[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
[quote]smh_23 wrote:
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
(The French of the time would have known nothing of the Lilith myth.) [/quote]
I am interested to hear more about this, because I distinctly remember Lilith’s name having come up in connection with the temptation scene of the trumeau of the west facade of Notre Dame de Paris.
Of course the Jews did not enjoy the favor of the French authorities at the time of the construction of the cathedral, but Rashi, for example, had lived and written not far from Paris, and had had influence in gentile circles. (I’m not saying that Rashi dealt explicitly with Lilith, which I don’t know; only that Jewish thought was not necessarily met by deaf ears in Medieval Christian France.) Christian art has been known to take on some surprising flavors–there is a Muslim-looking Jesus on the wall of a painted monastery in Moldavia, despite the fact that the patrons of the monastery were Christian Moldavians who had hated and warred with Muslims over the course of multiple centuries.
I’m not doubting you, by the way. I’m simply interested.[/quote]
First, “lilit” is a word used only once in the OT, Isa 34:14, in the context of a list of known nocturnal and unclean animals which inhabit a ruin. It would seem likely that a “lilit” is one such animal. But Rashi himself transmitted the tradition that a “lilit” was a demon, without further explanation.
Talmud mentions Lilith not in Mishnah (the real oral law of the Second Temple) but only in Gemara (the commentary) on 3 occasions, suggesting either a demon or incubus or a fallen woman of some type. (If Rashi commented, I do not have access right now to show it.)
In any case, it is doubtful that 12th C Parisian monks and masons would have access to Rashi’s commentaries, even by second-hand transmissions, and this was also an age of Talmud burnings, not learning, in Paris.
The Lilith myth was expounded in apocryphal stuff, Kabbalah and the like, especially after the 13th C in Spain, very possibly under the influence of Moorish and Arab culture. Doubtful that this would have been transmitted to Notre Dame as its foundations and first stories arose.
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I will note that (if I recall correctly) the Western Facade is a product of the the 13th century, and also that the stone-workers and painters who decorated cathedrals/churches were often the most cosmopolitan members of a given city, because many of them lived itinerant lives (cathedrals often being built in lurching bursts and thus not providing steady work over a lifetime). Still, I don’t doubt that you’re correct, and thanks for the explanation. The paucity of my knowledge of medieval Judaism is abhorrent.
Actually, I did some digging around after I finished the previous paragraph and discovered that, in fact, the sudden frequency of the feminine serpent is probably the result of Comestor’s description, in Historia Scholastica, of it as having a “snake-woman face.”