ReViews: Contextualizing Jewish Art

Steven Fine’s previous work on the synagogue in the Greco-Roman period demonstrates that scholars must integrate textual, archaeological, art historical and liturgical evidence in their analyses of Jewish life in antiquity. His latest work is a detailed and learned exposition of his synthetic, interdisciplinary method and a rich resource of Jewish art in the Greco-Roman era. Fine opens by addressing a vexing problem: the marginalization of the study of Jewish art in scholarly circles. As he points out, the embedded idea that “Jews don’t do art” probably accounts for the inattention both to Jewish art’s existence in its historical […]