Annual Fishman Family Endowed Lecture by Dr. Julie Harris

While the legacy of Sepharad looms large in the contemporary imagination, the verifiable remains of Jewish Iberia are really quite limited. In fact, a recent (pre-COVID) headline in the Times of Israel reported: “In Spain’s Jewish museums, almost nothing is actually from Spain.” The apparent contradiction this article reveals in Spain’s Jewish museums might also be extended to other institutions and to publications on Sepharad and its material culture. It is time to re-evaluate some of the objects used to portray Jewish life in Iberia; in fact, we may find that some “Jewish” objects in noted collections may not actually be Jewish at all.

Dr. Harris’s presentation will focus on two spice towers in the collection of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. The first of these has been published as the earliest surviving example and the only one from Sepharad—an attribution that will be questioned. The second is now exhibited as an Italian fifteenth-century spice tower which was later converted into a reliquary. She hopes to present the pair’s shifting identities as a cautionary tale for those seeking an accurate picture of Jewish material culture—in particular, the Sephardic legacy.

Julie Harris (PhD University of Pittsburgh, 1989) is a specialist in the art of medieval Iberia. She has published on ivory carving, the fate of art and architecture during Reconquest warfare, and illuminated Hebrew manuscripts. She has participated in three of Therese Martin’s international research projects, including “The Medieval Iberian Treasury in Context: Collections, Connections, and Representations on the Peninsula and Beyond,” which concluded in 2022. Her recent publications have appeared in Manuscript Studies, Ars Judaica, Gesta, the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, Medieval Encounters, and Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament, edited by Elina Gertsman (AUP, 2021). In 2020, she was awarded a Center for Spain in America fellowship at the Clark Institute for her project on the decorative carpet pages of Iberian Hebrew Bibles.