VisHeK (Visualizing Hebrew Knowledge: Shape and Text in Scientific and Philosophical Manuscripts) is a project focused on the transmission of visual language in the Jewish world. It centers on a group of diagrams found in Hebrew medical and philosophical manuscripts from the Middle Ages onward, exploring the transmission of knowledge from text to image and the cultural exchanges that shaped visual traditions within Jewish contexts.
Five groups of diagrams formed the core of the VisHeK project and were analyzed in relation to its key objectives: The Porphyrian Tree; Integrative Diagrams of Philosophical and Medical Knowledge; Anatomical Diagrams: From Text to Image and Back; One Form: Different Contexts; From Diagram to Image.
The diagrams studied in VisHeK were not arbitrary or decorative additions, but rather integral to the texts and their transmission. They offer visual representations of the ongoing interplay between text and image, often organized through hierarchical or sequential structures. While some of the diagrams are highly artistic, they remain embedded within a framework of textual-visual relationships. This allowed me to analyze them both individually and as part of broader diagrammatic categories. The study of each group occasionally overlapped, especially as new collaborations and publications emerged.
The main objectives of the project were: To investigate different methods of transmitting knowledge from text to diagram by analyzing various diagrammatic shapes and their relationships to textual content; To explore how visual knowledge was transmitted across cultural boundaries within Europe, including exchanges between Jews and their surrounding societies; To understand how "ordinary art" could take on a diagrammatic function when integrated with text; And finally, to synthesize insights that emerged from the study of the different groups of diagrams.
With the different groups, I explored various methods of knowledge transmission, as well as the changes and adaptations introduced through the Hebrew language and by Jewish creators. Each group of diagrams (and each individual diagram within them) conveyed a distinct insight. For example, one group demonstrates the variety of ways in which the same visual form could be used to represent different kinds of knowledge, and conversely, how the same body of knowledge could be expressed through different visual forms.
Medieval Jews were not only engaged in transmitting knowledge but also in preserving it, especially when it no longer appeared, or appeared differently, in other cultures. They adapted existing knowledge and, in some cases, innovated it. In almost every group, there is something unique that can be said about the visual knowledge produced in Jewish contexts.
