Published by Crown Publishers, New York 1973, hardcover, illustrated, 221 pages, 25 cms x 32.5 cms, condition: as new.
If your question is "what did people look like and how did they dress in olden times?" and you're specifically interested in the Jewish part of that question, this is wonderful eye-opening book. Although published way back in 1973, Reubens' book remains fresh and scholarly. It is the most complete, historically broad-ranging compendium on this subject that I've found (and I've done some searching!) It contains a marvelous assemblage of historical texts and rich imagery of Jewish clothing, male and female, across centuries and continents. The author draws connections between the images and the historical documents, illustrating textual evidence with supporting images.
Some of the most interesting historical engravings, illustrations and paintings show everyday social situations - people eating a Shabbat meal, people gathering in the courtyard of a beit k'nesset after morning prayers, or, in one remarkable little illustration from circa 1717 CE Germany, doing birkat ha'lavana, the blessing on the night of the new moon. These and many other scenes like them are moments we may experience in our own lives but to encounter them in visual form, straight from the 16th or 18th century, clothed in the robes and collars and belts and pointy hats that once must have seemed so comfortable, so ordinary and so right and that now seem so other worldly and so obscurely medieval, is amazing, even radically amazing.
Experiencing the diverse, culturally variegated, historically real experience of Jews across history, whether through learning about clothing and food, or through law and legend, enables me to live a richer Jewish life in the present. We tend to do a great deal to transmit our written culture, our behavioral culture and even our emotional culture but it is rare and refreshing to encounter a book which transmits visual, sartorial Jewish culture, from deep in the past, and exposes all the different things that it has meant across time to "look like a Jew."
A LOVELY COFFEE TABLE BOOK
