ritual art . by Cecil Roth . a characteristic recommendation of the Talmud justifies and proves the antiquity of the ritual art of the Jewish synagogue and home . rabbis make this comment about the Biblical verse . this is my God , and I will glorify ( lit adorn ) him ( Exodus , 15 , 2 ) : adorn thyself before him in the performance of the commandments . make before him a goodly succah , and goodly lulab , and a goodly shophar , and goodly fringes for your garments , and a goodly Sepher Torah &amp;hellip; and bind it up with goodly wrappings . elsewhere , we learn of the adornments hung in the succah , and of the gold fillets used to bind up the lulab , and more than once of the wrappings for the sacred books . but there is no evidence that at this time any of these appurtenances had any uniformity or were expressly made for a specific purpose . with the exception of a few eight-burnered clay lamps presumably intended for use on the feast of Hanukkah , there is barely any evidence of specifically-made Jewish ritual adornments , other than those of the temple , until the close of the first millenium . it must have been about this period that their manufacture began , for not long after we read of such objects as commonplace . thus in an inventory of the property of the Palestinian synagogue in Fostat ( Cairo ) , drawn up in 1186-87 , we find scheduled two Torah-crowns made out of silver , and three pairs of finials ( rimmonim ) made of silver , and twenty-two Torah-covers made of silk , some of them brocaded with gold , and so on . presumably , domestic ritual objects began to be made at much the same time . the name of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg , the great German Jewish ritual art as we know it now had begun to frequently in connection with our literary evidences , and it may be assumed that by his day Jewish ritual art as we know it now had begun to assume its form . little or nothing of this date , however , has been preserved to the present time , our evidence being indirect . the primary reason for this was presumably the vicissitudes of Jewish life . synagogues everywhere were sacked , burned , and pillaged ; communities were driven into exile , expressly forbidden to take with them anything made of precious material : synagogues could sell their sacred treasures in order to ransom prisoners or succor refugees . as a result of all these and similar recurrent crises , as well as normal wear and the natural tendency ( from the antiquary &apos;s point of view disastrous ) to replace the old by the new , Jewish ritual art of the medieval period has disappeared almost entirely . hardly more than a handful of specimens anterior to the sixteenth century are now traceable . this generalization , to be sure , may perhaps need qualification in due course . if careful and expert inspection could be made of the property of ancient and even modern synagogues , especially in the east , with the same care as has been devoted to the study of ancient manuscripts , it is not improbable that some memorable ritual objects of great antiquity might even now be discovered . however that may be , the fact remains that the objects of Jewish ritual art which are now extant are virtually all of the post-medieval period . after a trickle of the sixteenth century , there is a great mass of material of the seventeenth and eighteenth , some of it very fine . perhaps an unduly large proportion is German in origin , reflecting the religious enthusiasm , economic well-being and good taste of the new groupings in those countries , especially the newly-arisen class of court Jews . it may be remarked that here domestic religious adornments figure in great abundance side by side with those intended for the synagogue . the taste and charm of some of the objects then manufactured in Poland and eastern Europe belies the general impression of the economic misery and unaesthetic outlook of the Jewish communities in this area . on the whole , these objects reflect the tastes and fashions of the countries and periods in which they were manufactured . to be sure , in some cases the craftsmen were Jews . gold and silver-smithery was one of the characteristic Jewish occupations in most countries . it is believed that from early times until the modern era , Jews in the eastern countries were responsible for the manufacture of most of these objects . but in western Europe , with the growing tendency to exclude the Jews from handicrafts after the period of the crusades , this was different . moreover , in remote communities where a Jewish craftsman might not be available , it was necessary to have recourse to the local silversmiths . however that may be , it is certain that much Jewish ritual metal-work is of non-Jewish manufacture ; in England , Germany and Holland it often bears the mark of the gentile manufacturers , sometimes well-known masters of their craft - e.g the prolific Matthews Wolff ( Augusburg , c 1700 ) , Jeremiah Zobel ( Frankfurt am Main , c 1700 ) , and John Ruslen , Frederick Kandler , Hester Bateman and William Grundy ( London , 18th century ) . we know of at least two medieval contracts for the manufacture of silver ornaments for the Torah , made between gentile craftsmen and the leaders of the local Jewish communities - one from Arles ( 1439 ) , the other from Avignon ( 1477 ) . in the former instance , silversmith Robin Tissard undertook that the commission was to be executed in a room placed at his disposal in the house of one of the local Jews , and that no work should be done on sabbaths or Jewish holy days . on the other hand , besides the vast amount of anonymous work of this type which falls into this category , a good deal was carried out by ascertainable Jewish craftsmen of some reputation . we know , for example , of the London silversmith Abraham d&apos;Oliviera ( d 1750 ) , who has been mentioned elsewhere in this work in connection with his work as an artist-engraver , who designed and executed a good deal of ritual silver in London in the first half of the eighteenth century ; and his younger contemporary Myer Myers ( 1723-94 ) , first president of the silversmith &apos;s guild of New York , who carried out some distinguished work for synagogues ( as well as churches ) in America . certain decorative features became very common in , and almost characteristic of , the Jewish ritual art of the post-medieval period . in St Peter &apos;s in Rome there is a spirally fluted bronze column , the colonna santa , late classical in origin ; it is legendary said to have been brought from the temple in Jerusalem , where Jesus leaned against it while disputing with the rabbis . from the renaissance period , two twisted columns , apparently copied from the colonna santa , and inevitably identified with Jakhin and Boaz of Kings 7 , 21 , began to figure as a typical feature on the engraved title-pages of Hebrew books ( see fig 175 ) . it was from there that this feature was copied on various objects of European Jewish ritual art until the end of the eighteenth century . other symbols which are commonly found include the lion , representing the lion of the tribe of Judah ( Genesis 49 , 9 ) which , as we have seen , was one of the most common symbols found in Jewish art from classical antiquity . this illustrated also the Rabbinic dictum ( ethics of the Fathers , 5 , 23 ) that a man should be bold as a lion , light as an eagle and fleet as a deer to fulfill the will of his Father in heaven . the eagle and deer also figure , though less commonly ( fig 138 ) . the two tablets of stone bearing the ten commandments , in the shape which had become conventional in the middle ages ( among the Christians perhaps earlier than among the Jews ) is found very frequently ( fig 139 ) . sometimes , too , we see other ancient temple furniture , such as the altar and table of shew-bread , perpetuating the tradition already found in medieval manuscripts . a gift presented by a Cohen would often bear a representation of the hands joined in the priestly benediction , of a Levite that of the ewer and basin used by members of that tribe in laving the priest &apos;s hands . in Italy ( and later in the ex-Marrano communities ) other family badges and armorial bearings were not unusual . the whole would be commonly surmounted by a crown , symbolizing the traditional crown of the law : sometimes by a triple crown , in reference to the Rabbinic dictum ( ethics of the Fathers , 4 , 17 ) that there are three crowns - that of the Torah , of monarchy , and of priesthood and that of a good name surpasses them all . 2 . the ritual art of the synagogue naturally centered on the scroll of the Pentateuch or Sepher Torah , used in the Biblical readings , and wound upon two staves . it is impossible to determine when the practice arose of covering this by an ornament of precious metal . probably , however , it was relatively late . the Talmud ( Baba Bathra 14a ) speaks of the Pentateuch deposited by Moses in the tabernacle as being on silver rollers , but this legendary model does not seem to have been imitated , and in representations in synagogue interiors and on holy scrolls in various media ( gold glasses , etc ) in the classical period there is no trace of anything in the way of ornament . the account of the sack of the synagogue of Minorca in 438 speaks of the synagogical ornaments and silver , without giving any further details . the same is true of the sacred appurtenances which Pope Gregory the great ordered to be restored to the synagogue of Palermo in 599 . in oriental communities , the scroll of the law was enclosed entirely in a case ( tik ) , which was placed upright on the reading desk and opened out for reading the prescribed portion . this was the general practice in Iraq and the neighboring countries as early as the 10th century , and has remained to our own day . these cases were usually of wood , frequently with inscriptions applied in metal , but were occasionally of silver , finely worked and engraved , and sometimes of gold . in the former metal , a few fine examples are extant ; none , however , which are anterior to the seventeenth century ( fig 140 ) . though the tik was commonly used only in eastern communities , cases were made for the scrolls sometimes also in western countries , especially for well-to-do householders , who wished to have portable Torah-scrolls on their travels . an exquisite pair of such cases in silver , with polygonal sections opening on hinges and spirally fluted handles and finials , was executed in 1766-7 by a gentile master craftsman for Dr Samuel de Falk , the so-called Baal Shem of London . the practice of placing crowns of precious metal on the Sepher Torah - at least on such special occasions as the feast of the rejoicing of the law - seems also to have been established in Iraq as early as the tenth century ( Shaare Semahot , p 117 ) . the Fostat contract of 1186-7 lists among other objects two Sepher-crowns made out of silver . this form of ornament was naturally suggested by the Rabbinic dictum cited above which refers to the dignity of learning as the crown of the law - a phrase inscribed innumerable times on such objects and others connected with the synagogue ritual . these objects , which became known generally as atarah , were at the outset especially associated with southern Europe . Aaron of Lunel tells in his Sepher haManhig how in 1203 he persuaded some community which he visited , in southern France or Spain , to make a silver crown ( atarah ) for the Sepher Torah instead of decorating it with miscellaneous female adornments . the contract already referred to of March 12 , 1439 between the Avignonese silversmith Robin Tissard and the baylons of the Jewish community of Arles was for manufacture , for a total sum of fifty florins , of an atarah for the scroll of the Jews , hexagonal in shape , superimposed on a copper drum with which Tissard was to be provided . there were to be six towers - one at each corner - the top crenellated like a fortress , and the surface to be engraved in imitation of masonry . chains and columns decorated with lions &apos; heads were also to be part of the design . 