29 October 2023 Adam Cohen, Hebrew manuscripts in Edinburgh. In person in the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh’s Main Library.

This event is co-sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, constituting the Leverhulme Lecture.

The National Library of Scotland and the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh are outstanding repositories of cultural heritage. Although they constitute a miniscule percentage of their holdings, handwritten Hebrew manuscripts in both institutions offer a fascinating glimpse into the history of Jewish literary and artistic culture as well as something of the history of Jews in Scotland. In this talk, I introduce the entire range of these materials, which span over seven hundred years from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. Of particular interest will be the light that these works shed on the interaction of Jews and Christians; we will meet medieval scribes, Renaissance censors, early modern bookbinders, Karaites, Scottish Hebraists, artists, rabbis, and journalists. Because of my own background as a historian of medieval art, I will pay particular attention to the visual aspects of selected materials, which reveal some unexpected surprises.

Dr Adam S. Cohen is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto and currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is a specialist in the history of European illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. He has written and edited numerous books and articles on Christian and Hebrew subjects. Adam has published articles on the Sephardic Sarajevo Haggadah and the Kennicott Bible; with Sharon Liberman Mintz he is working on the forthcoming, “Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts: From Ashkenaz to America.” For the general public, Adam has written Signs and Wonders: 100 Haggadah Masterpieces (Jerusalem: Toby Press, 2018), a history of the illustrated haggadah from the Middle Ages to the present. With Jill Caskey and Linda Safran, Adam is the author of Art and Architecture of the Middle Ages: Exploring a Connected World, just published by Cornell University Press.

To attend this meeting, please email hholtschneider@gmail.com.