ABSTRACT
Although tattoos are generally perceived as antithetical to Jewish practice, this paper sketches a Jewish discourse of tattoos as otiyyot, a term used in biblical and rabbinic sources to refer to physical signs of God’s relationship with Israel, signs often central to Jewish rituals. The first section fleshes out the historic Jewish ban on tattoos rooted in Leviticus and its rabbinic interpreters, contrasting this to other positive depictions of writing on the body in Isaiah and Genesis which can (and were) read as referring to tattoos. The second section reads the work of Jewish tattoo artist and Hebrew calligrapher Gabriel Wolff as otiyyot. Wolff’s Hebrew tattoos generate meaning both through their verbal content and their embodied form—the bodies of those being inscribed as well as the bodies of Hebrew letterforms. This chapter also shows how his tattoos, like otiyyot, serve as tools of memory.
