Evolution of Jewish art

PAT JOHNSON

The Medieval canard that Jews had horns – a stereotype so widespread that even Michelangelo depicted Moses with horns – resulted from a simple biblical mistranslation. In translating to Latin the word keren, which can mean a beam of light or, alternatively, horns, was translated as the latter when, in fact, the Hebrew Bible described Moses with light emanating from his head.

This etymological footnote – which caused one of the enduring antisemitic myths – was addressed in a lecture at the University of British Columbia’s Hillel House on Jan. 18 by art historian Efrat El-Hanany, a Capilano University professor and Hebrew University alumna. The lecture covered nearly two millennia, from the earliest post-Temple times to the beginnings of Israeli art.

The question “what is Jewish art” is difficult, El-Hanany acknowledged, not only because of the diversity of Jewish experiences. There is also the small matter of Jewish law, a dichotomy captured ideally, though perhaps unintentionally, in “Moses with the Law,” an 1819 painting by Jewish artist Moritz Oppenheim. Oppenheim understood the nuance in the word keren and painted beams of light where Michelangelo had painted horns.

The painting depicts a very human Moses holding the Ten Commandments, one of which, remember, is “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath.... ” As it has on many issues over time, Jewish tradition has shown flexibility on this one, depending on the permissiveness of rabbis and the communities at any given time in various locations. For example, in a sixth-century mosaic on the floor of Beit Alpha Synagogue in the Beit She’an Valley of northeast Israel, there are images of Abraham and Isaac, the father preparing to sacrifice the son, with God’s hand emerging from an orb in the sky. Although, as

El-Hanany noted, its Picasso-like two-dimensionality is a “naive, childlike, abstract representation,” it is nonetheless a very early example of the willingness to ignore the graven image commandment. Frescoes only discovered in the 20th century in present-day Syria come from an even earlier time and flout the commandment with far greater chutzpah, depicting Pharaoh’s daughter finding Moses in the reeds. In this depiction, from a synagogue and estimated to date from 245-255 CE, the Pharaoh’s daughter is naked.

In a strange compromise many centuries later, the “Bird’s Head Haggadah” is decorated with cartoonish birds, each wearing the type of pointed hat German Jews were forced to wear in the 13th century. Apparently hesitant to depict humans, the artist opted to have birds stand in but, as El-Hanany pointed out, the bait and switch was plain.

“It’s an abstract representation of people,” she said. “These are Jewish birds. These are not just any birds.”

By the 19th century, some Jewish art had become more reflective, if no more realistic. While “Moses with the Law” was a traditional biblical study, Oppenheim made a name with a Norman Rockwell-like knack for depicting a nostalgic ideal that never really was, El-Hanany said.

“Every Jewish family that could afford it would buy a copy of Scenes from Traditional Jewish Life by Moritz Oppenheim,” she said. “But it was also popular with non-Jewish people.” The series was exotic, but not too exotic. The scenes of Jewish domesticity verged on the propagandistic, depicting their subjects as educated family people, living comfortably in well-appointed homes.

“Those weren’t really the circumstances of Jewish life in Europe at the time,” said El-Hanany.

A few years later, and a little further east, the picture would be far more grave. In a harrowing scene of fin-de-siècle darkness, Samuel Hirszenberg’s “The Wandering Jew” (1899) depicts a terrified, solitary figure in a gloomy forest of sinister crosses, the earth littered with bodies. Barely less dismal, his “Galut,” painted in 1904, shows an entire community trudging through the empty white landscape, led by a Moses-like elder, headed to an utterly empty future, the only small icons of hope a Torah scroll and a kettle.

In the 1905 painting “After the Pogrom,” Moshe Maimon’s soldier returns from serving the fatherland to a scene of carnage, his modest home ransacked, his wife and child dead, a rabbi saying Kaddish and the only remaining material item of Jewish identity being the word mizrach (east) on the wall, traditionally affixed to remind Jews of Jerusalem and orient them eastward in prayer. This painting was completed at the height of both the 20th-century pogroms and the dawn of the Zionist movement.

As more individuals and communities from around the Jewish world made their way to Israel in the early decades of the 20th century, Jewish art transformed itself again, reflecting – and influencing – the changes taking place at the individual and collective level as Jews became sabras.

The founding of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 1906 was a self-conscious attempt to create a distinctive yishuv (early Palestine settlement) artistic style, embracing Jewish subjects with Islamic design and European influences. Bezalel brought Jewish artisans from around the world, but especially from Yemen, to work in crafts of fabric, metal, wood, leather and brass. Traditional Jewish symbols like the menorah and pomegranates were integrated with watermelon, bananas and the sabra fruit, among others, to develop a hybrid regional style.

Challenges to convention typical of the time were rife in Yitzhak Danziger’s scandalous sculpture of Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah who was rebellious toward God and who is traditionally (although not biblically) remembered as a founder of the Tower of Babel. Danziger’s “Nimrod” was made of sandstone from Petra, in Egyptian style, and depicted as uncircumcised, emphatically rejecting any number of conventions.

El-Hanany was speaking at the first of four lectures by Hebrew University alumni and professors in a series co-sponsored by the Vancouver Hillel Foundation and Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The series will include Dr. Nicole Adler on How High-speed Rail Competes with Airlines: Using Your Tax Dollars on March 8. The other lectures will feature Merav Schiffer on iron-age beehives discovered at Tel Rehov (March 22) and Dr. Michael Friedmann on whether B.C. poplar trees can fuel vehicles (May 3). All lectures take place at UBC Hillel, at 6 p.m. Admission is free.

Pat Johnson is, among other things, director of programs for Hillel in British Columbia.

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