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Joel ben Simeon Looking at the Margins of Society
Christian theology evidenced a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward the monstrous[...]
Among other uses the haggadah is the text by which every Jewish father fulfils the precept of telling his son the story of the departure from Egypt. After a midrash on different verses of Exodus the text includes questions by four different sons and ...
The text of the haggadah opens with the following words: “Here is the bread of distress which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let anyone who is hungry come and eat. Let anyone who wishes come and participate in the Passover. Today we are here...
The fact that four of Joel’s figures, the London jester, the Parma vagabond, and the two men roasting the meat in the Rothschild and the Washington Haggadot all are pictured as suffering from goitres, clearly indicated in the neck area, calls for som...
A goitre, which is an enlargement of the thyroid gland usually appearing as a heavy swelling of the neck, is a symptom of the iodine-deficient drinking water and salt typical in alpine areas far from the sea. The disease of the goitre is thus specifi...
In non-medical sources from the early thirteenth century, on the other hand, we find the goitrous listed among the monstrous races. The first to list goitrous women with the monstrous races were Jacques de Vitry (1160–1240), a widely travelled schola...
Before we return to Joel ben Simeon’s drawings and the question of what they might signify, we should first give some thought to medieval attitudes toward monsters and other appearances perceived as abnormal. These attitudes raise the question to wha...
In the medieval mind monsters were – in Debra Strickland’s words – to express “largely abstract ideas about moral degeneracy, perversity, godlessness, demonic allegiance, and a whole host of other characteristics regularly attributed to the various e...
Christian theology evidenced a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward the monstrous races. On the one hand, they were part of the divine Creation, even though the role they played in the created world was unclear. It was, for example, Jacques de Vitry’s...
Several manuscripts of Thomas de Cantimpré’s text were illustrated. They show goitrous women, “cretins,” and hunchbacks mentioned in the adjacent text (fig. 5). Joel ben Simeon’s figure in the Parma Haggadah (fig. 2) shares some of its features not ...
Thomas’ work was extremely popular throughout Europe during the late Middle Ages. Numerous illuminated copies were produced up through the fifteenth century and his observations were repeated by other authors and chroniclers well into the early moder...
Different from the fabulous monsters of the East, with whom they were listed, those alpine Europeans who suffered from goitres were actually encountered by travellers, pilgrims, and migrants, in particular those who travelled through “outermost Burgu...
In all likelihood Joel ben Simeon had never seen a goitre in the Middle Rhine region where he had grown up, but there is a good chance that he passed through the Great Bernard when he moved from southern Germany to northern Italy. There and during hi...
Medieval Jews were familiar with the traditions of the monstrous races, particularly those related to the cultural landscapes where there was a high degree of acculturation of the Jews to the gentile environment. The letters of Prester John and the m...
None of the Hebrew lists of the monstrous races of the East includes any reference to the people with the swollen necks from Burgundy. One version of the Alexander story mentions “women with long beards which reached down to their breasts,” a specie...
The close link between the goitrous people of Burgundy and the monstrous races, on the one hand, and the similar wording used in the description of the goitrous and the bearded women, on the other, indicate that in the minds of the encyclopaedists and...
That connection does not prove that Joel was familiar with the goitrous as a monstrous race, but it does create an additional theoretical channel of information for such a tradition. In workshops for book production Jewish illuminators and copyists li...
Apart from common knowledge about goitres there was, finally, also an iconographic tradition harking back to the early thirteenth century that Joel could look back on. Since the beginnings of this tradition and apparently in correspondence with the g...
Representations of goitres in art became more common in the fifteenth century. Franz Merke, who examined an exhaustive catalogue of representations of the goitrous, noted that they are all bound to regions where goitres were found. There are basicall...
A great deal of difference in mentality can be observed in these groups. First there is the visual characterization of the wicked as goitrous, growing out of the notion of the monstrous races of the East with all its ambiguity. That attitude prevaile...
Joel ben Simeon lived his life between these two different states of mind. On the one hand, he had acquired some sense of realistic observation of the environment, whereas, on the other, the inclusion of the goitres in his artistic repertoire is not...
Joel’s figures of the goitrous are not evil, nor are they grotesque. They are poor and miserable, ignorant and perhaps stupid; they live on the margins of society; as hungry vagabonds they are, indeed, likely to have been intended to represent those ...
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Joel ben Simeon Looking at the Margins of Society
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2016
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