International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2006 Abstracts

The proposed paper focuses on the possible motives and ways of influence of St. Bernard of Clairvaux's aesthetics on the censorship of images in rabbinical thought and on the practice of synagogue art. There were only a few periods of a stricter attitude to zoomorphic imagery in the medieval synagogue decoration, whereas – in spite of the common stereotype – the medieval Jewish art in whole was not aniconic.

An example of such an austere synagogue decoration has surviving in the Altneuschul, a late-13th century synagogue surviving in Prague. The building and reliefs of this synagogue are attributed to the masons and stone carvers who worked for Cistercian convents. The patrons and compilers of the semantic program of the Altneuschul's design adopted symbolic images from the art of Christian majority. In the synagogue, some specific details of the Cistercian images were altered in order to rework their Christian symbolism into Jewish one.