The traditional view of late antique Jewish art is that there was none. Or, insofar as there was some, it ought not to have existed.1 This represents a deep cultural reflex about ‘Jewish aniconism’ whose origins in Judaic Scripture itself were replicated in ancient Graeco-Roman accounts of the Jews.2 In this sense both within antiquity and also in modernity, Judaism has been associated with a resistance to images by contrast with the aesthetically paradigmatic heritage of Hellenism. In terms of the complex of difficulties about, and reluctances to, images experienced by the religions which emerged in part in the wake of Judaism – namely Christianity and Islam – the idealized model of a prior Jewish aniconism and of simple worship, scripturally informed, by contrast with the risks of pagan idolatry that many Christians and Muslims long suspected to lie in art, has been a powerful factor in shaping religious ideology throughout late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the era of the Reformation and into modernity.3