YOSEF JOSEPH YAAKOV DADOUNE

Bi-bli-o-logia: The Book as Body

Curators: Drorit Gur Arie, Raphael Sigal, Petach Tikva Museum of Art

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son,
which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of
his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will
not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and
his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the
elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; 
And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son
is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he
is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his
city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou
put evil away from among you…
(Deuteronomy 21:18-21)

While this image was always thought as an attempt to cure the book, it is in fact the contrary: it is an attempt to cure oneself from the book. 

Joseph coated the Book of Legends (an edition of 1787 found in the genizah of Aix-les-Bains’ yeshiva) with anti-hemorrhoids cream in an attempt to neutralize the book, to render it less irritating, in the epidermal sense of the term. It was an attempt to conciliate tradition and sinful pleasure, the spirit and the body. It was a symbolic coming out, a coming to terms with a homosexuality repressed by guilt, an attempt to produce a piece of homosexual Jewish art — that is to invent a nature capable of overcoming the contradictions inherent to piecing together art, Judaism and homosexuality.

Photographer : Elad Sarig 

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