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Welcome Address at the Launching of the Bezalel Narkiss Index of

Jewish Art
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, August 9, 2017

Ilia Rodov, Department of Jewish Art, Bar-Ilan University

The launching of the Index of Jewish Art online is a remarkable milestone for
the project initiated by Prof. Bezalel Narkiss forty-three years ago. Inspired
by the Index of Christian Art (now the Index of Medieval Art) established by
Prof. Charles Rufus Morey at Princeton University in 1917, it was conceived
as a catalogue raisonné of Jewish artistic heritage worldwide. Distinct from
the Christian index, the concept of the Jewish index went far beyond a mere
pictorial thesaurus of sectorial art and architecture. Collecting the data on
Jewish art worldwide in Jerusalem imparted the project with the Zionist and,
one may say, messianic values of gathering the Jews in Israel – not only the
people, but also their cultural heritage. The current online index becomes a
component of a wide international conglomerate of internet databases on
Jewish art managed in Israel, Europe and the United States.

Since the expedition of An-ski in the eastern European flames of World War I,
photographs and drawings served a mission of saving Jewish cultural heritage
from the human violence and natural decay. The deep trauma of the
Holocaust, as well as the anti-Semitic inclination of Communist regimes in
post-war world, reinforced a sense of urgency and importance of the work for
documenting Jewish art. The politics of the “melting pot” endangered the
idiosyncratic artistic legacy of various Jewish communities in Israel, which
were thus documented by the Center as well.
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The Index creates a simulacrum of this art in the photographs, drawings, notes
and – with the advent of the digital age – in computerized data. Unlike the
original objects which remain vulnerable and transient, this simulacrum is
deemed safe and eternal.

The interplay of the reality and simulacra was pondered by Jean Baudrillard in
his Simulacres et Simulation (1981). In this work, he refers to the short story
Del rigor en la ciencia (1946) by Jorge Luis Borges. The piece describes
cartographers who tried making the map of their country as precise as possible.
In doing so, they created a map so detailed that it was as large as the country
itself, but the map on the same scale as its model has no utility.

I’d like to juxtapose that story by Borges with his Parábola del palacio (1960)
about a poet who has described a huge palace and all its uncountable details
in a poem comprising a single word only. While the cartographers believe that
scientific rigor can be reached by increasing ultimately their presentation of
reality, the poet considers that the exactitude of his description should be as
concise as possible. The two stories can be viewed as metaphors for opposite
poles of historical research, both desirable yet never reachable in full. The first
is a reconstruction of the past life in its entirety, the second is the ultimate
abstraction of empirical knowledge. The team of the Center for Jewish Art
maintains a successful balance between expanding the collections and
deepening their research.

The Index is about collecting and classifying traces of the past. The online
version is an even more widely-available source for anyone investigating Jewish
visual culture. The digital simulacrum – in part comprising rare or unique
visual information – is often more convenient for research purposes than the
real objects themselves. Yet, it may be deceptive for the represented materials
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are a fractal of reality, for a large part of them has survived just by random.
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Baudrillard warned that the simulacra may eclipse the original and thus cause
the distinction between reality and its representation to vanish. In the online
Index, it may be worth an effort to remain conscious of the gap between the
simulacrum and reality. In general, this may be done by stressing that the
database – as extensive as it is – is and will be always fragmentary and that the
offered iconographic classification of images is only a suggestion. Helping the
users of the Index maintain a sense of doubt and attentiveness will promote
their fresh and scrupulous examination of the images. The Index is a truly
convenient tool, a most welcome complement to the online collections of
Jewish artistic heritage, and – last but not least – intellectual challenge,
aesthetic pleasure and spiritual delight.

Let me send my sincerest congratulations, deep respect and excitement to the


creators of the most valuable visual archives of Jewish visual culture.

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