Behind
the Veil, in the Fringes, and
on
the Other Side of the Otherside
The predominance of Old Testament
subjects in the earliest art of the Church gives some countenance to the
precarious contention that Christian art in its first stage was in a measure
dependent upon the illustrated Bibles of the Jews. There is no evidence of such Bibles.[i]
We have already indicated that
the Jewish taboo against graven images, or representational, three-dimensional
figures, is less strict than gentiles often assume, when they are not familiar
with rabbinic exegetical procedures.[ii] The real fear is of idolatry rather than of
the visual or tactile imagination itself.
But the problem of what is allowable as symbol does not resolve itself
easily, particularly when we come on griffins and other pagan conceits. On the one hand, however, what seems like an
arbitrary violation of the specific Jewish environment of the art object would
in its own time and place, as Goodenough has shown,[iii]
be seen as the manipulation of neutral symbols, the signs of the zodiac, thus,
not referring to a rejected alternative world-view, and pagan to boot, but
merely as the normal quotidian referents to seasons or months. on the other hand, elements that seem
abstracted from a pervasive alternative religious system and hence importing
very un-Jewish values into the art work would also have a less overt or hostile
alterity to them in their original settings;
and it is clear that until fairly recently, in the post-Emancipation
period (from the late eighteenth century forwards), that Jewish artists would
avoid the central, overt symbols and figures of the other religions, such as
the cross or the crescent moon.
There
is another danger to that recognized in the rabbinical writings even in their
most liberal interpretations of the Deuteronomic and Levitical prohibitions
against graven images, of any artistic endeavor or aesthetic appreciation
lapsing into idolatry. There is a more
subtle vulnerability of the Jewish artist and the Jewish public to misread the
highly charged cultural signals of their surrounding, hegemonic cultures as
normative, neutral signs of reality, and hence of diluting or even losing sight
of their own specific Jewish mentality.
The insults and shocks that come with increased intellectual and social
discrimination—culminating ion the violent outbursts of pogroms, expulsions and
eventually the Shoah in our own lifetimes—lead to attempts by Jewish artists
to capture the emotion-laden imagery of the dominant persecuting cultures and
rendered through them claims to the justice, liberty and truth otherwise
denied. The process does not signal an
attempt to recapture Jewish narratives, events and iconography lost to
Christianity, since the early ecclesiastical artists did not seek to represent
but to replace Jews in the Gospels, saints lives and other homiletic texts
derived from ultimate Jewish experiences ; not until very late did
Christian artists at all seek to make their foundational stories imitate a
Jewish society and culture out of which their own would crystallize—and only
after that project was beguin, based on new principles of historiography and on
new archaeological evidence—would Jewish artists try to correct errors in such
images, background details, and thematic coherence.
Yet it is very difficult to
answer the commonsense objection that what seems like intrinsic facets of a
craft, like weaving or wood-carving, have a culture-specific content; as though there could be a Christian way to
make cloth or a Jewish manner of engraving.
Nevertheless there are modes of thought specific to Judaism, some
articulated in the proof-texts of the Bible and elaborated upon in Talmudic
commentary, and others which are implicit and not realized until they have been
lost and their reality strikes the scholar who juxtaposes a forgotten example
to a more familiar artifact. Or if the
mentality is not lost, the specificity of its Jewish construction will become
clearer when we examine what appears to some arbitrary or even perverse
features of a Jewish textile or ceremonial lampstand, and find that its
apparent swerving from cultural normality follows a predetermined, historically
ascertainable pattern.
Rabbi Jules Harlow, for example,
examines the traditions inherent in the making of textiles for the veil of the
tabernacle, the cloth that covers the opening of the ark in which the Torahs
are kept in a bet midrash. He begins with the description of the veil in
Exodus 26.31 where the Temple
This
veil is called parokhet in Hebrew. It
had a utilitarian function, setting off the Holy of Holies, although we see
from its description in Exodus that the aesthetic dimension was not to be
ignored or taken for granted. Yet the
true focus of the parokhet and of all other parts of the tabernacle lay in
neither functional nor aesthetic considerations. Rather, the purpose of it all is articulated
in a Rabbinic homily to Numbers 7:1, a verse speaking of the tabernacle's
completion: Moses brought the shekhinah (God's Presence) down to earth (Pesikto
d'rav Kahana).
There was also a
parokhet in King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, where a sanctuary was modelled
after the tabernacle in the wilderness.
Centuries later, in the Second Temple, the Holy of Holies no longer held
an ark. Yet a parokhet separated that
area from the rest of the Temple. This
parokhet was embroidered not with cherubim but with stars, flowers, and plants.
The parokhet survives in
the synagogue, though of course, in a different form, as the Torah ark curtain....
The parokhet is most often decorated and bears traditional Jewish symbols and
inscriptions. These elements recall the
ancient settings in their wilderness tabernacle and in the Temple sanctuary,
and also serve to focus upon the basic beliefs in Jewish tradition, such as
ultimate allegiance to God alone and the centrality of Zion. Symbolism and inscriptions sometimes also
serve to introduce a personal dimension relating to the donor or craftsperson
responsible for the parokhet.[iv]
Hence to understand such a
curtain we need to see in it a historical development, in which any single
image woven into the material may refer back to any one or more specific
manifestations of the parokhet in the
wilderness tabernacle, the First or Second Temples, or an earlier
synagogue; and moreover may also play
on visual and verbal puns associated
with the names of the people involved in the production or donation of the veil
itself.
"To fully appreciate
the symbolism," Rabbi Harlow goes on to say "we must be aware of
another element, the kaporet."[v]
While this refers today to the valence above the Torah cloth in synagogue use,
the original allusion is to Exodus 25.17, where kaporet is a slab of pure gold that covered the ark in which the
Tablets of the Law was kept inside the Holy of Holies. From this single piece of gold, there were to
be two cherubim carved, in their midst tradition indicating the presence of the
Shekhinah. Since the consonental root of
kaporet in Hebrew means to atone as
well as to cover, Rabbi Harlow says "the kaporet was focus of the ancient
ritual for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement."[vi] From this connection, the interpretation of
the common symbols used on the synagogue's Torah cloth is worked out, and not
surprisingly involves word-play that moves from Hebrew to Greek and visual puns
that enfold many surprisingly strange and un-Jewish looking images.
While the Jewish visual
imagination is to be understood as related in a general way to that of the
great Christian and Islamic civilizations it has resided in as a more or less
tolerated guest, the actual development and migration of symbols do not always
move in a sympathetic rhythm to the changes and charges of the hegemonic
cultures. Jewish history unrolls to a
different chronology than that of the host(ile) cultures and locates itself in
a different system of geographic markers, and so we may find a so-called
Oriental influence strongest in a Jewish community deep inside mainland Europe,
while French or Germanic influence may be manifest in the synagogues of
Istanbul or Antioch of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. A binding force of analogies in Jewish
experience of persecution may sustain a persistence of imagery in Haggadah
illumination way into the nineteenth century where such modalities of
figurative juxtaposition have been left behind by Protestant northern Europe . Even when
there is a revival of interest in the Orient in Christian Europe during the
period of Empire-building, that which emerges in secular culture as an exotic
gloss to the normative rules of the new art, may in Jewish artists intensify a
sense of familiarity in the depiction of ancient symbols and characters, or
even generate a negative response -- a rejection of the exotic altogether. What in a Christian artist may be mere
decorative use of Egyptian hieroglyphics or Persian stylizations may strike the
Jewish craftsman as highly charged emanations of the other—the other world, the
Yenne Velt.
[i] Walter Lowrie, Art in the Early Church, 2nd ed, rev. (New York: Harper
& Row, 1947; orig. 1901) p. 43.
[ii] Cp. Lowrie: “In fact,
many Christian writers understood the Second Commandment as an absolute veto
upon pictorial art of a religious sort.
It is commonly assumed as a matter of course that the Mosaic prohibition
of art was rigidly observed by the Jews of the Dispersion, and that their
observance of it, whether within the Church or outside it, must have had great
influence in retarding, if not in deterring, the development of Christian art,
all the more because it was supported by the opinion of enlightened pagans like
Celsus, Varro, Seneca, and the Neo-Platonists in general, who decried every
attempt to represent the Deity by means of images” (Art in the Early Church, p. 9).
This passage is rich in ironies, distortions and misunderstandings, if
not blatant errors: note expressions such as “commonly assumed”, “as a matter
of course,” “must have had”; the way of confusing problematic attitudes within
the Church with rabbinical opinions (i.e., “Jews of the Dispersion”) they were
either totally unaware of or were in the process of rejecting as they
separated Church from Synagogue; the manner of blaming, albeit sometimes
ambiguously, the Jews for statements that should be attributed to Roman
pagans, not least Neo-Platonists and Stoics, “enlightened” in the sense that
they showed little tolerance towards Christians and even less towards Jews.,
like “moderate” Islamicists who do not want to kill all the Jews at once now
but only gradually over the next few years.
[iii] This is an allusion to the lifework of art-historian Erwin R.
Goodenough, who has published widely on the absorption and recreation of
classical iconography into both Jewish and Christian art during the Hellenistic
period. See for instance his "Early
Christian and Jewish Art," in Joseph Gutmann, ed., No Graven Images: Studies in Art and the Hebrew Bible (New York:
KTAV, 1971), pp. 185-199.
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