Leviathan: The Metamorphosis of a Medieval Image

Abstract

The image of Leviathan held a special fascination for artists who decorated wooden synagogues and illustrated manuscripts from the eighteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe. They usually depicted this biblical and Talmudic creature as a giant fish coiled round in a circle. A leviathan of the same shape appears at first in Jewish manuscripts produced in Germany and regions under the cultural influence of German Jews in the thirteenth century. The appearance of this image was inspired, probably, by piyutim (liturgical songs) written in this time in the same region. The Jewish commentary tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrates a renewed surge of interest in this particular creature. It can be assumed that the special interest in Leviathan, both in the verbal and in the visual tradition, was correlated with the expectation of messianic times. The Leviathan represents the only image in the vault paintings of wooden synagogues that possesses a direct connection to traditional texts and manifests continuity with the Middle Ages visual traditions. In light of this, investigation into the Leviathan image in synagogue paintings is of special significance. The use of this image by Jewish artists may also shed indirect light on the meaning of other depictions that are compositionally related, and thus furnish a partial answer to the intriguing questions of the character and significance of those paintings. The present article is devoted to precisely these aspects of the Leviathan image; i.e., the genesis of its form and its semantics in synagogue paintings.