jewish communities of the artistic language of their so-called host culture.