Threads of Gold: Reclaiming the Textile in the Metaphors for Biblical Citations in Medieval Hebrew Literature

Figure 1

Author's photograph.

“The text is a tissue of quotations…”

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967)

The affinities between text and textile are already present in the very etymology of the word. The English term “text” is derived from the Latin textus, a perfect infinitive of the verb texo, meaning “to weave, to plait together.”

In what follows, we will trace the origin of a very different metaphor commonly employed in Hebrew literary studies, that of the “mosaic” (šibbuṣ), to refer to the practice of inserting biblical citations in literary texts, both religious and secular, which was widely practiced in the medieval period in Islamic Iberia (al-Andalus). Following up on the title of our conference, Fashioning and Breaking Bodies, we will argue that the metaphoric language of the mosaic “breaks” the body of the biblical text, dividing it up in discrete fragments. In the footsteps of scholars of Hebrew literature such as Neal Kozodoy and Peter Cole, we will propose reclaiming for this purpose textile metaphors, more specifically the embroidery (tašbeṣ), pointing at examples in the medieval textile industries of the Islamic world that were part and parcel of the cultural context in which Hebrew writers in the medieval Mediterranean interwove biblical citations in their writings.

During the medieval period, most of the world’s Jewish population lived as protected minorities (ḏimmis) under Muslim rule. Since the emergence of Islam in the seventh century C.E., and its subsequent expansion until the end of the thirteenth century, known as the end of the period that historians name the “High Middle Ages,” Jewish communities in the lands of Islam held not only the demographic, but also the cultural pre-eminence within Judaism.[1] These communities were fluent in the Arabic language, and they participated in the cultural enterprise of the Islamicate world.[2] They produced scientific and philosophical works in Arabic language, just like their Muslim counterparts did, adapting some of the literary models employed by the Arabic writers in their own works, composed both in Arabic and in Hebrew. Rina Drory has explained this process as the adoption of a literary system, initially implemented by Muslims, in which the Quran occupies the place of privilege not only religiously, as revealed Scripture, but also aesthetically. This system would be taken on by the Jewish authors, first Karaite, and then Rabbanite,[3] who would, in their case, put the Hebrew Bible at the center of their literary system:

From the tenth century onwards, the organizing principles of the Arabic
hierarchy of literary genres (with the Koran as its summit) is introduced into
Jewish literature, with such results as the configuration of new literary activities
around the Bible; the emergence of a new division of functions between the
written languages; and the adoption of new Arabic literary models in Jewish
literature, reshaping the repertoire of models for writing in Hebrew and in
Judeo-Arabic.[4]

As part of the Islamicate realm, the Jewish community of al-Andalus, the southern parts of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule,[5] participated in this cultural process. Andalusi Jews were fluent in Arabic and reached a relatively high level of cultural assimilation, making important contributions in Arabic language in different areas of knowledge, such as the natural sciences, philosophy, politics, philology, and the arts.[6] They also created a new kind of Hebrew poetry, following poetic models taken from the Arabic. Up until that moment, post-biblical Hebrew poetry had been exclusively religious and liturgical poetry (piyyuṭ).[7]

These advances gave rise to new poetic forms that developed both religious and, as a radical innovation, secular topics (for example, love poems, poems dedicated to wine, praise poems, etc.). Similar to what Arabic poets did with the Quran, Andalusian Jewish authors looked back at the language of the Bible as the standard for their literary creation, and took up the vocabulary and expressions of biblical Hebrew, a language which had not been used creatively and productively for centuries in secular writing.

We can read a first-hand description of this process in the words of one of the major Hebrew poets from this period, Moses ibn Ezra (ca. 1055-after 1135), who also composed (in Arabic) the first known treatise of Hebrew literary criticism, the Book of Discussion and Remembrance (Kitāb al-muḥāḍara wa’l-muḏākara). Moses ibn Ezra was born into an influential family from Granada. He was trained at the rabbinical academy of Lucena, under the mentorship of Isaac ibn Ghiyyat. He became a courtesan poet and led an itinerant life in the Muslim kingdoms of the south of Iberia. After the invasion of al-Andalus by the north African dynasty of the Almoravids in 1090, he decided to flee north into the Christian kingdoms. He would spend the last part of his life in the Christian lands, where his poetry was shaped by the topics of exile and solitude. Among his works, he left an important poetic production (diwān) of more than 400 poems, both secular and religious, his abovementioned treatise of Hebrew literary criticism, and a philosophical-exegetical work of Neoplatonic style, Treatise of the Garden of Figurative and Literal Meaning (Maqālat al-ḥadīqa fī maʿana al-majāz wa’l-ḥaqīqa).[8]

Ibn Ezra openly explains the purpose of his treatise on Hebrew literary criticism as follows:

These pages of little content aim to explain to you the question of how the two
nations, i.e., the Hebrew and the Arabic, are, and their parallelism in most
aspects, since the first one imitates the second, and takes from it, particularly in
what regards to poetry.[9]

In Arabic, this literary device is called “ignition” (iqtibās), referring to the action of “taking a burning coal or a brand (qabas) from a fire to light something else.”[10] The Quranic expression is compared to a lit coal which transfers luminosity and splendor to the text into which it is inserted. Quranic language was not always cited in pious or reverential manner; authors also used it in neutral manner, and for shock value in unexpected, or openly subversive contexts, constituting what Geert van Gelders has aptly named “forbidden firebrands.”[11]

Moses ibn Ezra includes at the end of his treatise on poetics a list of twenty rhetorical devices employed to beautify poetry (maḥāsin al-šiʿr), such as metaphor, hyperbole, etc. After this list, he includes a section on “proverbs (amṯāl) and enigmas (aḥāji),” within which he discusses the insertion of Scriptural verses or sections of verses. Scriptural citations would constitute a kind of riddle, an enigma, because the knowledgeable reader would be able to recognize and identify them. Ibn Ezra does not, however, employ the term iqtibās to refer to this device. He says:

The Arab poets found it laudable to introduce verses from their Qurʾān what they
call āyāt or “wonders” in their poetry, and in their eyes, these belong to their
glorious sayings. Most of them appear in the first hemistich (always at the
beginning of the poem), as one of them [of the Arab poets] said: “Spoke the
musk by his gates [saying]: / Enter ye here in Peace and Security” (Qurʾān 15:46).[12]

[…] It has been possible for the poets of our community to do something similar,
with complete verses and with part of them, introducing them into the hemistiches
of various sizes, [sometimes] with small additions, [sometimes] with some
deletions, and [sometimes] without any [modification]. Most of them are taken
from the compositions of Psalms, Job and Proverbs […].

The Arab poets have curiosities in verses, with figures of meaning taken from
their Qurʾān and only from them can they be imitated, for example what one
said about thinness: “If my thinness was transferred onto a camel, / nobody
would ever stay in hell. Because their Qurʾān says: “No opening will there be of the
gates of heaven, nor will they [the wicked] enter the Garden, until the camel can
pass through the eye of the needle (Qurʾān 7:40).” […] Among our compatriots [i.e.
the Jews] there are those who have imitated this way, composing verses with
figures whose meaning is taken from sacred books; there are those who completed
their endeavor in one verse and those who used two.[13]

It can be argued that the insertion of biblical citations existed in Hebrew literature well before any contacts with the Arabic literary system; in fact, the Hebrew Bible practices the biblical citation of earlier passages within its own corpus. Michael Fishbane has famously referred to “inner biblical exegesis,” and one could, by analogy, speak of “inner biblical citation.”[14] The authors of classical piyyuṭ and the rabbis also included biblical expressions and citations in their works. David Yellin notes that the classical liturgical poets, such as Yosi ben Yosi and Eliezer ha-Kallir, employed fragments of Scriptural verses sparingly, and, for the most part, in a fixed place at the end of the rhymes in their poems.[15]

A more radical critique of the very possibility of biblical citation within the corpus of medieval Hebrew poetry is offered by Schippers in an article that compares biblical and Quranic quotations in Hebrew and Arabic Andalusian poetry. Schippers notes that Ibn Ezra does not offer any examples of literal citations from the Bible in Hebrew poetry, and he deduces that this is because for Ibn Ezra, as well as for his contemporaries, “the whole corpus of the poetry of the Hebrew Andalusian school consists by definition of the Holy language,” that is, biblical Hebrew. It becomes thus impossible to ascertain “why a certain phrase of Hebrew poetry rather than others should be considered a quotation: all are of biblical origin. Everything about this poetry is biblical, so no striking feature, no additional effect, can be singled out such as, in Arabic poetry, the occurrence of a Koranic phrase.”[16] Only later, after having lost awareness of this biblical substratum of the whole of medieval Hebrew poetry, did it become possible to distinguish in the medieval Hebrew poems between biblical “quotation” (which would later become what us readers recognize as a biblical quotation) and that which is not (recognized by us as) biblical quotation.

Schippers’ critique does certainly have a point, and scholars have tried to circumvent this impossibility to discern what would constitute in this context a biblical quotation. One possible criterion is qualitative, and sometimes the technique of biblical citation is defined, for instance, as “at least three biblical words, not necessarily in the order in which they appear in Scripture.”[17] The criterion could also be qualitative, as for instance in the case of heavily connoted terms, or hapax legomena that are intrinsically associated with certain biblical episodes.

Himself an accomplished poet, Moses ibn Ezra employed this technique, of which we can see a paradigmatic example in his famous poem “The Garden,” which plays with the insertion of multiple biblical citations referring to clothes to describe the colours and textures of a garden in spring:

The garden wears a colored coat,[18]
The dress of the lawn[19] are embroidered robes,
The trees are wearing checkered shifts,[20]
They show their wonders to every eye,
And every bud renewed by spring
Comes smiling forth to greet his lord.
See! Before them marches a rose,
Kingly, his throne above them borne,
Freed of the leaves that had guarded him,
No more to wear his prison clothes.[21]
Who will refuse to toast him there?
Such a man his sin will bear.[22]

It may well be, as Schippers argues, that each one of the words in this poem can be found in the biblical corpus, but we do recognize certain phrases, in this case made up of two words, that have a particular resonance and that evoke specific objects or events in the biblical account. We would argue that this holds for us, contemporary readers, as well as for our medieval counterparts: for instance, the “colored coat” of the first line carries an intensity that is not found in more anodyne expressions that could also be taken from the Bible, like “such a man.”

Here, in this version the “checkered shifts” translate the biblical term tašbeṣ (“chequered (or plaited) cloth”), from the root š-b-ṣ. According to the The New Brown, Driver, and Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, this root in its verbal forms means probably “to weave in chequer or plaited work.”[23] We also find in the Bible the related nominal form mišbeṣot (“chequered (or plaited) work, usually of settings for gems”).

The intensive use of this technique started with the Jewish poets of medieval Sepharad, and it later crossed over to Hebrew rhymed prose. The technique evolved by enchaining citations of verses or fragments of verses one after the other, sometimes producing compositions that are almost entirely made up of “cut and paste” fragments of biblical text; and of tweaking the biblical citations “[sometimes] with small additions, [sometimes] with some deletions, and [sometimes] without any [modification],” in the words of Moses ibn Ezra.

Despite its widespread use, this technique did not receive a specific name in Hebrew, although sometimes it was referred to as meliṣah, a general way to name ornate or stylized language. As we will see in the following section, it would be called by the name of “Mosaic style” (in German) in mid-nineteenth century Europe. Roughly one century later, the German term would be translated into Hebrew as šibbuṣ, a word from the same root as tašbeṣ, but with a different semantic field of connotations, far from the textile, which would become the standard name for this literary device.

The Romantic period sparked the interest of European scholars in the Bible as literature, as we can see for instance in the works of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), who composed a book on The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782-3). In it, he says the following about what he calls the “playful” insertion of biblical citations in Hebrew poetry:

Among the Hebrews, history and poetry rest in a great measure on paronomasia
[wordplay], as on the originals of the language, and only by a taste for these
can our ear come to an intimate acquaintance with the spirit of the language.
And this acquaintance is the more necessary, since their writers delight in copying
and improving upon each other in whole phrases, which they unfold and amplify,
each in his own peculiar style. This, too, if any chose to call it so, is a playing upon
words, yet such as even the refined Greeks would not dislike. It was a favorite
practice with them to express their own thoughts in the word of Homer and
other distinguished ancient writers; and who would not be gratified by it? Both the
speaker and hearer are gratified, the former with the successful exercise of his
invention, the latter with finding a new friend [making a new discovery] in
an old and favorite costume (Ausdruck), a new thought in a known and approved
form of expression. So the Prophets employ the figurative language of the
Patriarchal benedictions and the Psalms. So the modern Hebrews employ the
words of all the more ancient writers in a new sense, but in the same beautiful
forms of expression. Their poetical language, in employing the expression of the
Bible, may be said, perhaps, in some sense, to be nothing but a play upon words;
but how refined! How interesting for one, who has a taste for the simplicity
of ancient times, which in this way reappear, as it were, dressed in a finer
costume (Schmuck).[24]

Writing a few decades after Herder, the Lutheran theologian and Hebraist Frantz Delitzsch (1813-1890)[25] will be the first to describe the technique of biblical insertions as Musivstyl, or “mosaic style,” in his On the History of the Jewish Poetry from the Closing of the Old Testament of the Holy Scripture and Up Until the Most Recent Times (1836). There, he recognizes the novelty of the denomination “mosaic style”:

Mosaic style, mosaic, emblematic style are newly coined speech images (neugeprägte
Redebilder) to describe one of the basic tones in the Orientalism and Romanticism
of Jewish poetry of the Middle Ages. An old Italian poet already transfers the
image of musical work to the style, the words of his distich are the most beautiful
miniature of that Jewish emblematics, about which only Herder, as far as I know,
gave some dark but deeply thought-out hints.[26]

The German Musiv originates in the Latin musivus, in turn derived from the Greek mousaios (that is, artistic, related to the Muses). A mosaic would be in Latin musivum. In German, it is not a very used term, and it evokes the Musivgold (also known by the rather problematic term Judengold), the fake gold-like metal that was employed in Byzantine mosaics, for instance, or in some works by Gustav Klimt (the golden mosaics of his Stoclet Frieze from 1905-1911).

Figure 1

Gustav Klimt, "Stoclet Frieze" (1905-1911), left panel (Public Domain). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoclet_Frieze

The luminous effect evoked by this fake gold-like metal in German (or, at least, in nineteenth-century German) is lost to the contemporary English reader, the connotation of “mosaic” is most immediately the composition of an image out of little discrete pieces of stone or clay, the tesserae.

Soon after Delitzsch, the Hungarian-Jewish critic of Hebrew literature Leopold Dukes (1810-1891), in his work On the New Hebrew Religious Poetry (1842), includes a section on the history of the Musivstyl:

The art of the new Hebrew [literary] stylists dressing their thoughts into a
tissue of Bible citations (ihre Gedanke in ein Gewebe von Bibelstellen einzukleiden)
is referred to as the mosaic style (Musivstyl), because it can be compared to the
artful visual work of the mosaic, in which countless unequal pieces combine
into a beautiful whole. This expression was chosen because none was better
and more significant, and also because there was also no such expression in
Hebrew itself. This type of style had long existed even before it was mentioned
by a theorist, and also before it had received a specific name.[28]

The German term Musivstyl was later on translated into Hebrew as šibbuṣ. It seems that this translation was coined by David Yellin in his 1940 Hebrew book Theory of Spanish Poetry, as Neal Kozodoy already indicated in 1977.[29] Yellin says: “And in Hebrew, this is called by the name of šibbuṣ,” adding in a footnote that: “in the European languages this is called ‘the style of the mosaic’ (ha-signon ha-musivi), a name derived from the word ‘Mosaik’ (ʿuvdat pispasim).”[30] The term šibbuṣ is not employed in the Bible; it does appear in the Mishnah and Talmud, and in the religious poetry of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (piyyuṭ).

The term is most often translated into English (as well as into the other Western European languages) as “mosaic” or “inlay.” This metaphor creates a hard, fragmentary impression, and that fails to account for the luminosity that is conveyed by the gold, and the flexible integration that is conveyed by the textile. Writing in 1976, Hebrew literature scholar Dan Pagis employs abundant textile metaphors to explain the device that he calls “mosaic style,” but without calling into question the term itself:

In the period of classical piyyut, in general the verses of the Bible were not
integrated in the internal tapestry (riqmah) of the poem, but they were in fixed
places, for instance at the end of the rhymes. [But] already in the first poets
of Sepharad, we find an internal biblical interweaving (šĕzirah), and there are
poems whose internal tapestry is made fundamentally out of the warp and woof
(šĕti wa-ʿerev) of verses [taken] from different passages in the Bible.[31]

Where Pagis did not openly challenge the use of the “mosaic” metaphor, other scholars did. In a 1977 article, Neal Kozodoy explained in detail the inadequacy of this metaphor, and proposed a different metaphorical language:

The art of inlay is inadequate as an analogy to this method, which needs to be
seen as a more delicate and pliable operation. With greater accuracy we might
think of the poem as a garment woven with great skill from costly and colorful
material. Into this fabric have been twined threads of pure gold, beaten down
from a single golden bar, the Bible; … [These threads] call attention to
themselves, first, inviting us to hold up the work, tilting it at a variety of angles
and planes in an attempt to perceive whether they might not form some hidden
pattern. At the same time, they impart real depth and brilliance to the surfaces
surrounding them, and as we study these surfaces we become struck by the
impression of motion, as the presence of the pure gold subtly alters the values
and intensities of the surrounding hues.[32]

Similarly, Peter Cole noted:

The term itself is somewhat misleading and in fact reflects a development in
nineteenth-century German scholarship. […] The Hebrew term shibbutz means
“setting” or “inlay,” as in the craft of the jeweler or mosaicist, and relies on a
metaphor that misses the dynamic action of the scriptural force in the poem.[33]

Following in the footsteps of Kozodoy and Cole, we would like to propose a different metaphor to think about the technique of biblical citation in medieval Hebrew literature. We recover a biblical term embedded into the abovementioned poem by Moses ibn Ezra: tašbeṣ, which we would render by tapestry or embroidery.

Figure 8

Laura and Matt walking outside. Author’s photograph, by Karolina Krasuska

Figure 9

Wall of Pictures in the Sauna Building. Author’s photograph, by Karolina Krasuska.

This is a photograph taken in the former Sauna Building, the last place we stopped on our tour. It is a bit off the beaten track, but of course the track, even out there, was covered in rubble, those same insinuating rocks and my boots were already in pretty bad shape. In this picture, I think I can see the accumulation of dust all over them.

I am standing in front of a vast wall of family photographs. These are images from the last Polish transport to Auschwitz that I wrote about at length in American Jewish Loss. It felt right for me to be there with them. Before this trip, I had a hard time imagining what a Sauna Building might actually look like and how the images would be displayed.

Figure 10

The Names. Author’s photograph, by Karolina Krasuska.

The photograph my friend finds most compelling was taken at Auschwitz I. Here, the names of all those who perished are documented. Like a huge over-sized collection of phone books all arranged in alphabetical order, the names go on and on.[13] The pages are vast. They remind me of a perverse version of Helène Aylon's The Book that Will Not Close.[14] In the picture, I am standing with our guide at the far end of the display. The photograph shows the compendium on the left, a long display of manila pages, but the size and vastness of the exhibit is confusing. Is this some kind of sculpture tangibly signifying the magnitude of the horror? What about all those names? My body at the far end of the room makes clear the scale of this memorial.

In “The Call,” Maggie Nelson writes about becoming undone as a political act. Like Judith Butler, she draws connections between intimate injury and loss, her mentor and my friend Christina Crosby’s broken neck and paralysis, and grand political and social disasters, 9/11 and patriarchy. My grief is both about my father and about Auschwitz. Nelson writes:

Figure 11

Maggie Nelson Quote from “The Call”, Author’s photograph.

This last piece from Nelson’s essay brings me back to my experience at Auschwitz. My numbness comes, at least in part, from all of the expectations that I brought with me, all of the lessons and understandings of this place that already shaped what I was supposed to enact—to do, to feel. I think I wanted to be open to what it was that I felt and perhaps the lack of sensation in that encounter that was only slowly growing in intensity as my feet began to hurt and my boots began to fall apart. This was my way in. 

As Sampson explains, these vestiges of once vibrant lives can’t help but remind us of those who once wore them. All those lost pairs of shoes continue to cleave to those now long-absent bodies. The open bins of shoes on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC—shoes that regularly make their way back and forth between Poland and the United States—bring visitors there into proximity to this horrific place and that time.[15] Perhaps having finally seen all of these shoes on permanent display at Auschwitz I, my own boots could not bear the weight of this reckoning.[16]

What is the legacy of Auschwitz, of the Holocaust? Is it really already known? I don’t think so. I think we need to let it undo us, to feel this for ourselves. Without doing so, we simply reiterate a familiar litany. We don't allow ourselves to feel our own vulnerability. We don’t take in what Auschwitz means for us now in the present. And perhaps, more importantly, what we take with us as we leave this place. What I am trying to get at is the slow process of undoing, of unravelling even what we thought we knew. This is part of what it means to perhaps commemorate the Holocaust in the present noticing the small things that are our own experiences of being in Auschwitz. Perhaps this is, in part, what we need to say and do now in order not to be complacent with the litany, the ones we already know. Part of what I take away from my trip to Auschwitz is the way that even knowing about “the Holocaust” or writing about it at this distance of time and geography does not stop us from being undone in the present, but only if we pay attention to what might appear to be the small things, a pair of boots whose undoing offer a clue to what it means to submit to a transformation, “the full results of which cannot be known in advance” (Butler 21, qtd. In Nelson, 60). 

My undoing at Auschwitz was slow. It began small—an irritation—and then grew larger and larger so that by the time I was leaving Birkenau, at the end of our long day's visit, I could hardly walk in my own boots. I felt my precarity keenly. I was afraid of tripping and falling. I had to carefully navigate my way back to the car.

The dismantling of unjust systems is a long, slow process. We experience it through accretion. Although accretion suggests a building up, in this case, it is an unbuilding, layer by layer. Undoing is not about easy slogans like the Holocaust-inspired slogan against genocide, “never again”; it takes time, and it demands that we not try to fix it or to tidy it up. Witnessing this history in this place is a form of grieving. We need to feel our vulnerability in the face of the profound injury that haunts this place. My boots brought me to this understanding. They forced me to confront my own vulnerability. After we left the camp, I wrapped up my broken boots and carried them home where I had them repaired. And when I wear them now, I remember.

Boots, shoes, corsets, and clothing are prosthetic devises, extensions of the body.

The body speaks when there are no words.

Grief, loss, and trauma are bound up with each other. 

Different losses are often experienced together. 

Losses are embodied, bound together in the body. 

“Auschwitz”. The Holocaust Encyclopedia, n.d. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/auschwitz.

Aylon, Helène. Whatever is Contained Must Be Released: My Orthodox Jewish Girlhood, My Life as a Jewish Feminist Artist. 2012, The Feminist Press at SUNY.

“The Book of Names-New at Yad Vashem,” https://www.yadvashem.org/museum/book-of-names.html#:~:text=Yad%20Vashem's%20Book%20of%20Names,with%20memorial%20sites%20and%20more%20%E2%80%93.

Butler, Judith. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, 2004, 19-49. Verso.

Feldman, Jeffrey. "The Holocaust Shoe: Untying Memory: Shoes as Holocaust Memorial Experience." Jews and Shoes (Edna Nahshon, Ed.), 2008, 119-130. Berg Publishers.

Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen. "Medical Care and Crime. The Infirmary of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1936-1945. https://www.sachsenhausen-sbg.de/en/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/medical-care-and-crime/

Glazer, Jonathan, director. Zone of Interest. A24, Extreme Emotions, Film4Productions, House Productions, 2023. 1:45. 

Grigg, Russell, “On Linguistry and Homophony”. PyschoanalysisLacan Volume Three Papers, n.d. Lacan Circle of Australia. 

Jones, Ellen Carol. “Empty Shoes” Footnotes: On Shoes (Sherrie Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss, Eds.), 2001, 197-232. Rutgers University Press.

Levitt, Laura. American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust. 2007, NYU Press.

Levitt, Laura. The Objects that Remain. 2020, Penn State University Press.

Levitt, Laura. “Telling Stories Otherwise (or Revisiting My Father’s Visual Archive).” [Distinguished Lecture]. The Center for Religion and Media, March 2006, New York University.

Nelson, Maggie. “The Call.” Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler, special issue of Representations, vol. 158, 2022, 57-63.

Nelson, Maggie. Jane: A Murder. 2005 [reissued 2016], Soft Skull Press.

Nelson, Maggie, The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial. 2016, Greywolf Press.

Nelson, Maggie. The Red Parts: A Memoir. 2007, Free Press.

Sampson, Ellen. Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear. 2020, Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

“Shoah, Block 27,” accessed February 6, 2025.  https://www.auschwitz.org/en/visiting/national-exhibitions/shoah-block-27/.

“Welt.” Oxford Language Dictionary, n.d. https://www.google.com/search?q=Welt&rlz=1C5CHFA_

Author Bios

Article Citation

Cusson, Emma, and Guadalupe González Diéguez. "Threads of Gold: Reclaiming the Textile in the Metaphors for Biblical Citations in Medieval Hebrew Literature." Corpus Textile, special issue of Fashion Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1-26. https://doi.org/10.38055/FCT040108.