Books were made to last forever.
My name is Jacob El Hanani. My work is about drawing.
I was born in Morocco and moved to Israel when I was six-and-a-half years old. In the 70s when I came to New York, I was very curious about bringing drawing to an extreme and to see how small I could get. And I worked 12 hours a day, sitting and making lines.
I practically drew time. I’ve never see this Mishneh Torah and when I saw it I was amazed how it was done by hand—the entire book was done by hand. I relate to it because I could see the time it took to write it, to make the images, to paint. On the other hand, I grew up with it.
The Mishneh Torah is essays on every subject of a Jewish life, from health to sex to God to food. And the rabbi consult it today.
We were not religious but we went to the synagogue and we read Hebrew. That was the power of the Haggadah, the Torah, the prayer: it was part of your activities. Turning a page 200 times a day become part of the way you grew up. Repeating the same prayer, even if you knew it by heart, you were supposed to look at the book, because if you read it aloud because you know it by heart, you would not concentrate. You had to see, literally, the letters.
I was stunned how everything in New York was fast food and fast art and instant and immediate, and I didn’t come from that background. The tradition of colors or paint was not available for me, and paper was expensive in a country that had no trees. So, for me, minute had to do with lack of means. But there was plenty of time.
The person who made that book had to spend a few years to finish. Today they say the average person spends three seconds in front of a painting. I have work that took a tremendous amount of time. I relate to how a book like that was able to be made, and I understand: I mean, the painter who illustrated the book probably never traveled more than 50 miles from where he was born. There was no printing press. It makes sense that people devote their lifetime for a book. So books were made to last forever. And it’s a miracle that the paint and the colors and the gold is as clear as if it was done today.
