Distinguished University Professor Elina Gertsman’s article, “‘The Breath of Every Living Thing’: Zoocephali and the Language of Difference on the Medieval Hebrew Page,” was published in Art History, one of the field’s flagship journals.
The essay explores the semiotics and phenomenology of a specifically Jewish visual idiom: the Hammelburg Mahzor, a 14th-century German High Holiday book, and its most remarkable feature: zoocephalic figures, or humans with beastly heads.