Gallery label
Judith crowns a household ritual lamp, moving the heroine from painted narrative into the material observance and historical imagination of Hanukkah.
Look closely
The discovery record identifies an early nineteenth-century Polish brass lamp and a crowning figure of Judith holding Holofernes’s head. Without reusable media, the exhibition limits itself to the documented object type and iconographic placement.
Why this Judith matters
A Hanukkah lamp changes the category of evidence. Judith is not only an image viewed in a gallery but a figure incorporated into Jewish ceremonial life, where later traditions associated her deliverance with the festival.
Sources for this record:Europeana record for the Yeshiva University Museum object ↗Center for Jewish History image record ↗Jewish textual traditions ↗
“Judith crowns a household ritual lamp, moving the heroine from painted narrative into the material observance and historical imagination of Hanukkah.”
Narrative index
Primary catalogue placement: afterlife of the story, Judith 13:14–16. The index organizes comparison; it does not claim that every visual detail comes from those verses or that the work touches only one episode.
