Exhibition Lecture: Portable Prayers: Objects, Adornment, and Devotion in Jewish Antiquity

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

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Conventional studies of ancient Jewish prayer and its evolution focus primarily on recitations or performances of precatory texts, liturgy, or poetry once conducted inside Jewish homes, synagogues, and study halls. This talk adopts a different focus: it considers inextricable connections between the minds, hearts, and bodies of Jewish supplicants and the portable things that they once attached to their bodies with strings and cords, including inscribed amulets and phylacteries of various sorts. Through explorations of objects from ISAW’s exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World, as well as those found in other museum exhibitions and collections, this lecture examines haptic and material dimensions of Jewish prayer, as facilitated through attention to wearable objects that originally encased hidden texts. Drawing additional insights from recent studies of ancient magic and ritual power throughout Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Mesopotamian cultural orbits, as well as neglected archaeological discoveries from synagogue contexts, the lecture offers novel insights into relationships between amulets and phylacteries, Jewish prayer, and the complex “marketplace” of religions throughout the ancient world.

Karen B. Stern (PhD Brown University, 2006) is an award-winning author and professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research synthesizes studies of archaeology, art, and graffiti to reimagine the cultural histories, material cultures, and sensory experiences of Jews and their neighbors throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. She is author of Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (Princeton University Press 2018; paperback ed. 2020), winner of a 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award; Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa (Brill 2008); and co-editor of With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal: Essays on Relationships in the Hebrew Bible in Honor of Saul M. Olyan (SBL Press 2021). Research grants, fellowships, and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Getty Villa, the Center for Jewish History, and others have supported her academic and field research. Her current book project, ‘Sacred: Archaeology of the Senses in the Ancient Synagogue,’ investigates experiential and multi-sensory dimensions of Jewish devotional life in antiquity.

This talk is given in conjunction with ISAW's exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World. The exhibition is organized by the Toledo Museum of Art; its presentation at ISAW is made possible by generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Leon Levy Foundation.

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