Visualizing a “Holy Society:” An 18th Century Czech Painting Cycle of Jewish Obligation to the Dead

What does it look like to be in community with the newly dead? A painting cycle, consisting of fifteen images, created in the 1780s for the chevra kaddisha (burial society) in Prague can provide us with a more robust picture of the community created between the dead, their caregivers, mourners, and laypeople. The paintings were created while the traditional rites of Jewish burial were under threat from hygiene reforms introduced by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Josef II. The paintings are thus a political and ideological document as well as an account of the embodied intimacy, spatial relations, and inter-communal relationships between the dead and living in late 18th century Jewish Prague. The paintings present a visual document of what it means to be in holy community with the newly dead, and are worth studying, alongside textual sources, for understanding the communal nature of Jewish death obligations when under state pressure.