Leo Baeck Institute London Lecture Series 2018-19

The richly illustrated Catalan Mappamundi is among the most celebrated medieval maps surviving to this day. Commissioned by Peter IV of Aragon as a gift to Charles V of France it was put to parchment by Elisha Cresques, a Jewish scribe, illuminator, and cartographer in the City of Majorca. The talk explores how Elisha, from his delicate position as a Sefardi intellectual in the service of the Court coped with his patron’s agendas while, at the same time, voiced his own views of the politics of his time.   

The visual presentation about Zionist landscape photography in Palestine (Eretz-Israel), from its beginning in 1898 until 1961, explores the 'returning' of the Jews to modern history and geography and the formation of the 'mental landscape' of Israel as it was created in the Zionist photographic narrative. Landscape photography, produced and consumed within the National Zionist Institutions, created a utopian image of the Jewish environment by developing a coherent iconography rooted in the hegemonic ideology of cultivating and 'building' a country for the Jewish nation.

In the 19th century Jews gradually began to free themselves from their ambivalence towards the fine arts. rabbis repeatedly placed the depiction of people in pictures and sculptures close to idolatry and viewed it with reservations. The discovery of a visual culture in Judaism by the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, fulfilled a double function: it was intended to strengthen a new Jewish self-confidence internally and at the same time to ward off the anti-Semitic prejudice that Jews were incapable of artistic expression. This process will be illustrated by the example of the emergence and…

Moses Mendelssohn has engaged artists of Jewish and non-Jewish origin from his lifetime until today. The lecture will show how, over this long period, Mendelssohn has been turned into the icon of German-Jewish modernity by being represented in a myriad of ways and techniques.

In this illustrated lecture, professor Nathan Abrams will explore recent British representations of Jews on television focussing on the role of the Jewish gangster in McMafia and Peaky Blinders in particular.

Nathan Abrams is Professor in Film at Bangor University of Wales where he directs the Film Studies programme and the Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (2018) and Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film…