Book Review: Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash

h-net (Reviewed by Marc Bregman)

Rivka Ulmer. Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2009.

This book is a collection of ten interrelated essays, with numerous figures, color plates, and tables of motifs, by the prolific scholar of rabbinic literature, Rivka Ulmer, utilizing her additional expertise in Egyptology, art history, and cultural theory. A number of the essays that have been published previously are here revised, updated, and integrated into a monograph on the significance of Egypt, as a cultural icon, in rabbinic texts. The concept of “cultural icon” is best explained in the introduction to chapter 7, “Cleopatra, Isis and Serapis”: “For the purpose of this chapter a cultural icon is understood to be a representative of a particular culture or a famous individual that emerged to signify this culture to a sizable segment of the known world of antiquity, the Roman provinces and even Non-Roman territories” (p. 215).