When is a menorah "Jewish"?: On the complexities of a symbol during the age of transition

Abstract

My objective in this paper is to trace the trajectory of one element of the Jerusalem medallion: its menorah. I will begin by contextualizing the image as it appears in the Roman East during the centuries encompassed by the exhibition "Byzantium and lslam--·called by some the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods, by others Late Antiquity. and by the curator of the exhibition, Helen Evans. simply, the Age of Transition. I will then discuss ways that Jewish and other communities in Palestine, beginning with the Samaritans, used this image, and continue with an exploration of the supersession of temple imagery particularly the menorah-first by Christians and then by the Umayyads.