Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-place of Cultures
Exhibition Room, Bodleian Library (free, open every day)
The Bodleian Library winter exhibition, running until 3 May 2010, tells the story of how together Jews, Christians and Muslims have contributed to the development of the book. It illustrates the cultural exchange, the social interaction and the religious toleration between Jews and non-Jews in the Muslim and the Christian worlds during the late Middle Ages. The exhibition draws on the Bodleian Hebrew holdings, one of the largest and most important collections of Hebrew manuscripts in the world.
Highlights of the exhibition include:
* The Kennicott Bible, the most beautifully and extensively illustrated manuscript among Spanish Bibles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and
* The Michael Mahzor: the earliest illuminated Jewish prayer book for the Festivals, produced in Germany in 1258. The prayer book was illuminated by a Christian, who - not familiar with the Hebrew script- painted the first illustration upside down.
More details and opening hours.
