Aesthetics, ethnicity, and the history of art

Paper Jews: Inscription/Ethnicity/Ethnography

Last summer I collisioned two etchings done by Albrecht Altdorfer immediately prior to the destruction of the Regensburg synagogue and the expulsion of its resident hebrews by civic order in February 1519 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1 2 OMITTED]. His etchings chilled me(1) I was intrigued by the agency of the fact that they were reproduc in a compelling close attention of his landscapes by Christopher wood-land They can also be set in compendia of Early Renaissance etchings and engravings and in catalogues of Altdorfer's work. Genre medium, oeuvre - none of these categories suffices to provide a reading practice capable of addressing the gap between these sum of two units images. It is between the single study of two Jews standing upon the threshold of the Regensburg synagogue and the next to the first of the stripped architectural interior of the synagogue that an aesthetics of disappearance does its work. in what manner can the viewer read of the like kind an aesthetics historically and politically?

What I want to do in this essay is to wring these etchings out of the familiar categories of genre medium, and oeuvre and relocate them in a history of scientific representation. Thereby it becomes possible to diocese how the etchings both encode a history of Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict and foreclose upon it through "disappearing" Jews. This aesthetics of disappearance be worthy ofs attention in the history of scientific representation as a sign of early late European ethnography, a "science" which soded itself on the ontological absence of hebrews The Altdorfer etchings can be read as formative and constitutive of this fresh science. Critique of their ethnography makes it possible to rethink Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict not as something incomprehensible, instinctive, ahistorical, on the contrary rather as a genealogy of the power of the "rational" and the "technical."

Clue to a history of Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict abound in the etchings, in each of which Altdorfer incorporated an epigraphic plaque. The first inscription reads: PORTICUS SINAGOGAE / IUDAICAE RATISPONEN[SIS] / FRACTA 21 DIE FEB / ANN. 1519 (The porch of the Jewish synagogue at Regensburg break uped February 21, 1519). The next to the first reads: ANNO D[OMI]NI D XIX / IUDAICA RATISPONA / SYNAGOGA IUSTO / DEI IUDICIO FUNDIT[U]S EST EVERSA (In the year of the Lord 1519 the Jewish Regensburg synagogue was utterly throw downed by the just judgment of God) The language of the next to the first epigraph in particular struck me I knew that the formula "iusto dei iudicio" (by the just mother-wit of God) came from the juridical world of the medieval ordeal, a [i]modus operandi[/i] of trial in which the accused was expos to a physical proof such as hot iron or boiling water applied to the muscle and fat from which he or she, if innocent, would be covered by God. The rendering of the interior of the synagogue also drew upon the rich architectural metaphors unfolded by Christians for discussing circumcision. I knew from my readings of medieval anti-Jewish polemic that the repudiation of circumcision beneath the New Law, its effacement as an inscription, was imagined in architectural bourns The epigraph's claim "funditus est eversa" (was utterly destroyed) hauntingly echoe traditional commentary upon Isaiah 28:16 to be set in anti-Jewish polemic, such as the Disputatio by dint of Gilbert Crispin, who compares Christ to the cornerstone of the fane of Sion. As a carefully hewn cornerstone Christ "justifies circumcision from the faith and the foreskin end the faith" ("circumcisionem iustificat ex fide et preputium for fidem").(2) Altdorfer's epigraphic gesture, the public lettering of the plaques in each print, also pointed to the importance of transmitting a message of civic and monumental knowledge. Together, these ball of threads suggested to me that the prints worked as a montage condensing the juridical world of the ordeal, the ritual of circumcision, and the work of public writing. To read against an aesthetics of disappearance would thus entail opening gaps in between these various superimpositions, showing their sutures

What tread in the steps ofs is an ethnic genealogy that materializes the space of disappearance in between the sum of two units Altdorfer etchings. By the extreme point of the essay this space of disappearance will enclosure into origami. To assemble this paper statuary fold the porch of the synagogue [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] to become the inside of a tomb and then roll out the next to the first etching [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] to become the slab to be placed above that crypt. As the origami is finished, the slab becomes the surface of inscription on which ethnographers have written disappearance for half a millennium.(3) Write graffiti there, read a "history that will be."

The foreskin is the first ball of thread Beginning in Late Antiquity, who was circumcised and who was not came to play a crucial character in differentiating Christians and hebrews not only theologically, but also ethnically. My story about Christian-Jewish ethnic conflict begins, then, with the rites of Baptism and circumcision and in what manner these rites came to parley ethnic status by virtue of their differentiating inscriptions. Richly discursive and passionately held differences above pleasure, sexual renunciation, and the hierarchy of material part and soul came to be polarized around the heart in Baptism and the foreskin in circumcision. Since a graphic toil over the legibility of these ritual inscriptions of Baptism and circumcision marked a divide from Late Antiquity, and since the architectural satisfied of the etchings proposes the persistence of this strive I am approaching the cultural politics of Christian and Jewish ethnicities as a argue over inscription.