Category Archives: 5780 / 2019-20 Programme

By the closing decades of the twentieth century, Jewish cultural historians had shown that the Second Commandment is not a blanket ban on visual art but rather proscribes the making and worshipping of images of the divine. The Bible forbids idolatry, but concedes that not all images are idolatrous. Although religious Jews have often been visually reluctant, the notion of Judaism as an aniconic tradition is, it seems, a modern one that owes more to Emmanuel Kant than the rabbis. Given that Jews have, in fact, been making, selling and buying art since the nineteenth century, Jewish commentators have instead turned their attention to what might be Jewish about Jewish art.  These days, most deny that it has any definitive, ‘national’ characteristics.  This talk, illustrated by slides, will invite debate by suggesting that, on the contrary, a Jewish image is one that exists because of the Second Commandment, not in spite of it.  A Jewish image is an idoloclastic one that stabilizes power by both revealing and concealing, restoring and cancelling, the glory of its object.

Melissa Raphael is Professor of Jewish Theology at the University of Gloucestershire, UK and teaches modern Jewish thought at Leo Baeck College, London. Her books include Rudolf Otto and the Idea of the Holy (1997), The Female Face of God in Auschwitz (2003), Judaism and the Visual Image (2009) and Religion, Feminism and Idoloclasm: Being and Becoming in the Women’s Liberation Movement (2019).

Gillian’s talk will be delivered online. Joining instructions will be sent out on the morning of 19th April via the Lit and the Sukkat Shalom mailing lists. If you do not receive Lit or Sukkat Shalom mailings, please write to ejlsoc@gmail.com by midnight on Saturday 18th April to register for this event.

This talk will take at its starting point 354 marriages, registered in Edinburgh between 1855 and 1911 where the bride or groom, or both, were Jewish. The records were assembled as part of a demographic study of 200 years of Scottish Jewry. We can  look at where they lived. their occupations, the families they came from, and those they formed. For the 271 marriages with a Jewish ceremony, we will profile some of the rabbis who officiated at them and the communities they served. During the later part of the period there were three main Jewish Communities in Edinburgh, just as there are now. The talk will look at similarities and differences between Jewish communities in Edinburgh then and now.

Gillian Raab is an applied statistician, mainly working in the medical and social fields. She is professor emeritus of Applied Statistics from Edinburgh Napier University. In her retirement she continues to work on various research projects using administrative data. She is a founder member of Sukkat Shalom, the Edinburgh Liberal Jewish Community.