Reading Resilience

By DIANE COLE

New York and Washington

Jewish texts, mostly religious, from ancient scrolls to brightly colored illuminated manuscripts to prayer books worn from use, are the subject of three separate exhibitions—at the Jewish Museum and the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, both in New York, and at Washington's Library of Congress.

While Muslims refer to both Christians and Jews as People of the Book, one of the first things we learn at the stunning Jewish Museum show "Crossing Borders: Manuscripts From the Bodleian Libraries" is that Jews apparently were slower than early Christians to fully embrace the transition from unwieldy rolls (known as rotuli) and scrolls to the less cumbersome, booklike form known as the codex. Christians found codices a more portable and practical form for spreading their teachings. Among the oldest pieces on display are a frayed papyrus scrap from a third-century Christian codex in Greek; a well-worn fifth-century parchment codex of the Four Gospels written in the Armenian dialect of Syriac; and a sixth- to seventh-century Latin Vulgate Codex from Italy whose marginalia, in Anglo-Saxon, documents its use to help spread Christianity in the British Isles.

By contrast, Jews as late as the 13th century continued to copy some liturgical texts on rotuli, exemplified here by a long, narrow parchment fragment in Hebrew (c. 10th century) recovered from the Cairo Genizah, the synagogue storeroom where more than 200,000 abandoned manuscripts and fragments were discovered in the late 19th century. Also from the Cairo Genizah, and on display here, are a frayed fragment from a 10th-century Hebrew codex and a well-preserved book manuscript from 1180, in flowing cursive Hebrew, by the great Jewish scholar Maimonides—part of his majestic rabbinic commentary, Mishneh Torah.

In keeping with its title, "Crossing Borders" (based on a 2009 exhibition at Oxford's Bodelian Libraries and organized for the Jewish Museum by curator Claudia Nahson), also vividly dramatizes the interweaving of artistic influences among cultures and faiths in the Middle East and Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. For instance, on the left-hand page of a Hebrew Bible produced about 1300 in Tudela, Spain, an intricate Islamic-inspired geometric pattern in gold and red surrounds a medieval castle, symbol of the Christian kingdom of Castile; on the facing page, another bold geometric design is framed by an elegant inscription in Hebrew. Most surprising is the Hebrew Bible from 15th-century Italy that displays a Renaissance-style illustration of a unicorn (a symbol of Christ) sitting in the lap of the Virgin Mary. It's unclear whether a Christian artist illuminated the manuscript—or if the unicorn, so often pursued and hunted, is meant as a subversive symbol of the persecution of the Jews, with the Virgin Mary a stand-in for Eve, and the unicorn also doubling as the hope for the redemption of Israel.

Then there is the artistic centerpiece of the show, the exquisitely adorned and illuminated Kennicott Bible (named for the 18th-century British Hebraist Benjamin Kennicott). It bears the signatures of both the Hebrew scribe and the Jewish artist who crafted the volume in northwest Spain in 1476, and it effortlessly blends artistic influences from Islam, the Christian Renaissance and secular folklore, all of which can be seen in the sophisticated use of color and in the widely varied architectural, geometric, bird, floral and animal motifs. This sumptuous masterpiece of Jewish and European art was completed a mere 16 years before the Jews were expelled from Spain.

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At Columbia's exhibition "The People in the Books," the focus is on the human stories found in the 100-plus handwritten manuscripts on display. Those stories range around the Jewish Diaspora to tell a broader tale of Jewish continuity.

In the 17th century, for example, descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had publicly converted in 1492, but secretly kept remnants of their old faith alive, began arriving in the more religiously open Netherlands. The show includes a 17th-century tractate written in Spanish by Amsterdam's rabbi Saul Levi Morteira to reintroduce Judaism to the many conversos new to his city.

There is a sense of the exotic in the two manuscripts—one written in Spanish in 1678, the other in Hebrew in 1781—that recount travels to the Jewish communities of Cochin and Malabar, in India, whose existence had been known since the ninth century.

Insight into the seriousness of religious observance can be gleaned from a signed and sealed rabbinic ruling (or responsa) from 1753 written in Italian and Hebrew; the leading rabbis of the Corfu Jewish community had engaged in so heated a dispute over whether the Shema prayer ("Hear, O Israel") could be sung in synagogue that they took their case to other rabbis from Safed, Salonika and Padua. This document approves the singing. There is also a poignant footnote: When one of the "losing" rabbis died, one of his opponents wrote the Hebrew elegy, also displayed here, in tribute to him.

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It would be hard to choose the most extraordinary of the 60 objects in "Words Like Sapphires: 100 Years of Hebraica at the Library of Congress, 1912-2012," the panoramic survey of Jewish history and tradition drawn from the library's vast Judaica collection of more than 200,000 items. In terms of sheer artistic splendor, the prize surely goes to the colorful, eye-catching Washington Haggadah produced in Germany in 1478. The lively illustrations that line the margins of this book, used on Passover to recount the Hebrew exodus from Egypt, provide a candid, often witty look at Jewish life and observance in the late Middle Ages.

But don't overlook the censored volume of Hebrew Psalms with Commentary, published in Bologna in 1477. Its pages literally contain layers of history: The heavy ink marks made by the censor (the Catholic Church instituted such censorship in 1553) have faded with time to reveal the original text beneath. Even before then, however, the book's owner had written in the deleted passages in the margins.

Historical rarities also abound, such as the vest-pocket-size 17th-century Hebrew Bible. On a lighter note: "Heroes of Ancient Israel" playing cards (King of Clubs David, Queen of Diamonds Prophetess Deborah) illustrated by the Polish-American graphic artist Arthur Szyk (1894-1951). And there are several examples of Yiddish sheet music, including "Der Yiddisher Yankee Doodle" ("The Jewish Yankee Doodle"), whose lyrics explain that "In America you must work first in order to play later."

Most breathtaking of all, though, is the Talmud created in 1948 for Holocaust survivors living in German Displaced Persons Camps. The title page depicts in its lower half a Nazi concentration camp complete with barbed wire, while at the top appear the palm trees and panorama of the Holy Land. The dedication thanks the "United States Army . . . who played a major role in the rescue of the Jewish people from total annihilation."

The rebuilding of Jewish life and the continuity of the Jewish spirit: That is the collective story told in all three exhibitions. The books bear witness to it.

Ms. Cole is the author of the memoir "After Great Pain: A New Life Emerges" and is on the faculty of New York's Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-el.

A version of this article appeared November 28, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Reading Resilience.