Bohemia Sacra Judaizante: Central European Baroque Art and the Jewish Mystical Tradition

One of the most enigmatic peculiarities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Roman Catholicism in general, and Central European Baroque monasticism in particular, is a fascination with Christian adaptations of the Jewish mystical tradition and its practices. Visual evidence of this phenomenon includes chronostica or chronograms, gematria, micrography, notarikon, labyrinthi cubici and amulets with Hebrew inscriptions. Such artifacts are of interest because they comprise, in the illustrations and diagrams found in books and manuscripts of the period and in talismanic objects, the visual manifestation of the Roman Catholic engagement with Christian kabbalah. The manuscript examples to be considered were created for two Cistercian abbots and a Benedictine Abbess-Princess, two important early patrons of the Prague architect J.B. Santini-Aichel (1677–1723), and help to illuminate the meanings of the esoteric buildings he designed for them. An equally unexpected coda to this influx of Jewish imagery into the Bohemian Baroque Catholic milieu is its obverse: the adaptation of columnar tabernacles and retablos from Renaissance and Baroque churches in the design of frontispieces for Jewish manuscripts and printed books of the period. This paper will describe these episodes of interchange between populations that are traditionally understood to have had minimal cultural contact, and will examine potential sources of this contact, foremost among them the writings about Jews by the Czech-Spanish Prague-based polymath Juan Caramuel de Lobkowicz (1606–1682).