Housing Scent, Containing Sensorium

Abstract

This article focuses on two medieval besamim containers in order to tease out their multisensory potential that appealed to the viewer’s mind and body simultaneously. Intricate and complex in design, the containers evoked a broad range of visually charged associations. The tower form was used in a variety of medieval Jewish ritual objects, appearing in wedding rings, Hanukkah lamps, Torah arks and scroll stave finials. Figured as miniature inhabitable spaces, liminal and ambiguous, they gesture to a vast landscape of real and imagined sites: sites of (be)longing and sites of the encounter with the divine. The besamim boxes in particular became the loci of theological, mnemonic and sensual associations that evoked the city of Jerusalem, terrestrial and celestial, expectantly attainable and eschatologically fraught. Delving into a range of sources—from medieval Jewish exegetical and poetic discussions of the messianic age to the Kabbalistic interpretation of the relationship between the soul and the smell—this article explores some of the ways these objects elicited cognitive, affective and physiological engagement with their users.