It is a credit to the authors of the papers collected in this elegantly produced volume that their work is as relevant today as it was years ago, when it was presented at a conference held on October 23‒5 1977 in Oxford under the aegis of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and the Tarbuth Foundation. Un - fortunately, the reason for the perennial freshness of these essays is that the field these papers deal with has not advanced very far beyond what was cutting-edge in 1977.

It is disappointing that the field of Jewish art has not attracted more attention in the wider context of Judaic studies or art history in general. With the significant exception of work such as that found in Art and its Uses: The Visual Image and Modern Jewish Society, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vi, edited by Richard I. Cohen (New York, 1990), developments in the field of Jewish art have by and large been far outstripped by those in general art history. This is due in large part to the fact that the preoccupations of historians of Jewish art, as evidenced in the present volume, have hardly changed since the publication of the previous significant anthologies of essays on Jewish art and iconography in the 1960s. These include enquiries into what had constituted ‘Jewish art’, the reconstruction of antique Jewish models presumed lost on the basis of evidence in medieval Jewish and Christian art, the cataloguing or motif indexing of iconographic elements based on textual parallels, issues in collecting, fakes, and forgeries.

Joseph Guttman's corner-stone essay ‘Is there a Jewish Art?’ is a further re - capitulation of an issue he has dealt with in print many times before. Yet this time it is something of a summa that seeks to call off the search for some Jungian Ur-Judentum in nudes of Modigliani. What he neglects to suggest is that it might be more fruitful to concentrate on issues of greater moment that are current in the various fields of general art history. Thus, Guttman's essay is ultimately valuable more for this overview than for its conclusion, which has remained unchanged since his essays on the topic in the 1960s.