Page - 48 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

48 | Alisha Meininghaus www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 45–65 Only very few amulets contain an explicit indication of when and where they were printed. However, assumptions can be made about origin based on woodcut prints used in other works. Accordingly, we can establish that most of the amulets come from the Jewish printing houses of Fürth and Sulzbach, while some can also be traced to Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt an der Oder, and Karlsruhe. Most of them can be dated to the 18th century and some to the 19th century. The amulets were used in the context of different customs around the birth and the puerperium and were, for example, hung on the walls of the delivery room. This context makes our focus on the images par- ticularly relevant. Given the small size of the amulets, the text cannot be eas- ily read, even close-up. Only the often optically dominant pictures are visible then. If the amulet was not hung very close to the woman in childbed, looking at the picture might have played a greater role than reading or reciting the text, should she even have been capable of reading Hebrew.11 The Woodcuts With one exception all types of amulets have at least one illustration. In most cases, these are woodcuts, very rarely also copperplate engravings. While in studies with a philological focus the authors of the text are in the foreground, in this approach the artists who produced the printing blocks and the design- ers of the other visual elements of the amulets appear as creative religious actors. There is hardly any indication of who made the woodcuts, whether these persons were Jewish, what their relationship to the printing houses was, or to what extent the details of the depiction were determined by the printers or by the artists. In many cases, the woodcuts seem rather coarse and artistically not very demanding. The concrete visual design of the amulets was most likely decided by the respective typesetter.12 Although he had no influ- ence on the content of the text, which was predetermined by tradition, he was able to influence the interpretation of the text to an extent that should not be underestimated. This involvement could be achieved, for example, by setting some text elements in a larger font, by separating them from other text parts using decorative elements, or even by providing the Hebrew consonant text 11 See Wagner 2018, 66. 12 In many cases, the prints show indications of careless work, such as setting errors in the text or wrongly placed woodcuts.