to mitigate any breach of the prohibition. In modern Israel In the state of Israel, all religious sites, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, are protected by law. Even though Jewish law teaches that idolatry is forbidden to all of humanity as one of the Seven Laws of Noah, Jews today combat it through discussion, debate, and education, rather than the physical destruction of statues and shrines. However, most traditional Jews still follow the prohibitions against entering places of idolatry, and will not attend functions held in buildings where there are religious statues. Recent scholarship In a refutation of the belief in an aniconic Judaism, and more generally in an underestimation of Jewish visual arts, the historian of ideas Kalman Bland recently proposed that the phenomenon is a modern construction, and that "Jewish aniconism crystallized simultaneously with the construction of modern Jewish identities". Others have also argued that the notion of a total prohibition of figural representation in the Biblical and Hellenistic-Roman periods is untenable. Until the 20th century, Judaism was believed always to have been aniconic. The view was probably first challenged by Dávid Kaufmann, who marshalled a large and comprehensive corpus of data in order to prove it untenable. He was the first to use the term "Jewish art" in an article published in 1878, and is regarded as the founder of the scholarly discipline of Jewish art history. His disciple Dr. Samuel Krauss wrote in 1901: See also Aniconism in Islam Iconoclasm Notes References Barber, Charles, The Truth in Painting: Iconoclasm and Identity in Early-Medieval Art, Speculum, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), pp. 1019-1036, JSTOR Judaism Jewish theology