Radiant Energy
Le judaïsme pulse et rayonne d’énergie comme quelque
trou noir dans la galaxie de l’histoire. [i]
Judaism
pulsates and radiates with energy like a black hole in the galaxy of
history.
Despite the Second Commandment’s
prohibition of graven images, which the rabbis interpreted in a generous way
often to forbid works of art that could be used or even be seen to be part of
idolatrous customs in the contextual societies where they lived, wherever and
whenever they were given the opportunity, Jews did create forms symbolism and
art in their own terms. This was easier
when responsa literature agreed to treat Christianity less as a form of
outright paganism than a derivative of Judaism based on a misinterpretation of
the Torah and its main principles. Wherever
and whenever the political and economic conditions allowed, moreover, Jews
created art of all sorts on a lavish scale and with all the skill and insight
their own civilization could muster, drawing on the resources of the
surrounding cultures, but also recreating the new techniques in their own
specific ways. For many contemporary art
historians still not to accommodate to these widened parameters is to diminish
the value of their supposedly normative assessments of the European achievement
in art altogether. This holds true, let
us say, for those historians who do not take into account such evidence as the
Dura Europos synagogue, which, aside from its relevance in demonstrating a
prior Jewish achievement of Byzantine iconic representation of Old Testament
figures and events two hundred years before Christian evidence, happens to be
the most extensive collection of classical wall-paintings outside of Italy. If like
Toynbee the commentators treat modern rabbinic Judaism as a mere fossil, then
they can only see paintings, symphonies, ballets and architecture made by and
for Jews as a dead imitation of what is truly alive and lifeless piece of minor
craftwork, not as a continuous development of a millenia long tradition.
The professional historians of
art may grudgingly accept a few remnants of ancient Temple and synagogue art as
of historical interest, curiosities of a virtually irrelevant people, but when Jewish
achievement in the arts appears again and again in later periods—they continue
to glance over its sporadic evidence as due to lack of creativity or appreciation ;
whereas a more sympathetic—and obviously discerning and sophisticated reading of
the facts would recognize it as proof of the destructiveness of anti-Semitic persecutions. What remains, then, may seem like only
occasional and discontinuous developments, lost in the overwhelming weight of
Christian or Islamic art throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,
whereas even then a refined examination, sensitive to careful understanding of
the historical facts and a close exegesis of the written texts,m would be alert
to the way in which Jewish craftsmen and women, whether converted or merely
earning a living where and when possible, particiopated in those hegemonic
enterprises. Even when it stares them in
the face, that is, when there is no doubt of provenance and authorship, Jewish
creativity is too often mistaken for something else, treated as insignificant,
or overlooked altogether.
I wish to cite from Franz
Landberger's conclusion to his chapter on "The Illumination of Hebrew
Manuscripts in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance", which appears in the
second, revised edition of Cecil Roth's now classic Jewish Art: An Illustrated History:
Barred
from other artistic achievements through personal inhibitions (by the
prohibition of making images) or through outwards restrictions (by not being
accepted into guilds), they found the art of book-making in many cases the only
channel for their artistic urge. For
this reason medieval illuminations are of such great significance for Jewish
art in general. Among other peoples, the
art of illumination is only one aspect and not even the most important one of
their artistic activities. For medieval
Jews, however, the art of the book is the center of all artistic activity. All talent is directed towards it. Here, the rich storehouse of Jewish thought
and imagination, of Jewish solemnity and Jewish humor find pictorial
expression. And here, finally, we have
the clearest evidence of the fact that the Jews of the Middle Ages enjoyed form
and colour.[ii]
Despite this attempt to recognize
what is there as evidence and to treat it as proof of a continuity despite its
relatively out-of-the-way manifestations, scholars not prepared to see what is
there or unwilling to step outside of existing crude paradigms, have nothing to
report—and there failures reinforce one another generation after
generation. Take this example which
locks into the passage cited above: if we turn to those sections of S.F.
Brandon's Man and God in Art and
Ritual[iii]
which deal with manuscript illuminations and associated arts, we find
discussions of Greek, Aztec, Hindu and Christian traditions; but not a hint, not a whisper of Jewish
manuscript art. This is a phenomenon I have called “Incidentalism,” where the presence and
activity of Jews in world history is treated as merely incidental to the main
players and events, if not completely ignored.[iv]
The Christian exegete and
the secular historian, and often the untrained Jewish scholar, all seem to have
been blinded by the Second Commandment.
They are swayed by the strong ideological view stemming from ecclesiastical traditions that treat Jews as a people who are hide-bound
literalists and obsessive or hysterical followers of the letter and incapable
of appreciating the spirit of the Law. Let
us turn to this question of inhibitions and prohibitions which seem to exist
within Judaism itself to prevent the development of an aesthetic tradition, a
sense of form and color. That path will
lead us to the verge of symbolism within Judaism, and to why art—or rather the
work of aesthetic art, if not for its own sake, then for the sake of providing
worldly pleasures and idolatrous excstacy—does not become in itself an object of
worship, or at least a centring of worship, an icon, though it is certainly
there to the outside observer blessed with hindsight. Then we will look at some of the ways in
which illustrated, enhanced, and elaborated objects play a role within worship,
study, and domestic life for Jews prior to the period of modern Emancipation,
how they prepare for a flowering of Jewish aesthetic activity in the
post-Emancipation period, and finally lead up to the situation we began by
mentioning in Paris in the early part of this century, a time when a group of
some forty to fifty Jewish artists take significant roles in the evolution and
creation of the most advanced and sophisticated artistic activity of our shared
European civilization.
For a very long time in
the histories of art which spill out from studies of Christian iconography and
liturgical and ceremonial objects, it has been commonplace to commence any discussion
of Jewish art and attitudes towards things aesthetic by citing the passages in
Deuteronomy IV.17-18 and Leviticus XXVI.1 which are taken to prohibit in an
absolute fiat the making or worship of graven images. However, to adduce those passages as though
they established an inalternable base for Judaism’s legal attitudes and
cultural practice either before or after the Fall of the Second Temple is to
slip into the same trap of anti-Jewish literalism which finds its locus in the
New Testament and subsequent gentile slurs against Judaism as the religion of
the law, whose rigid interpretation of the letter makes Jews the spiritually
dead, fossil-like remnants of a superseded religion. These archaic mandates or taboos in the
dispensations of the Law are no more to be read as unconditionally binding
dictates than, say, for instance, the so-called lex taliensis (an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth). Rabbinical—in the Mishnah, Talmuds, midrashim
and a score of other primary interpretation and praxis have seemingly always
received such mandates as part of a continuous rabbinical dialogue, an open
interpretative process. The commandments
are not to be abstracted from the pages of Scripture as absolute rules but
perceived, in both their written and oral contexts, as part of the many-voiced
revelation recorded by the Torah and as focal points for juridical
argumentation. As Cecil Roth indicates,
in his "Introduction" to Jewish
Art: An Illustrated History, interpretation of these commandments have
varied through Jewish history in response to specific events and circumstances.[v]
While there has been a very
strong reluctance to portray God himself and a somewhat less severe inhibition
on the depiction of the human face and
form, there is no actual prohibition against the "representative
imaging of God" in the Hebrew Bible or the rabbinical commentaries. "What is clearly forbidden," says
Arthur A Cohen, "is the fabrication of idols (`graven images') and the
imaging of elements in the universe that might serve as idols," and therefor
Cohen understands the scriptural injunctions as against idolatry but not
consistently anti-iconic. He further
examines the relevant passages in the rabbinic collection Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael and finds that:
What
is at stake...is the fear of idolatry, the prohibition of the worship of idols,
and the extenuating implication that anything made by man to represent the
beautiful and the sublime risks the making of an idol.... Representational art
is forbidden in order that divine revelation will be unchallenged.[vi]
Nevertheless a survey of the
cumulative development of Jewish art, beginning with the detailed descriptions
of the Ark and the Temple in the Torah and carrying through to modern
archaeological discoveries, reveals a series of pendulum swings, often in
direct response to the attitudes towards divine and secular art in the
surrounding Persian or Greek, Babylonian or Latin, Christian or Moslem
society; this Jewish response sometimes
being one of moving with the tide of general public opinion amongst the host
populace or sometimes of behaving in a contrary way in order to preserve or
protect Jewish identity. What there is
not, then, is a hard and fast rule.
Though it remains a subtle anti-Semitic dig to call these pulsations and
radiations a kind of black hole in Jewish history, it nevertheless is apt to
think in terms of dynamic flows, widening and narrowing circles of energy to
follow the ebb and flow of persecution, withdrawal into obscurantism, and then
flooding outward in times of tolerance and enfranchisement. What remains steady is the source, the core
of Jewish values, sensibilities, and techniques of analysis, whereas what
varies and seems to disappear into the glare of surrounding society are
superficialities and disguises.
[i] Pierre Cormany, “La question juive (ou comment
réconcilier antisémitisme et cosmopolites” Perspective
et pensées
dures (19/11/2008).
[ii] Franz
Landsberger, "The Illustration of Hebrew Manuscripts in the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance," in Cecil Roth, Jewish
Art: An Ilustrated History, rev.
ed. by Bezalel Narkiss (London: Valletine Mitchell, 1971), p. 148.
[iii] S.F.G. Brandon, Man and God in Art and Ritual: A Study of
Iconography, Architecture and Ritual Actions as Primary Evidence of Religious
Belief and Practice (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975).
[iv] In so doing, of course, I am parodying Edward Said’ book Orientalism a book which has distorted
and positioned much of modern scholarship.
[v] Cecil
Roth, "Introduction," in Cecil Roth, Jewish Art: An Illustrated History (New York, Toronto, London:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1961), pp. 21-22.
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