Capturing the Collections: The Holy Scriptures, Illustrated by Jacob Barosin

5 min read

In the 1940s, Jacob Barosin and his wife Sonia hid from the Nazis in the upper room of a schoolhouse in Montmejean, France, where Barosin took a particular liking to what he found to be the true meaning of Jeremiah 30. Barosin said that as a teenager he never understood the Bible as he did in his adult years—the desperation in his adulthood led him to see the Bible in a new light, one that gave him strength and cultivated a newfound appreciation of its words.

Throughout Barosin’s life, he took inspiration from his surroundings to create art. Perhaps his biggest inspiration was the Bible, a constant in his story from the time he fled his Berlin home in Nazi Germany to his eventual move to New York City. Barosin merged his artistic talent with the strength he took from the Bible in the various challenges he faced. As a Holocaust survivor, the Bible was a source of hope amidst despair for him and his family, and it percolated into his art through many years until his death in 2001.

At Museum of the Bible, Barosin’s life-size paintings of 18 biblical prophets were on display from March to July 2024, a testament to his enduring strength and adherence to the Bible nearly a century after his years of being on the run, which began in 1933.

Last month, Barosin’s illustrated Jewish Bible was taken to Museum of the Bible’s digital imaging lab, where I had the privilege of imaging it with my internship supervisor and the museum’s digital imaging specialist, Rebeccah Swerdlow. Like Barosin’s other works, this Jewish Bible is filled with detailed and vibrant images of biblical figures, making for an interesting project as part of my internship at Museum of the Bible.

Figure 1: Front cover of The Holy Scriptures. This Jewish Bible was fully illustrated by Jacob Barosin and includes the latest translation at the time of publication and supplemental notes. His vibrant style and attention to detail are a striking addition to the text. Image © Museum of the Bible, 2024. All rights reserved.

Despite its beauty, imaging this book was not without challenges. To image this book, we used the book cradle, a piece of imaging equipment which opens bound items at an angle of 100°. Some books, however, have text and images that creep into the binding of the book, making it difficult to capture their entirety when the book is only open at a 100° angle. The Barosin Jewish Bible is one such book. In the lab, Rebeccah and I spent a day imaging the Jewish Bible, which involved a series of small adjustments to ensure that the final images taken included as much, if not all, of the text and illustrations as possible.

This poses an interesting ethics-in-imaging question: Do we focus our efforts on capturing the best image of the entire object, or on what’s displayed on each page? While the answer is typically to capture the object, Barosin’s Jewish Bible served as a useful case study (and test of perseverance) in my imaging journey of the difficulties in doing so.

Working with this object brought to life a story that is ultimately about hope—one that I am proud to know and grateful to have worked into my experience.