Exhibition | Jewish Worlds Illuminated: Hebrew Manuscripts
Now on view at The Grolier Club:
Jewish Worlds Illuminated: A Treasury of
Hebrew Manuscripts from the Jewish Theological Seminary Library
The Grolier Club, New York, 17 September — 27 December 2025
Grace after Meals, Daily Blessings with Shema and Prayers for Bedtime; scribe: Aaron Wolff Herlingen of Gewitsch, Vienna, 1724 (New York: JTS MS 8232).
Since the time of the Babylonian Exile in the early sixth century BCE, the vast majority of the world’s Jews have lived in diasporas—scattered across many lands, cultures, and languages. In these communities, Jewish wisdom and creativity often found their fullest expression in the creation of books. Manuscripts became vessels of memory, imagination, and identity, preserving the richness of Jewish life from Antiquity into modern times. Within their pages are the voices of scholars and poets, scribes, and artists, which afford us a window into the everyday experiences of Jews across the globe. The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, established in New York in 1886, houses one of the world’s largest and most important collections of Hebrew manuscripts and printed books.
With items dating as far back as the ninth century and originating from lands as varied as Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, and Yemen, the collection represents more than ten centuries of Jewish scholarship, spanning the spectrum of Bible, liturgy, rabbinics, kabbalah, science, literature, and philosophy. Jewish Worlds Illuminated is the most extensive display ever of the JTS Library’s Hebrew manuscript treasures and is the first exhibition at the Grolier Club devoted exclusively to Jewish books. Each case presents scribal and artistic masterpieces from a particular region or period, inviting you to enter a historical Jewish setting and consider it alongside others. The works displayed stand as enduring testimony to Jewish intellectual, cultural, and artistic life across centuries and continents.
Visit the exhibition online»
Exhibition | Art of Faith from the Jewish Museum, New York
Torah Pointer, 18th century, coral and silver
(New York: Jewish Museum)
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From the press release for the exhibition:
Guests of Honor: Art of Faith from the Jewish Museum, New York
Detroit Institute of Arts, 5 December 2025 — 3 January 2027
The Detroit Institute of Arts presents a special exhibition in partnership with the Jewish Museum in New York, highlighting the heritage, traditions, and vibrancy of thriving Jewish communities from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Guests of Honor: Art of Faith includes 13 exceptional ceremonial objects, dating from the 1400s to the 1900s, that illustrate connections across faith traditions.
With the works placed throughout the museum, this DIA Guests of Honor presentation offers a rare opportunity to experience exquisite objects of Jewish ceremonial art alongside pieces produced for Christian and Islamic patrons in the same period. These diverse works both demonstrate the specificity of Jewish communities, their holidays and rituals and mutual influence of craftspeople, artists, and patrons across faiths. This loan from New York’s Jewish Museum brings a culturally specific set of artworks into conversation with DIA’s encyclopedic collections.
Giovanni Maria Ronchi (active in Ferrara, 1764–1801), Torah Crown, 1764–77, silver, partial gilt (NY: The Jewish Museum, F3688).
“The Detroit Institute of Arts is deeply honored to collaborate with the Jewish Museum to bring these extraordinary Jewish ceremonial artworks to our community,” said Detroit Institute of Arts Director Salvador Salort-Pons. “This partnership represents more than a loan of objects; it is a testament to the power of cultural institutions working together to preserve and share the richness of Jewish history as well as artistic and spiritual life. Through this exhibition, we hope to foster greater understanding and appreciation for Jewish history and culture, while strengthening the bonds between our institutions and communities.”
Among the items are several that adorn Torah scrolls, the holiest text of Judaism. These objects reflect both Jewish practice as well as the artistic styles of their places of production. The oldest of the works on view include a silver Torah shield from the 1660s, one of the earliest surviving pieces of Jewish ceremonial art from Nuremburg, Germany. This specific shield is decorated with unicorns, lions, and foliage, echoing styles popular in German art across religious communities in the period. The exhibition also includes three sets of Torah finials (ornamental metal objects placed atop the wooden rollers of a Torah scroll) featuring small bells to announce the movement of the holy text during congregational processions. These three sets of Torah finials come from distinct Jewish communities—one was crafted in London by the noted silversmith Solomon Hougham in the 1700s, another made in Iran a century later, and the third made in Morocco in the early 1900s—and reflect how Jewish communities across the world ornament the Torah in different ways. The exhibition also includes two silver Torah crowns used to beautify the Torah scroll: one from the late 1700s made in Ferrara, Italy, an important center of Jewish life since the 1100s; and the other made in North Africa in 1898–99.
Hanukkah Lamp, Northern Rhineland, late 17th or early 18th century, cast copper alloy, 24 × 22 × 11 inches (NY: Jewish Museum, F5591).
Alongside objects centering the Torah in Jewish ceremonial life are works connected to Jewish holidays and festivals. These works also reflect the broader context in which they were made and first used. An Eastern European spice container (used during the Havdalah ceremony at the end of the Jewish Sabbath) resembles the form of a Gothic clock tower, echoing the architecture of the region. A silver container for an etrog (a fruit used to celebrate the fall holiday of Sukkot) made in the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s is adorned with designs similar to Islamic silver from the same time and place. Two Hanukkah lamps, one from northern Germany and one from Ottoman Baghdad, share characteristics with designs popular in each region.
Presented alongside DIA’s outstanding collections of Islamic Art and European Decorative Arts, these works of Jewish ceremonial art help tell a broader story of interfaith interaction, shared creativity, and culture around the world.
“Working alongside our collaborating partners at the Jewish Museum to select these pieces has been an incredible journey of discovery and scholarship,” said Judith Dolkart, Detroit Institute of Arts Deputy Director, Art, Education & Programs. “Each artwork tells a unique story—of faith, resilience, craftsmanship, and community—and together we have carefully identified objects that will resonate with our visitors on multiple levels. I am excited for our audiences to experience the beauty, meaning, and history embedded in each piece.”
Guests of Honor: Art of Faith from the Jewish Museum, New York is organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts. The exhibition is generously supported by the William Davidson Foundation.
Exhibition | Adorning Ritual: Art from the Jewish Museum, New York
Marriage Wall Panel or Tabletop, 18th–early 19th century, marble inlaid with cut stones, 58 × 38 × 2 inches
(NY: The Jewish Museum, 2007-1)
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Now on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art:
Adorning Ritual: Jewish Ceremonial Art from the Jewish Museum, New York
Cleveland Museum of Art, 25 May 2025 — 10 May 2026
The Cleveland Museum of Art houses an encyclopedic collection, giving visitors valuable insights and perspectives into the lives and cultures of people around the world and throughout time. To enhance its permanent collection and to more fully represent the stories and objects important to our communities, the museum is displaying art on loan from the Jewish Museum, New York, in six galleries.
Heinrich Wilhelm Kompff, Torah Finials, 1797–99, silver, 11 inches high (NY: The Jewish Museum).
Most of the works are ritual objects relating to Judaism or the lives of Jewish people, from silver Torah finials to an inlaid marble panel commemorating a marriage. The objects have been placed in context with other works of the same time or region, allowing a fuller narrative to unfold. As you encounter these objects in the galleries, we invite you to consider their relationships to the other works in these spaces.
In addition to the loans from the Jewish Museum, two examples of Jewish ceremonial art from local collections are on display in two additional galleries: an etrog box recently acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art and a miniature Torah ark on loan from the Mishkan Or Museum of Jewish Cultures in Beachwood, Ohio.
New Book | Kant: A Revolution in Thinking
From Harvard UP:
Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, translated by Peter Lewis (Cambridge: Balknap Press, 2025), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0674296107, $30.
Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of perpetual peace in the global order decisively influenced both intellectual history and twentieth-century politics, shaping everything from the German Constitution to the United Nations Charter.
Renowned philosopher Marcus Willaschek explains why, three centuries after Kant’s birth, his reflections on democracy, beauty, nature, morality, and the limits of human knowledge remain so profoundly relevant. Weaving biographical and historical context together with exposition of key ideas, Willaschek emphasizes three central features of Kant’s theory and method. First, Kant combines seemingly incompatible positions to show how their insights can be reconciled. Second, he demonstrates that it is not only human thinking that must adjust to the realities of the world; the world must also be fitted to the structures of our thinking. Finally, he overcomes the traditional opposition between thought and action by putting theory at the service of practice.
In Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, even readers having no prior acquaintance with Kant’s ideas or with philosophy generally will find an adroit introduction to the Prussian polymath’s oeuvre, beginning with his political arguments, expanding to his moral theory, and finally moving to his more abstract considerations of natural science, epistemology, and metaphysics. Along the way, Kant himself emerges from beneath his famed works, revealing a magnetic personality, a clever ironist, and a man deeply engaged with his contemporary world.
Marcus Willaschek is Professor of Philosophy at Goethe University, Frankfurt, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science, where he is responsible for the German standard edition of Kant’s works. The author of four books, he is also coeditor of the three-volume Kant-Lexikon.
Exhibition | Stan Douglas: Tales of Empire
From the press release for the exhibition:
Stan Douglas: Tales of Empire
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario, 5 December 2025 — 22 March 2026
Curated by Sarah Milroy
This winter, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection presents Stan Douglas: Tales of Empire, a landmark exhibition surveying three decades of work by internationally acclaimed Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas. The exhibition brings together five major photographic series that explore the histories, legacies, and enduring reverberations of colonialism across continents and centuries. Curated by Frances & Tim Price Executive Director and Chief Curator Sarah Milroy, Tales of Empire investigates the power structures, mythologies, and lived realities shaped by imperialism through Douglas’s technically masterful and conceptually incisive lens.
Stan Douglas, Act I, Scene V: In which Polly Peachum is Greeted at the Ducat Estate by Family Friend Diana Trapes, who Will Ultimately Betray Her, 2024, inkjet print on Dibond aluminum, 150 × 150 cm (courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner).
• The Nootka Series (1996) — Created on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island, this series traces the enduring presence of Indigenous communities and moments of early contact with European settlers. At the McMichael, these photographs are being shown in dialogue with historical paintings by A.Y. Jackson, opening a compelling conversation between Douglas’s contemporary vision and the Group of Seven’s early twentieth century perspective.
• The Cuba Series (2005) — Capturing the complex architectural and political landscape of Havana and other Cuban towns, these images illuminate how centuries of Spanish, American, and Soviet influence have shaped the city’s identity and visual fabric.
• The Western Series (2006) — Set in British Columbia’s interior, this series examines landscapes marked by resource extraction, revealing how settler-driven development has altered the environment and reshaped the region.
• The Klatsassin Series (2006) — A cinematic re-imagining of a violent episode of Indigenous resistance in nineteenth-century British Columbia. Douglas invents a cast of characters associated with the event, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction while probing how stories of colonial conflict are constructed and remembered.
• The Enemy of All Mankind (2024) — Douglas’s most recent project draws inspiration from Polly (1729), the satirical sequel to John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. Featuring a costumed ensemble, the series restages scenes of decadence, intrigue, and misadventure in the Caribbean, using Enlightenment-era satire to critique the moral bankruptcy of colonialism for a contemporary audience.
Across these bodies of work, Douglas dissects and dramatizes the machinery of empire—its spectacle, its systems, and its violence—while inviting viewers to reconsider how histories are recorded, contested, and retold.
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Stan Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver) is an internationally renowned artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans photography, film, video, installation, and theatre. Since the 1980s, he has created technically ambitious works that explore the complexities of history, collective memory, and the lasting imprint of colonialism. Through innovative uses of both analog and digital media, Douglas restages pivotal historical moments—often at cultural, political, or social tipping points—blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, cinema, and visual art.
Douglas has been featured at the Venice Biennale five times, most recently in 2022 with the acclaimed video installation ISDN. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at major institutions worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and the National Gallery of Canada and is held in leading museum collections across North America and Europe. Recent projects include a permanent public commission at New York’s Moynihan Train Hall (2021) and the recent survey Stan Douglas: Ghostlight at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art in 2025. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Audain Prize for Visual Art (2019); the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2016); the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award (2013); and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (2012). In 2021, Douglas was knighted as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2023 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Simon Fraser University, Greater Vancouver. Douglas lives and works in Vancouver.
Stan Douglas: Tales of Empire (Kleinburg: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2025), 128 pages, $35 CAD. Introduction by Sarah Milroy, an interview with the artist, and an essay by André Alexis.
New Book | Race and the Scottish Enlightenment
From Yale UP:
Linda Andersson Burnett and Bruce Buchan, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0300264388, $65. Series: The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History.
In the decades after 1750, an increasing number of former medical students from the University of Edinburgh construed humanity as a subject of both intellectual curiosity and colonial interest. They drew on a shared educational background, blending medicine with natural history and moral philosophy, in a range of encounters with non-European and Indigenous peoples across the globe whom they began to classify as races. Focusing on a surprising number of these understudied students, this book reveals the gradual predominance of race in Scottish Enlightenment thought.
Teaching provided a toolbox of concepts and theories for students who went on to careers as military and naval surgeons, colonial administrators, and natural historians. While some, such as Mungo Park—who traveled in Africa—are well known, many others such as the long-term residents in the Russian Empire, Matthew Guthrie and his wife, Maria Guthrie, or the Caribbean botanist Alexander Anderson are less remembered. Among this group were those such as the Pacific traveler Archibald Menzies and the circumnavigator of Australia, Robert Brown, who are known primarily as botanists rather than as ethnographers. Together they formed a global network of colonial travelers and natural historians sharing a common educational background and a growing interest in race.
Linda Andersson Burnett is a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden. Bruce Buchan is a professor in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia.
New Book | Slaves in Paris
From Harvard UP:
Miranda Spieler, Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0674986541, $40.
A pioneering biographical study of enslaved people and their struggle for freedom in prerevolutionary Paris, by an award-winning historian of France and the French Empire.
In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured Paris as a refuge from France’s notorious slave-trading ports.
The French were late to the slave trade, but they dominated the global market in enslaved people by the late 1780s. This explosive growth transformed Paris, the cultural capital of the Enlightenment, into a dangerous place for people in bondage. Those seeking freedom in Paris faced manhunts, arrest, and deportation. Some put their faith in lawyers, believing the city’s courts would free them. Examining the lives of those whose dashed hopes and creative persistence capture the spirit of the era, Miranda Spieler brings to light a hidden story of slavery and the struggle for freedom.
Fugitive slaves collided with spying networks, nosy neighbors, and overlapping judicial authorities. Their clandestine lives left a paper trail. In a feat of historical detective work, Spieler retraces their steps and brings to light the new racialized legal culture that permeated every aspect of everyday life. She pieces together vivid, granular portraits of men, women, and children who came from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. We learn of their strategies and hiding places, their family histories and relationships to well-known Enlightenment figures. Slaves in Paris is a history of hunted people. It is also a tribute to their resilience.
Miranda Spieler is the author of Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. She is Professor of History and Politics at the American University of Paris.
New Book | Turner and the Slave Trade
Distributed by Yale UP:
Sam Smiles, Turner and the Slave Trade (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2025), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107512, £30 / $40.
While J. M. W. Turner’s iconic painting The Slave Ship (1840) is celebrated as a powerful denunciation of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, his personal and professional ties to slavery tell a more nuanced story. This book provides the first detailed analysis of Turner’s evolving responses to slavery over his lifetime, from his financial investment in a Jamaican property worked by enslaved labourers to his later denunciation of the trade in his art. Drawing on extensive archival research, Turner and the Slave Trade traces the artist’s interactions with patrons tied to the plantation economy and examines the impact of abolitionist discourse on his work. Key chapters investigate The Slave Ship, its inspiration, and its contested interpretations, while situating Turner within broader debates about art, slavery and shifting public sentiment. Offering a nuanced understanding of how art engages with history’s most urgent issues, this important new study presents Turner as an exceptional yet complex figure, whose legacy is intertwined with the institution of slavery and its eventual abolition.
Sam Smiles is honorary professor at the University of Exeter, and the author of The Late Works of J. M. W. Turner: The Artist and his Critics (2020).
Completing the Turner Cataloguing Project
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In 2012, updates on the Turner Bequest cataloging project described the effort as a 30-year initiative with a completion date of 2014. A decade later, this short film marks the close of the project’s final phase.
“Completing the Turner Cataloguing Project | What Can Turner’s Sketchbooks Tell Us? New Discoveries,” 11 minutes, produced by Storya, 2025. Featuring Matthew Imms, Hayley Flynn, Hannah Kaspar, and Vanessa Otim.
Marking 250 years since the birth of J.M.W. Turner, this short documentary explores the closing chapter of a decades-long cataloguing project that has transformed how we see one of Britain’s greatest artists. Commissioned by the Paul Mellon Centre in collaboration with Tate, the film captures the final phase of cataloguing Turner’s 37,000 drawings, sketchbooks, and watercolours—the largest holding of preparatory works by a single artist in the world.
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The catalogue is available here»
David Blayney Brown, ed., J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Watercolours (London: Tate Research Publication, 2012).
Landscape and history painter, master draughtsman and watercolourist, tireless traveller, poet and teacher, J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) exemplifies the energy, imagination and enquiring spirit of his time. For his admirer John Ruskin he was “the greatest of the age.” Explore the world’s largest collection of Turner’s sketchbooks, drawings and watercolours and its unique insights into the artist’s mind and creative process. Follow him as he toured Britain and Europe, discovered new subjects, styles and techniques, and developed his pictures, poetry and prints.
J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours is a growing catalogue of the many thousands of original works on paper in Tate’s collection, drawn mainly from Turner’s bequest of his collection to the nation. Divided into five sections covering different phases in Turner’s career, the catalogue consists of thematic groupings of works, arranged chronologically and by subject. Entries on the groupings and individual works provide detailed commentaries, exhibition and publication histories, and information about the media and materials used.
Research Leads
Martha Barratt — Senior Research Editor
Amy Concannon — Manton Senior Curator, Historic British Art
Project Editors
David Blayney Brown — Curator British Art, 1790–1850
Matthew Imms — Senior Cataloguer
Jennifer Mundy — Head of Art Historical Research
The full contributor list is available here»
Research Project | Generation Landscape
Francis Danby, The Avon Gorge, Looking toward Clifton, ca. 1820
(New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
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From the Paul Mellon Centre:
With the completion of the online catalogue of the Turner Bequest at Tate, supported by the PMC and launched with a major international conference, Turner 250 at Tate, this is a watershed moment for the study and understanding of the contribution of English landscape painting within the wider contexts of European and world culture. Generation Landscape will bring art historians, curators, academic researchers, and creative voices together to think afresh about this significant moment in art history, when a generation of emerging artists created paintings and graphic works offering bold and often experimental new visions of nature, the landscape and the purpose of art itself—and why these images continue to carry such imaginative force today.
Sarah Turner, Director of the PMC, said: “Collaborating to support a vibrant infrastructure of research is at the heart of the PMC’s approach. Through our funding, we are really delighted to bring together the convening potential and academic expertise offered by the Courtauld’s new Manton Centre with our partners at museums and galleries in Ipswich, Bristol, and Margate. This partnership is going to build on the foundations of the extraordinary body of scholarship that already exists on artists such as Turner and Constable and will support a new generation of curators, researchers, and artists to engage with it and shape different and original responses for audiences today. “
Steve Edwards, Director of the Manton Centre at The Courtauld, said: “Sir Edwin Manton built an art collection centred around the important generation of English landscape painters: Constable, Gainsborough, Girtin, Turner, and others. This collaboration between the Manton Centre and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art establishes a dialogue with the artists at the heart of his interests to consider the meanings and values that have shaped Britain. Generation Landscape will support and promote new scholarship and curatorial work concerned with landscape and nature, providing an exciting opportunity to place contemporary research in conversation with a moment when both British art and British society were undergoing profound change.”
Generation Landscape is a three-year programme of research and events organised by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Manton Centre at The Courtauld.
With additional information here:
This research project is founded upon the simple fact that a stellar collection of British landscape artists—including J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Thomas Girtin, and John Sell Cotman—were born within just a few years of each other (1775 in the case of the earliest, Girtin and Turner, and 1782 in the case of the latest, Cotman). Generation Landscape is intended to look afresh at the kinds of landscape imagery produced by these individual artists and their contemporaries. It will do so from a variety of art-historical perspectives, including those that are being newly developed in response to our current environmental crisis.
Generation Landscape encompasses and complements detailed new research on a number of the individual practitioners listed above. This activity includes the production of a new online catalogue of Thomas Girtin’s works, written by Dr. Greg Smith, published in 2022. Research undertaken as part of the project fed into the major 2025 Tate Britain exhibition Turner and Constable: Rivals & Originals. More broadly, Generation Landscape aims to chart the trajectories of this distinctive cohort of landscape artists in relation to a shared set of interests, experiences, and circumstances. It will look at how these practitioners and their works interacted with, and differed from, each other, and responded in both comparable and contradictory ways to the challenges—artistic, cultural, political, and environmental—thrown up by their era.
Generation Landscape was initiated in 2021 by Mark Hallett, former Director of the Paul Mellon Centre.
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