The Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Visual

As common opinion has it, the Wissenschaft des Judentums had little affinity with art and aesthetics. This article begins by relating this lack of ‘visual antenna’ to the movement’s original national-philological orientation. By scrutinising relevant passages from the writings of hard-core Wissenschaftler such as Leopold Zunz, Michael Sachs, Moritz Steinschneider, David Henriques de Castro and David Kaufmann, it then explores how traditional Jewish philologists coped with art and the visual when confronted with the non-textual, supranational dimensions of Jewish material culture, which became more and more prominent as the nineteenth century drew to a close.