Mamluk synagogue carpet

This carpet decorated with a portico topped with an inscription in Hebrew belongs to the synagogue of Padua. It was often thought to be a parochet, a Tabernacle curtain[1]. Produced around the mid-sixteenth century in the workshops of Cairo for the Jews of Venetia, it is a Mamluk carpet[2] with marked Ottoman and European influences.

On the field rises a neoclassical portico, consisting of arch, pilasters and pediment. In the arch are a brazier with long flames, a seven-branched candelabrum (menorah) and three small crowns. The neatly executed inscription in Hebrew makes clear the meaning of the decoration: “This gate of the Lord, into which the righteous shall enter.”[3] It is verse 20 of Psalm 118, which is recited during the Feast of Tabernacles (Succoth), which commemorated the life of the Patriarchs in the desert.

The model for this image is found in the title pages of books printed in Italy, particularly in Venice, home to the major Jewish publishers, such as Bomberg, Soncino and Giustiniani. From 1540, the titles were often placed inside a portico, drawing an analogy between the entrance of a palace and the beginning of a text. Similarities have been noted between the Padua carpet and the title page of a Haggadah[4] printed in Mantua in 1560, or with that of a Hebrew text printed in Venice in 1574: same portico, same inscription. The incipit of an edition of The Kuzari[5], published in Venice in 1548, is a seven-branched candelabrum, quite similar to that on the carpet.

However, the meaning remains enigmatic. The book that served as a model has not been identified. The image has been adapted: the flames of the brazier resemble the wavy stripes of the Turkish chintamani motif; the branches of the candelabrum, which, according to the Scriptures, should imitate those of an almond tree, are formed of tulip calyces. Of course, the candelabrum represents the one that burned in the Temple of Jerusalem and, through it, the one that Moses had placed in front of the Ark of the Covenant, but it is atypical. Its base comprises four clawed paws, which does not conform to Scripture. As for the brazier, it appears in no depiction of the Sanctuary and cannot be confused with the “altar of the sacrifices”. The decoration might reproduce the frontispiece of a Hebrew text having to do with Jewish mysticism, particularly the Kabbalah, a speculation on the Creative Emanations (the Ten Sephiroth), which was hugely successful in Spain in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Its founding text is the Zohar (“Book of Splendour”), often credited to Moses de León. In sixteenth-century Venice, the Kabbalah, which proceeded by analogy, met with great success, not only among Jews, but also among certain Christians, including the Italian Francesco Giorgi and the Frenchman Guillaume Postel.

Among the Kabbalists, the candelabrum took the shape of a tree and became the support of the Sephiroth. The Sephiroth appear on the seven lamps and the three nodes of the central stem. Malkhut, the Emanation closest to the material world, is placed at the base. The base, with its four points, is related to the four elements of the world (Fire, Air, Water, Earth), themselves associated with the four Creatures of Ezekiel and, among Christian Kabbalists, to the four symbols of the Evangelists: man, eagle, lion and bull. Thus, Guillaume Postel, in his Candelabrum typicum, gives this base a man’s leg, an eagle’s foot, a lion’s paw and bull’s leg; an odd shape, but one that is rather similar to that used in the carpet. Thus, the frontispiece of a book of Jewish mysticism may have inspired this decoration.

[2] Warp thread with several ends (three or four), whose lime yellow wool was spun in S twist, then again in Z twist; two-pick weft, in garnet red wool; lustre wool velvet, obtained using asymmetrical knots open to the left, 3,000 per square decimetre. As is customary with Mamluk carpets, the palette is dominated by green, blue and red; this piece also features a large amount of yellow ochre. More exceptional is the use of white for the background of the epigraphic band and especially of black for the letters. The black wool, corroded by the iron filings used in the dye, has almost entirely disappeared. Thus, the letters of the band are “outlined” and coloured red by the exposed weft.

[3] “Ze hacha’ar l-adonai tsadikim yabo’ou bo.”

[4] See Alberto Boralevi’s essay in Oriental Carpet and Textiles Studies II (London, 1986), 205. The Haggadah is a collection of edifying stories.

[5] The Kuzari by the Cordoban Judah Halevi, written in Arabic around 1114, is an apologia for the Jewish faith explained to the king of the Khazars – hence its title.