In approximately 1468, Italian artist Paolo Uccello completed a predella representing the Miracle of the Profaned Host for the Confraternity of Corpus Domini in Urbino. This painting tells the story, in six scenes, of a Jewish moneylender who obtains a Eucharist from an indebted Christian woman and then proceeds to injure the consecrated host until it bleeds the blood of Christ. Christian authorities rescue the Eucharist from its assailant and pardon the Christian woman for her transgression. The Jewish moneylender, his pregnant wife, and two small children do not receive absolution. Instead, Christians burn the Jews at the stake for their sacrilege. The predella serves to teach its Urbinate viewers the power and compassion of the Christian faith and to perpetuate fears of the Jewish abuse. The artist situates those abuses within a Jewish pawnshop, where, according to state and church records, moneylenders committed unnatural acts against Christians and Christianity.

In Cultural Exchange: Jews, Christians, and Art in the Medieval Marketplace, Joseph Shatzmiller initiates his discussion of the artistic exchanges between Jews and Christians in the pawnshop. Synods and councils charged Jews with perpetrating “detestable” acts against ecclesiastical vessels and forbade Christians from pledging sacred objects. These prohibitions notwithstanding, Christian clergy came to Jewish lenders with objects of cult and ritual as collateral in the money trade. Shatzmiller itemizes the contents of pawnshops throughout the medieval West, which held chalices, crosses, prayer books, and holy vestments in their cupboards. If Uccello paints host desecration into the Italian context, giving the tale of Jewish abuse a convincing—though fictive—local reality, we learn from Shatzmiller that Jews' access to Christ through “the insensate vessels sacred to him” was not a local phenomenon (28). The author follows the money trail to medieval cities in Italy, Iberia, Germany, England, and France, where Jews and Christians regularly disregarded injunctions regarding articles of the faith to conduct business as usual.

That business crossed religious, class, and gender boundaries. Jewish moneylenders issued small loans against pledges of modest value (bed sheets, belts, or napkins) to the impecunious at a low rate of interest. Archival inventories indicate that wealthy princes and patricians also sought the Jews' pecuniary services. Shatzmiller vividly describes how Count Amadeus VI and his wife Countess Bonne de Bourbon pawned lavish gold figurines in the form of exotic animals to the Jews, while the Count of Savoy pledged the duchy's richly bejeweled crowns. Through documentary descriptions synthesized from a large literature, the author investigates how material objects taught the medieval Jew about the quality and beauty of contemporary craftsmanship. That is, the Christian contents of the Jewish pawnshop instructed the alleged “artless Jew” in art. It is through the world of the object, the material, the thing, that we can understand Jewish cultural history. As Igor Kopytoff writes, “Power often asserts itself symbolically precisely by insisting on its right to singularize an object.”Footnote ¹ Shatzmiller examines objects made singular in the medieval West to demonstrate the cultural commingling of Jew and Christian and to dispel, once again, the myth of Jewish aniconism.

Martin Buber conceived of medieval Judaism as unable to produce art given the Jews' widespread involvement in moneylending and the stifling effects of religious law on creativity. Shatzmiller, in contrast, joins the discussion begun by scholars of Jewish art who contend that visual art filled medieval Jewish life. From the sumptuously frescoed interior of a Jewish home in Zurich to the figurative painting in Hebrew manuscripts, Jews incorporated art into their houses and synagogues. At times the Mosaic aversion to visual representation is documented in these paintings. In his examination of a German Jewish codex preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Shatzmiller notes that figures in the manuscripts have been disfigured with the iconoclastic erasure of their faces. He asserts that artists in other codices effaced figures by avoiding frontal views or rendering featureless faces and zoocephalic hybrids with no specific human physiognomy. Anxieties over the second-commandment prohibition on graven images led medieval artists to complicate relations of image and likeness. As Genesis 1:26–27 specified that God created humans in his image, so artists defaced faces to avoid the idolatrous implications of figuration.

The strength of this book lies in Shatzmiller's assessment of an extensive historiography. Drawing from historians and art historians alike, Shatzmiller surveys the connections between Jewish economic activities and iconographic appropriations that serve specialists and general readers. Shatzmiller's approach is concise yet careful. For instance, he criticizes Bezalel Narkiss's well-known analysis of the Golden Haggadah illuminations because Narkiss assumes Christian authorship based on the high quality of execution. Despite the fact that he calls such an approach “overly cautious,” Shatzmiller neglects to point out the potential subversive interests embedded in the patronage and authorship of Hebrew manuscripts, as Marc Michael Epstein posits in his research (132). In fact, Epstein's theories on Jewish art contradict Shatzmiller's approach, which persists in understanding Jewish art as emulation of Christian artistic forms. Yet as Shatzmiller aptly points out, notarial contracts associated with the commission of Jewish art are exceptional. Given their paucity, questions of authorship and the meanings surrounding such authorship will continue to fuel debate. And Cultural Exchanges cogently participates in that ongoing debate.