Imagery in Jewish and Christian Ritual Settings

During the Roman period, Jewish and Christian communities throughout the Mediterranean had a complex relationship with the visual culture of the larger Greco-Roman world. Both groups, in their attempts to be set apart as distinct ethnic or religious entities while at the same time remaining integrated within their surrounding social landscape, expressed themselves in different times and places along a spectrum of selective adoption, adaptation, and rejection of the artistic forms used by their neighbors. For instance, owing to a shared hostility toward pagan idolatry, both communities in the early part of this period largely avoided figural iconography (they instead drew in limited ways upon the non-figural artistic repertoire of local Hellenistic and Roman society), but by later centuries distinctly Jewish and Christian art began to emerge and incorporate a fuller range of Greco-Roman motifs for use in a variety of communal settings.