Maizuls M. (Non-)Jewish Hats: The History of a Sign. [Digital Resource] // Vox medii aevi. 2025. Vol. 1 (12). P. 88–150. URL: https://voxmediiaevi.com/2025-2-maizuls
DOI: 10.24412/2587-6619-2025-13-88-150
Mikhail Maizuls
Candidate of Sciences (History), Senior Research Fellow at the Educational and Scientific Center for Visual Studies of the Middle Ages and Modern Times, RSUH
maizuls@gmail.com
(Non-)Jewish Hats: The History of a Sign
The article examines the functions of the so-called «Jewish hats» in visual representations from the 11th to the 15th centuries. The point of departure is a miniature from the Speculum humanae salvationis, in which this headgear unexpectedly marks not the Israelite strongman Samson but one of his Philistine enemies. This example prompts the author to address the polysemy of medieval signs of otherness and to highlight how frequently such markers were transferred between different groups of non-Christians. The very object of study — the «Jewish hat» — requires more precise definition and contextualization. Historians often use this term to describe head coverings of diverse forms: from semicircular caps to broad-brimmed hats or tall conical hats, each with its own history and, presumably, distinct iconographic functions. After briefly tracing the history of headgear as compulsory markers imposed on Jews following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the author shifts the focus to their role within imagery. He demonstrates how, across various subjects and types of representation, the form of headgear served either to align or to contrast righteous Old Testament Israelites with unrighteous New Testament Jews. The article further analyzes the transfer of these sign-hats from Jews to heretics and sinful Christians in the Moralized Bibles, the Orientalization and exoticization of such headgear in late medieval imagery, and their probable transformation into the «funnel hat» in the visual worlds of Hieronymus Bosch. The «Jewish hat», therefore, is not a single object but a network of signs that varied across time and space and belonged to a broader «family» of pointed headgear marking religious, spatial, and ethnic distance.
Keywords: Hieronymus Bosch; iconography; Jewish-Christian relations; Judenhut; orientalisation; signs of otherness.