Kennicott Bible (Spain)

• An exquisite Sephardic Hebrew Bible illuminated in vibrant Gothic-Mudejar fusion; handwritten by Moses Ibn Zabara and illustrated by Joseph Ibn Hayyim in late medieval Spain.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Kennicott Bible is a profound object of ethical stylization and cultural resistance—a self-conscious orchestration of Jewish identity within the entangled aesthetics of 15th-century Christian Spain. Foucault, in The Care of the Self, reveals that the individual subject is not merely a bearer of truth, but a craftsman of a particular mode of being. The Kennicott Bible becomes a workshop for this crafting—not simply a container of divine text, but a theater of ethical inscription, where aesthetics serve the cultivation of the self.

In this manuscript, brilliant vegetal motifs, geometric rhythms, Islamic arabesques, and Gothic flourishes frame the Hebrew script like an ethical halo. These are not decorative marginalia—they are the graphical mirror of care, expressions of devotion rendered in line, color, and form. Just as Foucault defines the epimeleia heautou (care of the self) as a disciplined attentiveness to one’s truth, the Kennicott Bible practices an act of visual listening—responding to the Word not with uniformity, but with polyphonic style.

Foucault’s emphasis on subjectivity as historically constituted is particularly resonant here: the Jewish community of late medieval Spain faced persecution, forced conversions, and cultural marginalization. Yet this manuscript reflects not a defensive retreat, but a defiant illumination of selfhood—an insistence that the subject can craft its own splendor within the interstices of dominant regimes. The hybrid visual language of the Kennicott Bible resists purity and embraces multiplicity—echoing Foucault’s call to reinvent the self through aesthetic practices, not moral prescriptions.

Moreover, this manuscript is a pedagogical space. Each illuminated page does not merely transmit religious doctrine—it trains perception, hones ethical focus, and invites a gaze of reverence. It becomes, in Foucauldian terms, a “technology of the self”—a tool not to dominate but to form the subject in their ongoing search for freedom through beauty, tradition, and interpretive will.