Jewish Hat - Jewish Hat in Art

Jewish Hat in Art

The Jewish hat is frequently used in medieval art to denote Jews of the Biblical period. Often the Jews so shown are those shown in an unfavourable light by the story being depicted, such as the money-changers expelled by Jesus from the Temple (Matthew.21.12-17), but this is by no means always the case. The husband of Mary, Saint Joseph, is often shown wearing a Jewish hat, and Jesus himself may be shown wearing one, especially in depictions of the Meeting at Emmaus, where his disciples do not recognise him at first (Luke.24.13-32). Sometimes it is used to distinguish Jews from other peoples such as Egyptians or Philistines. It is often depicted in art from times and places where the hat does not seem to have actually been commonly worn by Jews, "as an external and largely arbitrary sign devised by Christian iconographers", one of a number of useful visual ways of identifying types of persons in medieval art.

In notable contrast to forms of Jewish badge, the Jewish hat is often seen in Hebrew manuscript illuminations such as Haggadot made in medieval Europe (picture above). In the Bird's Head Haggadah (Germany, c. 1300, now Jerusalem), the figures wear the hat when sitting to eat the Passover Seder.

However in Christian art the wearing of the hat can be sometimes be seen to express an attitude to those wearing it. In one extreme example in a manuscript of the Bible moralisée, an illustration shows the rod of Aaron, which has turned into a serpent, turning on the Pharoah's magicians (Exodus, 7:10-12); Moses and Aaron do not wear the hat but the Egyptian magicians do, signifying not that they are Jews, but that they are like Jews, i.e. on the wrong side of the dispute. The paired roundel below shows two tonsured clerics confronting a group of hat-wearing Jews, and has a Latin caption explaining "Moses and Aaron signify good prelates who, in explaining the words of the Gospel, devour the false words of the Jews". In another scene showing the conversion of Jews and other non-Christians at the end of the world, a series of figures show different stages of removing their hats to signify the stages they have reached in their conversion, so that "the hat does not just identify Jews; it functions independently of its placement to signify infidelity and recalcitrant Jewishness".