Scholars have long acknowledged the cultural and political significance attached to the fashioning of Israelite identity in Ethiopia. Insufficiently appreciated, however, is the extent to which the claim of descent from Jacob’s seed turned on its head the supersessionist paradigm that had come to prevail everywhere else in the Christian ecumene. Ethiopia invented for itself a biological Israelite genealogy, assuming the mantle of chosen peoplehood literally to become carnal Israel. How to reconcile the prestige of Israelite ancestry according to the (...) flesh with the Christian doctrine of spiritual inheritance according to the promise? How to channel Old Testament ritual into a national religious consciousness while at the same time repelling even the intimation of tainted kinship with the Jews? Visual evidence from late thirteenth-century wall paintings and fifteenth-century manuscripts demonstrates that the greater the investment in Solomonic succession, the translocation of Zion, and the embrace of Old Testament practices, the sharper the antithesis between becoming “Israel” and becoming “Jewish”. (shrink)

One of the most extensive ensembles of twelfth-century mural painting still extant in France has recently been reconstituted in the Church of Saint-Silvain at Chalivoy-Milon , a small village located about forty kilometers southwest of Bourges. During the late 1970s and 1980s, conservation work carried out under the auspices of Monuments Historiques recovered the entire chevet program , a portion of which was first discovered in February 1868. The stunning exposure of a complex, predominantly Christological cycle at Chalivoy-Milon sparked my (...) interest in nineteenth-century reports of painted decoration once visible in the nave. That lost painting is the focus of the present study. (shrink)