The most remarkable feature of the Hammelburg Mahzor, a fourteenth-century German High Holiday book, is the inclusion of zoocephalic figures: humans with beastly heads. The purpose of this essay is to explore the semiotics and phenomenology of this specifically Jewish visual idiom, and to suggest that its presence lies at the intersection of language, philosophy, poetry, and history. In the Mahzor, zoocephaly signals distinction that collapses temporalities, tests the limits of alterity, and engages in a sophisticated word–image play that strives to establish visceral connections with the community of the manuscript's users. Hammelburg zoocephali invoke the fragility of the human condition by establishing reverberating relationships between themselves and other inhabitants of the Mahzor's pages: echoes of many, avatars of none. Outwardly monstrous yet emphatically human, these zoocephali prove to be particularly excellent images to think with about the place of Hebrew manuscripts in the long history of medieval visual culture.

中文翻译：

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“一切生物的呼吸”：Zoocephali 和中世纪希伯来语页面上的差异语言


《哈默尔堡马佐尔》（Hammelburg Mahzor）是一本 14 世纪德国节日书籍，其最显着的特点是包含了兽头动物形象：长着兽头的人类。本文的目的是探索这种犹太视觉习语的符号学和现象学，并表明它的存在存在于语言、哲学、诗歌和历史的交叉点。在《马佐尔》中，兽头畸形标志着一种区别，它瓦解了时间性，测试了相异性的极限，并参与了一场复杂的文字图像游戏，努力与手稿的使用者群体建立发自内心的联系。哈默尔堡兽头虫通过在自己和 Mahzor 页面上的其他居民之间建立回响关系来唤起人类处境的脆弱性：许多人的回声，无人的化身。这些兽头怪外表怪异，但本质上是人类，它们被证明是特别出色的图像，可以用来思考希伯来手稿在中世纪视觉文化的悠久历史中的地位。