Bernard Starr’s recent essay “Jesus in Jewish Art: The Missing Pieces”(Algemeiner, 18 October 2013) raises many
important and interesting questions.
Starr reports that many Jews are worried today that there are too many
“missing pieces” in the medieval and Renaissance paintings when the identification
of Jesus as a Jew is either left out altogether or misrepresented . The writer’s questions come in response to an
exhibition of Marc Chagall’s works in the Jewish Museum in New York City with
the title “Love, War and Exile” ; this show gave the museum an opportunity to
display twenty-four other Jewish works, about half showing the Crucifixion.
My own response to Starr’s essay begins with three problematical
assumptions in his argument or that of the people he claims to be speaking for
who are troubled by their discovery that usually Christian religious paintings,
frescos, statues, manuscript illuminations and whatever else do not fairly
represent the historical truth of Jesus as a Second Temple Jew.
The first assumption, then, is that Jesus and the Christ are the same
person, which implies that Jesus was an historical figure whose existence can
be attested by evidence outside the hermeneutic circle of Christian religious
documents; and then even further, if he were an actual human was born and died
in Herodian Israel that he was a Jew. But
we really do not know what kind of
people Jews were at this time before the basic rabbinical documents and
institutions came into existence as we know them, neither the Talmudic nor the
New Testament literature supposedly dealing with this period being more than
religious writings, not historical documents: they are oblique evidence,
composed much later and having other purposes than what we now-a-days recognize
as accuracy. Historiography, like realistic writings we find in novels, comes
much later. What we know about the
people and everyday events of the ancient world cannot provide models for what
things looked like.
Figures made by early Christians to represent Jesus, his disciples and
others mentioned in the New Testament, have no historical or photographic
validity: they are usually adaptations of symbols and types borrowed from
classical works and later modified in accordance with ecclesiastical
doctrine. As in the Gospels themselves,
the version of Jewish life depicted is vague and inaccurate, if not outright
distortions to discredit the old Dead Law of Moses. It is most likely, in my view, that any
attempt at “historicism” follows and does not precede the Pauline view of the
Resurrected and Living Christ as the heart of the new religion, and comes only
secondarily, with some need for a legal fiction of historical actuality, by the
Gospels, perhaps even with John’s quasi-Gnostic fourth gospel coming first,
then the two Lucan texts (the third Gospel of signs and the Book of Acts
itself), and last Mark and Matthew—in other words, the reverse of the currently
accepted order of composition. The only
reason to write about—or later to draw and contemplate images of—the Jews was
(a) to show how wrong they were to disbelieve in Christ’s message and so to
crucify him, (b) to indicate how all the prefigurative promises of the Old
Testament were now fulfilled in the Life, Passion and Resurrection of Jesus as
the Christ, and (c) to claim to be the triumphant new spiritualized chosen
people, the New Israel.
The second troublesome assumption in Starr’s essay is that there is and
was such a thing as “art” as a special category of cultural knowledge and the
representation of history prior to the early nineteenth century, or even, to
make things more complicated, that there was a pre-Renaissance distinction
between representations of people, places, acts and ideas for secular purposes
and those for religious use. Frankly,
the idea that a traditional artist—that is, a skilled craftsman (or woman)
working for various official commissions, workshop managers, and civil or
ecclesiastical patrons—had the self-conscious awareness or the freedom of
expression to create some reflection of his or her own feelings, attitudes and
beliefs is almost preposterous. Whatever
that was eccentric, private and heretical would not have lasted very long
anyway as all but the most important works would be lost, painted over, or
corrected or improved by subsequent generations. Our notion of art as a supreme manifestation
of individual sensibility and a collective reflection of the spirit of the
times (the Zeitgeist) just was not
there, except perhaps inadvertently.
By the time anyone was attempting to think or write about Jesus and his
family as historical Jews—that is, fairly late in the nineteenth century, with
thinkers such as Ernest Renan—there was very little known about what such
persons might have looked like, about how they lived and about what they did to
be remembered. At best, the clichés of
Orientalism provided a kind of romanticized version of Arabic society and
Muslim culture in the Ottoman Empire to model such paintings or sculptures
on. While church decorations—stained
glass windows, religious iconic paintings for contemplation and instruction,
carvings in wood or stone—were not only carefully monitored for orthodoxy by
the Catholic Church (Protestants mostly would avoid such idols and symbols) but
also adjusted to current doctrinal needs, especially extra-Scriptural and
dreams-visions by ecstatic nuns and hysterical children. So much anti-Semitism bore down on the
consciousness of the clergy and the congregations, the only Jews they could
call up in their imaginations would be of those nasty cartoons in the popular
or ecclesiastical press that later became the stock-in-trade of the Nazi
regime. To counter this trend, some
Jewish artists who emerged in the same period attempted to present a more
sentimental and idealized view of old-fashioned life in the Ashkenazi ghettos,
shtetl and Jewish neighborhoods of their youth or Sephardi zones in the cities
of North Africa and the Middle East they visited on their journeys to view the
exotic scenery. None of this has any
historical legitimacy in regard to the question in hand, though it tells us
about how some Jews appeared during the nineteenth century.
For Jewish artists in more recent times to give Jewish faces and
rabbinical institutional forms of worship, prayer, study and home-life to
pictures of Jesus as a historical person has a clear polemical purpose. They are sometimes trying to correct what
they see as historical errors in the history of art or they are seeking to
integrate Jewish motifs and symbols into the tradition that made academic
copying the masterpieces of the past proof of one’s belonging to the club of
European art, as Chaim Potok shows in his Asher Lev novels. When Chagal inserts a tallit-wearing Jesus into his canvases or takes up the challenge of
providing windows and panels for Christian buildings—churches, chapels ,
hospitals—it was an assertion that the whole of the Jewish people have and are
suffering in the same way as Jesus did.
But Chagal never claimed archaeological accuracy: he was drawing from
his memory of pre-World War One Vitebsk and the people he knew in late
nineteenth-century Czarist Russia. All
these efforts have their own aesthetic and polemical dimension.
I can see good reasons to be angry that some churches in Europe still
keep on display pictures and statues of the Blind Synagogue, the
Sow-worshipping Rabbis or the Ritual Murder of non-existent little local
boys—as they are now historical evidence of anti-Semitism, I wouldn’t destroy
them but keep them in backrooms for scholarly study. They should not be in the
public areas where they reinforce popular prejudices. I am not upset by the failure of fourteenth
or sixteenth century artists to match our own politically-correct ideas of who
and what a historical Jesus might have looked like when he worked as an
apprentice carpenter for his father Joseph or said in his bar-mitzva speech or wandered
Galilee with his faithful followers.
Christian iconography is what it is, and it is up to the Christians, of
whatever denomination, to use or not use it as they will. When such masterpieces of Dutch or Italian
art which were made in the tradition of Christian iconography are displayed in
public museums and private galleries, they are now treasured for something
other than the real persons, places, things or events they once purported to
represent and provided a way of focusing the congregant’s attention. We now look at them in terms of style,
composition, color, brush-stroke and indications of personal genius (whatever
that is). It is nice to know that
Rembrandt used some of his Jewish neighbors as models or that someone else
visited a local synagogue in Paris or Berlin in the nineteenth century and
sketched what he or she saw for use in a later painting. But none of this, as I said above, provides
proof either that Jesus ever lived or that he was a Jew or, if he were a Jew,
what kind of early first-century CE Jew he was.
Frankly, I would be much happier if no one thought of Jesus as a
Jew. We have enough trouble as it is.
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