Italy: New Publication about Padua Cemetery and Renaissance Gravestones

Padua, Italy. Jewish cemetery.  Gravestone of Leb Lodi, ca. 1545.  One of many similar portico front stone from the mid-16th century.  Photo: David Malkiel (see below).

Italy: New Publication about Padua Cemetery and Renaissance Gravestones

David Malkiel, “Renaissance in the Graveyard: the Hebrew Tombstones of Padua and Ashkenazic Acculturation in Sixteenth-Century Italy": AJS Review 37:2 (November 2013), 333-370. 

You can read the article here

David Malkiel has published a thoughtful and detailed article based on the nearly 100 sixteenth-century Hebrew gravestones extant at the Jewish cemetery in Padua.  This is the second Jewish cemetery of the famous university town and Jewish center located close to Venice.  The first was destroyed in the war of the League of Cambrai in 1509, the same war that brought so many Jewish refugees to Venice and thus stimulated the creation of the first official Italian ghetto in 1516.

In Padua, where more than 1200 Jewish funerary inscriptions survive from between 1530-1860, Malkiel is able to use both the architectural form of the stones and the commemorative and literary content of their inscriptions to trace a pattern of accommodation and acculturation between Italian Jews (italiani) and Ashkenazi Jews (tedeschi) during the 16th century.

Malkiel summarizes his findings thus: "The literary features of the inscriptions indicate a shift from a preference for epitaphs written in prose, like those in medieval Germany, to epitaphs in the form of Italian Jewry's occasional poetry.  The art and architecture of the tombstones are part and parcel of the renaissance ambient, with the portals and heraldry characteristic of Palladian edifices.  The lettering, too, presents a shift from the constituency's medieval Ashkenazi origins to its Italian setting."

This is a very rich article - and there is a lot more in it regarding the relationship to tombstone design to formal designs for Arks in synagogues interiors, for parochets and for title pages for Hebrew printed books.  

Malkiel writes: " Architectural frames were conventionally used in early modern Europe to structure a broad range of objects, including mantels, moldings, candelabra, and illuminated documents. The classical portico, with pediment, entablature, columns, and portal, began appearing in Italy in the early fifteenth century. The portico became extremely popular, and served to ornament the title pages of books, as well as actual buildings.  Italy’s Jews, too, applied the portico to Hebrew title pages, in print and manuscript, and also to the illuminated ketubah, or marriage contract.  In the graveyard, the gable represents the portico, especially when accompanied by entablature and pilasters. A series of portico tombstones from the latter half of the sixteenth century have a distinctly Palladian character.

Importantly, the author is emphatic in stating "it is certain that Catholic tombstones could not have inspired the Jewish gravestones. The Jewish gravestone had no analogue in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, including the 16th-century.  This claim surprised me - and if true it is very important for identifying a unique development of style and taste for Jewish art.  I'll have to check around at Italian Christian graves. 

Malkiel also writes at length about the many personal and family emblems that decorate stones and place the deceased within the local social structure, and he writes how Ashkenazi Jews gradually - or sometimes not so gradually - accepted Italian language and social mores. I hope this study proves a model for work elsewhere in Italy.  The stones of the Venice cemetery have been fully published, and so are ready for deeper analysis.  I don't know about the state of work on the many other Italian Jewish cemeteries...I'll report back!

USA: A Visit to Boston's Vilna Shul

 Boston, Mass. Vilna Shul.  These Jewish Stars welcome the visitor on Beacon Hill.  Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013

USA: A Visit to Boston's Vilna Shul
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) Last may I posted about Boston's former Blue Hill Avenue Synagogue, a mighty building saved today as a working church. When I was in Boston again in December for the Association for Jewish Studies Annual Meeting I had a chance to visit the most modest (haimish) Vilna Shul on Beacon Hill, a building with which I have a long association, and which has always been one of my favorite American synagogue preservation projects.  I want to thank Executive Director Barnet Kessel for taking the time to show me around.

The building was saved from the wrecking ball back in the early 1990s - Historic Boston took the lead in that and they called me in as an outside expert (I hardly was at that time) to make the case for saving the building. In the end, through a tortured set of circumstances, Boston did the right thing and kept this old immigrant synagogue on Beacon Hill and gradually over the past two decades a growing community of interest has formed to move conservation and preservation efforts forward, and to fill the building with a wide range of activities: educational, recreational and religious. The Havurah on the Hill which has met at Vilna since 2002 helps keep the spirit (and spirituality) of Judaism alive at the building, while the proximity to the Boston Freedom Trail has better connected the Jewish immigrant story to the larger Boston historical and social experience.

The topography of the Vilna site is unusual, and is one contributing factor to the placement of the main sanctuary on the upper floor (there are others reasons, too). So the downstairs,  entered directly from street level, takes you into a relatively low and long space that served as the congregational Beth Midrash, and probably for a mix of social and educational purposes. Today, the Ark wall remains pretty much as it was, and the old paint has been revealed with its decorative motifs (painted vases of flowers flanked the Ark). Most of the space is given over to a permanent exhibit about Boston Jewish history.

Boston, Mass. Vilna Shul. Ground floor Beth Midrash, Ark wall. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013

 

Boston, Mass. Vilna Shul. Sanctuary. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013

Boston, Mass. Vilna Shul. Sanctuary. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013

This time around I was especially interested in looking at the painted decoration that has been revealed underneath the sickly beige paint that had long covered the synagogue walls. Gradually, we are understanding the original decoration scheme and there are plans on the books to recreate this in a later phase of restoration. My interest has been revived because my recent experience in Burlington, Vermont visiting the so-called Lost Shul Mural at the former Chai Adam Synagogue. All this decoration was work by and for the immigrant Lithuanian-Jewish community of New England. The Burlington and Boston communities had links still to be fully explored. Interest is greater now, too, since the publication of of the important 2-volume study of the Synagogues in Lithuania. This detailed study documents all that remains of synagogues within the boundaries of modern Lithuania--and it sadly documents (or suggests) by inference and absence--all that was lost. Since there is so little synagogue painting left anywhere in Lithuania, all that we can learn from the work of immigrant communities takes on double value, important for local history, but also to fill in lacunae about synagogue decoration in the "the Old Country."

Boston, Mass. Vilna Shul. Sanctuary. One of several skylights. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013

 

Boston, Mass. Vilna Shul. Sanctuary. The Ark. Noted the painted curtain on the wall behind.  Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013

I'm not going to discuss the decoration in any detail here, except to the note the remains of a painted curtain on the walls behind the large wooden Ark, and the two views of Holy Land sites--tombs of the Matriarchs--on the east wall of the women's section. These images of the Cave of Mechpeleh and the Tomb of Rachel are commonly depicted in Eastern European synagogues in the late 19th and early 20th century, and can be found in several immigrant synagogues, too.  For the most part they relate to a new-found interest in the topography of the Holy Land due to the increased travel there by pilgrims and tourists-- Jewish and Christian--and the growing production of books, prints, postcards and other memorabilia with images of Holy Land sites. More specifically, by 1919, the use of these images is usually taken to represent a general interest in Zionism--either religious or political or both.  We find these images frequently in Orthodox immigrant synagogues, but hardly ever (ever?) in Reform settings. 

For the moment, I'll let the photos speak.  There is so much to comment on in this synagogue I'd need a little fellowship to write it all up! I hope in the near future that I'll have that chance, or at least the opportunity to speak at length about the history, art and architecture of this little Boston gem.

 

Boston, Mass. Vilna Shul. Sanctuary, women's section.   Rachel's tomb / קבר רחל and the Cave of Mechpelah /  מערת .המכפלה  Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013

 

 Boston, Mass. Vilna Shul. Sanctuary, women's section.   Rachel's tomb / קבר רחל .Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013

Boston, Mass. Vilna Shul. Sanctuary.  This Menorah gives a sense of the building's caretaker's tenacity. Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013.

 

 Boston, Mass. Vilna Shul. Outside, the roots of this tree might be threatening the building's foundation, but its growth conveys the sense of the building's renewal.   Photo: Samuel Gruber 2013