Clark Art Presents Lecture on Laurent D'arveiux and the King's Bible

07:54AM / Thursday, October 30, 2025Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Tuesday, Nov. 4 at 5:30 pm, the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program hosts a talk by Julie Harris (Independent Scholar / Clark Fellow) examining French consul Laurent d'Arvieux's 1683 discovery of a Hebrew Bible written and illuminated in medieval Iberia three hundred years earlier.

The talk takes places in the Manton Research Center auditorium.

According to a press release:

His purchase of the codex should not surprise us: d'Arvieux was one of a cadre of European diplomats and travelers in the middle east in search of so-called Oriental manuscripts, particularly early Bibles, to ship back to scholars and royal libraries in their home countries. What is surprising, however, is that in this case d'Arvieux was not content merely to acquire the Bible, which is now in the British Library in London, but also arranged for additions to be made to its decorative program. Three richly painted, full page illuminations comprising a Title Page (8r), a depiction of the Name of God (2r), and a list of the Ten Commandments (7v) are the most sensational of these additions. At first glance, these folios seem related to accepted decorative entities found in other illuminated Iberian Hebrew Bibles. In reality, they reveal an early modern Christian's notion of how a Hebrew Bible should be decorated.

Julie Harris is a specialist in the art of medieval Iberia. She has published on ivory carving, the fate of art and architecture during Reconquest warfare, illuminated Hebrew manuscripts, and the exhibition of pre-Expulsion Jewish ceremonial objects. Recent publications have appeared in Manuscript Studies, Ars Judaica, Gesta, the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, Medieval Encounters, and Abstraction in Medieval Art: Beyond the Ornament, edited by Elina Gertsman (2021). She holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. In 2020 she was Center for Spain in America Fellow at the Clark Institute for her project on the decorative Carpet pages of Iberian Hebrew Bibles. Harris served as the Fishman Family Scholar in Jewish Studies at Vassar College in Spring 2024.

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

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Discrimination Against Muslim Americans Persists 25 Years After 9/11

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
07:00AM / Saturday, September 12, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Dozens of Muslim Americans were among people killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Untold numbers of Muslim Americans have suffered countless acts of discrimination in their aftermath.

"Of course, you'll find several accounts of Muslims from all over the U.S. describing how they went from the unknown kids in the school to being stereotyped or ridiculed for their Muslim names," Sidra Mahmood recalled recently. "However, many Americans forget that the victims of 9/11 were also Muslim Americans.

"I can't forget the time when a classmate broke down in sobs when 9/11 came up in our classroom at the Islamic seminary I went to in Texas, because her father's best friend who was like an uncle to her, died on 9/11."

Today, Mahmood is a chaplain at Williams College. In 2001, she was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, when terrorists forced two passenger jets into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan and another plane into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. A third plane, which terrorists hoped to crash into a D.C. landmark, was brought down in western Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

The attacks, which ultimately claimed 2,976 lives, horrified people around the world, including in Mahmood's native land.

"I remember being aghast like anyone who witnessed the fall of the Twin Towers in real time," she said. "However, even as a child, fear gripped me about the possibility of war, especially once we learned that Afghanistan, right adjacent to Pakistan, would be attacked by the U.S. My mother had told me about the 1971 war between India and Pakistan when she remembered hiding in the dark after bomb sirens would go off in Punjab after intentional blackouts.

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