In "Another Flight into Egypt: Confluence, Coincidence, the Cross-Cultural Dialectics of Messianism and Iconographic Appropriation in Medieval Jewish and Christian Culture," Marc Michael Epstein returns to propositions set forth forcefully in his earlier book, Dreams of Subversion (1997). Traditional scholarship on Hebrew illuminated manuscripts often was committed simply to discerning the Christian sources from which Jewish illuminations borrowed. Epstein, however, is determined to demonstrate that Christian visual formulae transferred to Jewish contexts, placed in relation to Hebrew texts could gain new, subversive meaning in the eyes of their Jewish beholders. This essay focuses on a miniature of Moses and his family in the celebrated Golden Haggadah. It is evident that this image shares formal characteristics with Christian representations of the Holy Family's Flight into Egypt. Epstein contends that the adoption of this Christian iconographic motif in a Jewish context could proclaim the superiority of Moses over Joseph and thus the Jewish over the Christian tradition (even if the artists were Christian, which may have been the case). Epstein's work has reframed the discipline of Hebrew manuscript studies and the repeated references to his scholarship in the essays of the other contributors to this volume attest to his influence.
- Nina Rowe, Middlebury College in H-ArtHist (November, 2003)