Marc Michael Epstein is professor of religion and visual culture and director of Jewish studies at Vassar College. He is the author of, among other books, The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (2011) and Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts (2015).
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One recent Saturday morning, I was following the Torah portion from a late-13th-century manuscript and noticed some strange faded text and stress lines. What did they mean?
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A professor of Jewish art finds himself turning from one explanation of a puzzling drawing found in an old manuscript to another—and then possibly back again.
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Christian Renaissance paintings of the Temple are the visual record of a theology that had devastating consequences in the lives of Jews from antiquity to the Middle Ages and beyond.
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Why do Christian depictions of the Jewish Temple look like the Dome of the Rock, the 7th-century Muslim structure built on that site?
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It's not that they were exceptionally sophisticated or tolerant, as one popular recent article would have it—it's that they lived surrounded by people who raised pigs.
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Why, in all of Jewish art, is there no image depicting the moment of Moses’ death?
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How the 14th-century creators of an illustrated Pentateuch managed to reflect both the Jewish and the Christian worlds they lived in.
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A few months ago, I was approached with a request to become involved in a then-secret mission: to examine one of the very few high-medieval Haggadahs still in private hands.
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The mystery of Zipporah's pout.
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A sumptuous new book collects 100 examples of decorated and illuminated haggadahs from across Europe, Israel, America, and beyond.
Unlock the most serious Jewish, Zionist, and American thinking.
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