Obj. ID: 49762
Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts  The Purim story of Esther and the Song of Songs written in a miniature script in a circular form, Ukraine, circa 1900

The following description was prepared by William Gross:

Micrography, the scribal practice of employing minuscule script to delineate shapes or figural designs, is an art form that has been used by Jews for over a millennium. In fact an original art form created by Jewish scribes, this intricate decorative technique was first practiced in the tenth century in Egypt and the Land of Israel. It developed within the Islamic cultural milieu in which the written word was frequently transformed into elaborate decorative patterns.

Much of the earliest micrography we have is found in biblical codices. These Bibles in book form were not subject to the stringent rabbinical rules that applied to the writing and form of a Torah scroll, whether the arrangement of text of the form of the letters. They also were unaffected by any prohibition against ornamentation, and thus offered the scribe considerable latitude in arranging and decorating their text.

By the early thirteenth century, micrography appeared in Europe in the Sephardic manuscripts of Spain and Portugal as well as in Ashkenazic works produced in Northern Europe. While manuscript production on the whole declined in the sixteenth century, micrography continued to be used to on Ketubot (marriage contracts) and wall hangings. From the seventeenth century onward, scribes who practiced the art of micrography favored the texts of the five Megillot, Psalms and Proverbs as the basis of their art.

In 1798, the invention of lithography extended the micrographic arts beyond the exclusive realm of one-of-a-kind manuscripts. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of micrographic prints allowed this ancient art form to reach a much broader Jewish audience. These prints encompassed a wide variety of themes; biblical portraits and vignettes as well as panoramas of the holy sites of Israel were especially popular. Famous rabbinic, political and literary personalities such as Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyady, Theodor Herzl and Hayyim Nahman Bialik, were also favored subjects, whose micrographic portraits were rendered from the texts of their own books and poems.

The Purim story of Esther and the Song of Songs, written in miniature script in a circular form. Since this was of course impossible to read as written, it was made to be shown as an example of a scribe’s skill - an object to be admired rather than used. While it is not technically a work of micrography, where the text is used to outline a form, it is closer to this genre than to any other category. There are two other circular written texts of the Esther story in the Gross Family Collection as well as this printed form, 078.011.017 and 078.011.046. The page is stamped as formerly being in the Goldstein Collection in Lviv.