The Book of Judith is the story of a Jewish heroine living during the period of the Second Temple when the Jewish community had returned from the Babylonian captivity and reestablished temple worship in Jerusalem. In this story, a fictional Near East sovereign threatens the religious hegemony of the Jewish people. The story is famous for Judith’s pursuit and behead-ing of the Kbehead-ing’s general, Holofernes. Judith’s success against all odds epit-omizes the charter myth of Judaism itself – cultural survival through the commitment to the preservation of the Mosaic Law, with the help of God.1
Judith is remembered in the Jewish tradition on the festival of Hanukkah.
Roman Catholics chant verse from the Book of Judith in liturgy on Mary’s name day in the daily office.2 Judith is a celebrated figure in European vis-ual arts, drama, and music. The powerful appeal of the Judith story has inspired scribes, composers, playwrights, poets, painters, and sculptors for over two millennia. The famous scene of the beheading of Holofernes with his own sword defines the Judith story. The motif of the sword became a defining attribute of the figure of Judith.3
The Sword of Judith is the first multidisciplinary collection of essays on the representation and reception of Judith through the ages. It includes new archival source studies, the translation of unpublished manuscripts, the translation of texts previously unavailable in English, and essays in rel-1 For Judith as a fictional model for cultural survival in the Hasmonean period, see Steven Weitzman, Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 48–54.
2 The author thanks Marta J. Deyrup for pointing out that verses from the Book of Judith are used in the liturgy sung on the Most Holy Name Day of the Blessed Virgin Mary on September 12. The feast dates to the sixteenth century although the date was changed in the seventeenth century to commemorate the Polish king Ian Sobieski’s victory in Vienna over the Turks on September 12, 1683.
3 For the importance of the sword in Judith iconology see Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Icon Edition, 1972), pp. 11–13.
atively unexplored areas in Judith Studies, such as Judith in the history of music. It is based on the proceedings of “The Sword of Judith Conference”
held at the New York Public Library in the spring of 2008.
Judith Studies emerged as a multidisciplinary field of endeavor in the humanities in the late twentieth century. It was stimulated by the work of feminist art historians, a renewed interest in apocryphal books of the Bible, a new ecumenism in the study of early Judaism and Christianity, and new approaches to early Jewish literature. The (re)discovery of the Italian Ba-roque artist Artemisia Gentileschi by feminist art historians4 brought the Judith theme new cultural prominence. For example, the Yvon Lambert Gal-lery in Paris exhibited a show of contemporary artists in 1978 inspired by Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes with works by Cy Twombly,
Joseph Kossuth, Daniel Buren, and others. The exhibition catalogue was introduced with an essay by Roland Barthes.5 Judy Chicago’s famous instal-lation The Dinner Party (1974–79) created a place setting for Judith at the table of the most important women in history, and Gentileschi’s Judith imagery was given fictional treatment in film, drama, and popular novels.
In 2003 Toni Craven’s article “The Book of Judith in the Context of Twentieth Century Studies of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books”6 reviewed one hundred years of Judith scholarship. By the end of the cen-tury, she noted, “Postmodern concerns [in Judith Studies] predominate the period. Scholarship is committed to the past, but it is increasingly gender inclusive, international and eclectic.” Beyond traditional biblical studies, commentaries, and translations, Judith Studies now includes art history, social and cultural history, Jewish studies, history of religion, musicology, and literary criticism.
Why Judith? What is the case for Judith Studies? Why has Judith gar-nered so much multidisciplinary interest? It is beyond the scope of this introduction to attempt to define the relevance of Judith for the study of culture and religion in the humanities. However, we can point out that the 4 See Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago, IL, and London: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1999); and Mieke Bal, The Artemisia Files: Artemisia Gentile-schi for Feminists and Other Thinking People (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
5 Word for Word – Artemisia No. 02. Trilingual edition (English/French/Italian).
Texts by Roland Barthes, Eva Menzio, Léa Lublin (Paris: Yvon Lambert, 1979).
6 See Toni Craven, “The Book of Judith in the Context of Twentieth-Century Stud-ies of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books,” Currents in Biblical Research, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2003), pp. 187–229.
story has had an uncanny ability to perpetually remain “load bearing,” that is, to carry significant cultural, political, and theological meaning in differ-ent times and contexts. Parsing the meaning the narrative has captured is the work of Judith Studies. As Roland Barthes wrote for the Yvon Lambert Gallery exhibition, “as a strong narrative this story has exploded, over the centuries, into every possible form of narration: poems (in English, in Ger-man, in Croatian), in ballads, oratorios (Vivaldi’s Juditha triumphans is by now well known), and, of course, figurative paintings.”7
The Sword of Judith maps the terrain of Judith Studies across disciplines in two sections: Writing Judith: Jewish Textual Traditions and Christian Textual Traditions and Staging Judith: The Visual Arts and Music and Dra-ma. The essays were conceived and developed over the course of a year-long collaboration among scholars called the Judith Project, facilitated by the New York Public Library’s Digital Experience Group. ARTstor, the dig-ital image library, has assembled a digdig-ital collection of Judith images, some of which are published here, accessible through ARTstor portals at most university, college, government, and private research libraries. Jstor, the digital archive, compiled and made available journal articles on Judith for the benefit of scholars working in the project.
The Sword of Judith is published by Open Book Publishers. Under the direction of the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library a comprehensive bibliography of Judith Studies has been compiled, the first of its kind. In addition, all of the papers published here can be read for free or downloaded in a digital format for a nominal price as an alternative to purchase.
The essays are presented as case studies supplemented by illustrations and new translations. Texts addressed in this book are written in ancient Greek (Ioudith); Hebrew (the Megillat Yehudit); Anglo-Saxon (Judith); me-dieval French (Mistère du Viel Testament); German (Luther Bible, popular folk songs, nineteenth-century dramatic literature); Latin (Speculum Virgi-num); Yiddish (Dos Bikhli fun der vrumi Shoshana [Susanna and Judith in Yiddish]); English (Hudson’s translation of Du Bartas’s epic, La Judit); Ital-ian (nineteenth-century newspaper articles, musical librettos), and other texts and languages.
A work of this ambition, conducted cooperatively by many scholars and institutions, in a number of languages, would not have been possible even a few years ago. And the results are being made available to readers, quickly, 7 Yvon Lambert, 1979, p. 9.
cheaply, and with opportunities for them to engage, discuss, correct, and carry the work forward. The Judith Project, which is ongoing, is there-fore tangible proof of the success of new approaches to producing, vali-dating, and disseminating knowledge. It is a practical vindication of the Re:Enlightenment Project (www.reenlightenment.org) of New York Uni-versity and the New York Public Library, which will be formally launched in April 2010 and of which I am proud to be among the founders.
The editors want to point out both the ambitions of the book and its limitations. The organization of the book provides a provisional schema for Judith Studies, which is the result of and will require multidiscipli-nary collaboration. Within this schema, the papers cover new ground and revisit old terrain. The Sword of Judith is not a comprehensive guide to Judith Studies, however. By design, the essays are concise and narrowly focused on specific research agendas within discrete disciplines. The case studies selected for the 2008 Judith Project do not begin to exhaust the diverse research interests of Juditheans working in the field today. We take this as a positive sign that indicates the need for new projects of this kind.