Tracing the Temple: Maimonides’ Diagrams and the Founding of a Rabbinic Discursive Practice

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Jewish Cultures

Abstract

Medieval Jewish exegetes were not unaccustomed to incorporating diagrams alongside commentary, but no medieval scholar employed diagrams as systematically as did Maimonides. In a surviving manuscript of his COMMENTARY ON THE MISHNAH, Maimonides included over one hundred sketches and diagrams, the highest proportion of which is found in tractate MIDDOT. This session aims to contextualize Maimonides’ diagramming practices within his project to restructure the study of HALAKHA, and propose them as one the pedagogical techniques he developed to bring clarity both to the minutiae of text as well as the corpus of Jewish law. By looking at the proliferation of diagrams of the Temple that succeeded Maimonides, it will be suggested that this artifact of medieval visual culture was not simply a means for translating text into image, but was the founding of a discursive practice that has shaped the study of the Temple in rabbinic sources until the present.

Author

• Shira Eliassian