Windows on Jewish worlds
Subtitle: essays in honor of William Gross, collector of Judaica on the occasion of his eightieth birthday
By: edited by Shalom Sabar, Emile Schrijver, Falk Wiesemann, in cooperation with Lies Meiboom [copy editor], Sam Herman [language editing] ; [translations Miriam Samsonowitz, Lillian Dombrowski ; photography Ardon Bar-Hama]
Contributors: Gross, William L.
Publisher: Walburg Pers bv
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Zutphen
Language: eng
Number of pages: 382
ISBN-13: 9789462494565
Subjects: Art collections; Bibliography; Judaism; Liturgical objects; Hebrew Manuscripts; Hebrew imprints; Jewish art
Description: This volume celebrates the collecting effort of perhaps the greatest of all contemporary collectors of Judaica, William Gross, of Tel Aviv. It appears on the occasion of his eightieth birthday and contains discussions of a variety of works from the Gross Family Collection, authored by friends and colleagues from the world of Jewish museums and Jewish studies. Items discussed include Hebrew manuscripts and printed works, Jewish ceremonial silver, textiles, amulets, medals and Kabbalistic texts. The articles are illustrated richly, mostly with items from the Gross Family Collection. William Gross has always cherished a very personal perspective on the items in his collection. For him Jewish life and ritual, out of which all of these items grew, is multi-faceted. He has often claimed that each individual item in his collection constitutes a window through which one can view and learn about the Jews of a particular place and time. He believes that no Judaic object can be separated both from its Jewish roots and from the more general context of the political, social, economic and artistic environment in which the Jews, who ordered, used and venerated those objects, lived. These roots and this context are what give substance to these objects, which are often collectively referred to as Jewish Art.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the life and life's work of William Gross, collector of Judaica --; title: A late gothic carved pair of Torah staves from Italy  -- Dora Liescia Bemporad; title: The earliest Torah binders (wimpels) from Ashkenaz, before 1650  -- Falk Wiesemann; title: Center stage : Torah silver from remote East Frisia  -- Annette Weber; title: About faces : kabbalistic visualizations of the divine visage in the Gross Family collection  -- J. H. Chajes & Eliezer Baumgarten; title: Unconventionally orthodox  -- Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek; title: The other side : prayer book shivitis with texts on the back  -- Estehr Juhasz; title: Abraham bar Jacob and the creation of his copper-engraved childbirth amulet from Amsterdam, 1700  -- Shalom Sabar; title: Hevra Kadisha beakers from Frankfurt's goldsmith workshops  -- Bernhard Purin; title: Eighteenth-century Hebrew manuscripts in the Gross Family collection, or : a private quest for method  -- Emile Schrijver; title: Scrolling through the Haftarah  -- David Stern; title: Killing an enemy in the literature of practical Kabbalah  -- Chaim Fuchs; title: Engaging mystery : a late medieval Hebrew-Christian kabbalistic medal  -- Ira Rezak; title: The Rashash's meditation prayer books, between tradition and innovation  -- Moshe Hillel; title: Rabbi Eleazar Fleckeles : a humash, a friendship and an anecdote  -- David Trobisch; title: Markus Donath/Mordecai Sofer Stam of Nitra  -- Zsuzsanna Toronyi; title: From Marrakech to Milan : the artistic journey of Makhluf/Michele Allun  -- Sharon Lieberman Mintz & Elka Deitsch; title: The story behind a Baghdadi Torah case  -- Bracha Yaniv; title: From talisman to Judaica : the magical and mystical sides of the shmire (blessed coin)  -- Batsheva Goldman-Ida; title: Seeking protection : shaddayot and alephiot in the Romaniote world  -- Zanet Battinou & Christina Meri; title: Childbirth magic in amulets and recipes from the Gross Family collection  -- Chen Avizohar-Hagai & Yuval Harari; title: An ancient Babylonian text on a modern Jewish amulet  -- Gideon Bohak; title: Bernhard Friedlander : revolutionary traditionalist  -- Sharon Weiser-Ferguson; title: Biographies --; title: Colophon.