The Jew in the Art of the Renaissance by Dana Katz focuses on five art works created in northern Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in which Jews are portrayed negatively. These Jews had allegedly, or actually, committed anti-Christian acts, and Katz places both the acts and the Jews’ subsequent punishment in their political and religious contexts. She maintains that the works had a dual purpose: They publicly admonished Jews for their misdeeds, while at the same time safeguarded them from popular aggression. Basic to this study is the assumption that images had the power to influence events. One example is a series of church frescoes in the Valcamonica region of Italy depicting Simon of Trent's “martyrdom” that is based on prints appearing in 1475 and after. Deprived of the labels in the original prints that named specific Jews of Trent as “murderers,” the Valcamonica frescoes presented generalized Jews and thus stigmatized the whole community. Many places where the frescoes were painted became centers of Simon's cult.

A second chapter is devoted to the Miracle of the Profaned Host painted by Paolo Uccello in 1468 for the predella of the Corpus Domini altarpiece in Urbino. It portrays—as did the prints and frescoes depicting the Trent Blood Libel—an imagined event that nevertheless resulted in the execution of Jews. Katz deftly places the painted narrative within the political and ecclesiastical history of Urbino, linking its commission to the preaching of Fra Domenico da Leonessa who urged the establishment of a monte di pietà to undermine Jewish moneylending, although her claim for its grounding in the Parisian account of a libel dated 1290 is unconvincing when compared to the predella of a 1384 altarpiece from Sijena (Aragon) by Pere Serra, whose pictorial narrative closely follows the written description.Footnote ¹ The four scenes at right begin with a Christian woman giving a host to a Jew who recompenses her by returning her pawned clothing. He then stabs the host, causing blood to spurt forth while, nearby, the Christ Child stands in a cauldron of boiling liquid. They are watched by a Jewish woman, characterized by her distinctive headdress, who holds a young boy (presumably her son). At far right are two scenes centered on a Jewish woman—identified by her red hair—who, in the last scene, accepts communion. Katz also fails to mention other art historical precedents for the Urbino predella, such as the mid fourteenth-century retablos of Las Monjas (Diocese of Lérida), despite the discussion of all these works in Miri Rubin's Gentile Tales (155–60), which she twice cites.Footnote ² The active artistic interchange between Aragon and Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which saw Spanish artists studying in Italy and Italian artists working on the Iberian Peninsula, could have inspired the concept of a multiscene host libel predella in Urbino, since the subject had no historical basis in the Italian states. Admittedly, Uccello's depiction of the narrative is particular and infused with local color.

Two other cases—a mob's execution of Bartolomeo de Casas in Florence in 1493 and the persecution of Daniel Norsa in Mantua beginning in 1496—are examples of Christian retribution for the desecration of Christian images. Daniel Norsa was one of the leading Jewish moneylenders in the Italian states. He had purchased a house that had been painted with an image of the Virgin and Child and asked the bishop for permission to whitewash it; permission was granted. But two years later he was required to pay 110 gold ducats for a Madonna della Vittoria by Andrea Mantegna to be placed in the church erected on the ruins of the Norsa home, and in 1499 he was required to pay for a Madonna and Child that included portraits of the Norsa family. In conjunction with this affair, Katz mentions other interesting and little-known cases of Jews who were likewise granted dispensation to remove Christian images from newly purchased homes (53–54). Only Norsa was punished excessively, which suggests that he was targeted, perhaps for his outstanding financial success. In her discussion, Katz compares the “relative prosperity of the Jews of Mantua” with the adversity of fifteenth-century Iberian Jews (45). This view needs to be modified in accord with recent scholarship.Footnote ³

The fifth essay discusses a very different subject, the violent murder of Synagoga in a fresco by Benvenuto Tisi da Garofalo, Crucifixion with Ecclesia and Synagoga, painted between 1522 and 1524 for the Augustinian priory in Ferrara. It is the only allegorical work treated in the book. This painting also differs from the others in that it was created for a space to which access was restricted to monks and their guests. It is also singular for its pairing of the attack on Synagoga with a dignified representation of the High Priest and Israelites in the ancient Temple, which serves to ameliorate the hostile portrayal of the synagogue.

Two of the chapters are closely based on previously published articles, which unfortunately results in repetitive passages that could have been eliminated in editing.Footnote ⁴ More serious are the author's mistakes in interpreting Jewish ritual. A bimah in a synagogue is not an altar (126), but a desk for the reading of the Torah scroll, and in Italy and other lands of the Sephardic Diaspora it is more commonly called a teivah. The interesting 1491 account of a nighttime excursion to the house of an infant boy by several Jewish men of Mantua (61) does not record a circumcision, which is traditionally held the morning of the eighth day of life, but the shalom zakhor, a welcoming and protective vigil consisting of prayers and Torah study held the night prior to circumcision.Footnote ⁵ Finally, Katz occasionally indulges in prose that exceeds the visual evidence, as in her attribution of meaning to the absence of Daniele Norsa's image in Mantegna's Madonna and Child (53). Not all Italian altarpieces include images of the patron(s); what is unusual is the presence of Jewish patrons in the Madonna della Vittoria, painted two to three years later. The discussion of the second painting includes an odd statement referring to a “ceremonial tapestry” separating the Virgin from the Norsa (57). The object in question is an oriental rug, one of many that were imported into Renaissance Italy and depicted in paintings because it was a luxurious possession. The analysis of a 1475 print of Simon's murder refers to a Jew cutting Simon's genitalia while looking elsewhere, when in reality, none of the Jews is touching the knife; it simply lies on Simon's body (fig. 59). Nor are the parallels cited for the works always appropriate in terms of date. The iconography of a painting dated 1324 may not be the same as that in a work ca. 1499 (65).

The Jew in the Art of the Renaissance is valuable for the new material it brings to the discussion of the five works and for its insights into the historical and religious issues surrounding their creation. It is also an extremely well-written book so that reading it is a pleasure.