When I came across Joseph and Yehudit Shadur’s book Traditional Jewish Papercuts: An Inner World of Art and Symbol, I became fascinated and hooked by this traditional form of Jewish folk art (see also at My Jewish Learning, Wikipedia and YIVO). For me, Jewish folk papercuts are not only beautiful, but also express deep meaning. I feel like liberating a design which is already hidden in the paper using simply scissors and a scaplel.
Jewish papercuts are an art-form made by cutting figures, ornaments and words in paper or parchment – a beautiful expression of religious and mystic spirit, hiddur mitzvah (beautification of the commandments and rituals). They often decorated ketubbot (marriage contracts) and other documents of family life, Mizrahs, Shiviti, and ornaments for festive occasions such as Sukkot. Materials were very cheap — paper, pencil, penknife, watercolors and colored crayons — and even the poor had access to them.
The earliest known reference to a Jew who created cut paper work dates to 1345, when Rabbi Shem-Tov ben Yitzhak ben Ardutiel composed a witty treatise in Hebrew entitled The War of the Pen Against the Scissors. He relates that when the ink in his inkwell froze on a cold winter’s evening, he resorted to cutting the letters out of the paper–apparently in keeping with a conceit fashionable at the time (and later) in Spain.
They were common amongst Ashkenazim from Europe and Sephardim in the Near East and Northern Africa, where the different styles evolved independently from each other. In Eastern Europe they coincided papercuts created by rural non-Jews. However, Jewish papercuts were unique both in techniques and artistic motifs. For example the technique of multilayered, colourful Polish papercuts was not adopted by Jewish compatriots.
The technique flourished particularly in the nineteenth century and began to fade as an art in the twentieth century with the advance of cheap printing. Today, a small number of dedicated artists in Israel and the diaspora are reviving this fascinating art-form.
Yehudit Shadur (1928-2011) was known internationally for her intricate papercuts. Her daughter, Tamar Shadur talks about her mother's work, the tradition and motifs of papercuts in Jewish artistic culture, and how her mother innovated the medium.