In the case studies presented in this session, intersections between politics, identity, and different religious cultures are explored through close studies of books and letters, seen as sites of fluid religion. The first paper examines a powerful confluence of religion and politics in the iconography of a frontispiece inspired by Saint Gregory of Nazianzen’s Third Discourse on Peace in a twelfth-century Greek manuscript. The second looks at the ways letters are invested with cosmic power in late medieval Jewish Kabbalah and the Sufi tradition in Islam, illuminating the role of inter-religious dialogue in the development of letter mysticism in both traditions. The third looks at 16th-century Jewish-Italian humanist Gershom (Hieronymus) Soncino whose print shop produced an array of materials so diverse it caused some people to question his Jewish identity. These papers show religious traditions converging with each other, with politics, with humanism, and with issues of religious identity.
This paper examines the iconography of a miniature inspired by Gregory of Nazianzen’s Third Discourse on Peace, which forms part of a Byzantine manuscript of the twelfth century (Basel, University Library, Ms. AN I 8). The most striking feature of the painting is an unusual depiction of a personification of Peace, the iconography of which is without parallels in Byzantine art. I argue that the details of this visual allegory reveal a connection of the Basel codex with the imperial court of Manuel I Komnenos, ruler of the Byzantine Empire between 1143 and 1180. I maintain that the painter aimed to portray the emperor as a great peacemaker who was striving to reunite the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches at a time of intense doctrinal debate.
This study explores the intersections between Kabbalistic and Sufi mystical thought, focusing on the role of letter mysticism in both traditions. Building on Ronald Kiener’s suggestion of Ibn al-Arabi’s potential engagement with Andalusian Kabbalists, this research examines how language functions as a cosmological principle in The Meccan Revelations, the Sefer Yetzirah, and the Zohar. Both Kabbalah and Sufism view letters as vessels of divine emanation, structuring reality and reflecting the human microcosm. Ibn al-Arabi’s concept of the Perfect Man parallels the Zohar’s Adam Kadmon, suggesting shared frameworks of their mystical systems. By contextualizing these ideas within the intellectual and religious exchanges of al-Andalus, this study sheds light on the possible transmission of mystical concepts across Jewish and Islamic traditions, emphasizing both commonalities and distinct theological developments.
The print shop headed by Jewish-Italian humanist Gershom (Hieronymus) Soncino (1460[?]-1534) produced a dazzling array of materials: Rabbinics, Talmud tractates, Latin and vernacular Italian poetry, illustrated chivalric epics. This wealth of sometimes contradictory material has led several Jewish bibliographers to question whether Gershom and Hieronymus were even the same person, inventing ‘histories’ of conversion. The ‘defense’ of his devout Jewishness is no less overdetermined (telling us more about 19th-centiry German-Jewish anxieties). Their source was in the material aspects of some of Soncino’s titles: decorative borders, acting as a kind of architecture, which he repurposed between ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ titles. I present these decorative borders and my findings on the Venetian artisan whom Gershom commissioned for their creation, and expand on his supposedly ‘promiscuous’ use of the same material apparatus for both specifically ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ titles. This use, I argue, is what led later bibliographers to ‘marranify’ his work.