Binding Auto/Biographies: Torah Binders Revisited

Wimpel, 1836, Furth, Germany

Silk embroidery on linen; The Museum of German Speaking Jewry, Tefen, Israel

Photo by Katya Oicherman

PhD, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014

Practice-based doctoral research focused on 19th century German Jewish ritual textiles to develop a model of imbuing historical craft artifacts with contemporary relevance through creative research. I studied the 19th century German circumcision binders: Torah scroll wrappings which documented male births. I examined images on the seams of a 1836 binder (collection of the German-Jewish Jewry Museum, Israel), showing that its seams acted as a transitional territory where the embroiderer consciously played around with traditional images, transposing the subject of birth and fertility into a discourse about the formation of the emancipated Jewish cultural identity  in 19th century Germany.

I critiqued the contemporary museum staging of the binder as a nostalgic vision of Judaism which refused to recognize the binder's contemporaneous relevance as a contradictory repository of modern Jewish identity hi/stories. This critique was the foundation of the practical part of the thesis, a remaking of a traditional textile format in the contemporary context and a written “autobiographical” account of it. Autobiographical stories of Jewishness were told, reflected upon and presented as a fictional binder. The shifting position of cloth between autobiography, practice and historical research was explained using the writing of Jacque Derrida on material, creative act and memory, in particularly the concept of subjectile. The project investigated “hands on” the particularities of the 1836 binder, exploring its letters, images, materials and techniques, referencing and reshaping them. This material exploration has shaped the research, emphasizing performative reading of the binder and related rituals. Alongside its contribution to the history of traditional Jewish and contemporary textiles, it presented interrelated “biographies” of processes in research and in creative practice.

A multimedia exhibition, featuring embroidery, video, and drawings, complemented the text and was shown at several international venues. Selections of this work appear as a book chapter in the Handbook of Textile Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015) and as a peer-reviewed article in Zemanim, Historical Quarterly of Tel Aviv University. I will also contribute an entry on Torah binders to the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles (forthcoming 2023). The thesis is accessible here