Animal Affinities: Monsters and Marvels in the Ambrosian Tanakh

The Ambrosian Tanakh, one of the earliest Ashkenazic books to include zoocephalic protagonists, closes with an extraordinary pair of scenes: Ezekiel’s Vision of the Chariot painted across the gutter from the Feast of the Righteous—an eschatological event discussed in a series of rabbinical texts and later medieval commentaries. In this article, I consider the Ambrosian beastly banquet as a nucleus of images and ideas that coalesce around the visually and ontologically exceptional zoocephalic idiom particular to late medieval Jewish manuscripts. After considering the book’s material and figurative emphasis on animality as a whole, I explore visual conversations its images establish with each other and with other contemporaneous Hebrew manuscripts in order to suggest the way that they—along with Talmudic and midrashic exegetical literature—inflect the meaning and perception of the feasting scene. Finally, I consider animal-human hybrids within a larger set of Jewish cultural discourses on the monstrous and the marvelous. At stake is the very system of signification that binds the visual and the discursive in a vivid, intellectually demanding mode of reception characteristic of medieval Ashkenazic books, here distilled and foregrounded through the trope of animality.