Jesus the Jew or Christ the Christian ?
Whether Jews began before the Christians
to illustrate the Bible is still a subject of dispute, in spite of of the
third-century frescoes at Dura [Europa].
I am inclined to think that they did….Nowhere were the Jews at once so
literary bs so liberal as in Alexandria, and it is plausible to suppose that
they began there as early as the third century to illustrate the Biblical
story. If they did so, whether in
manuscripts or in wall paintings, the Christian illuminaters must have been
influenced by them.[i]
Probably nothing seems so other and
threatening to the Jewish sensibility than the depictions of Jesus on the
cross, an emblem for millenia of exclusion and persecution, and so there can be
no more sensitive entrée into a discussion of contemporary Jewish art than its
flirtation with the central and defining image of Western art—the
Crucifixion. In more recent times, as
several periodic debates on whether or not Jesus was an historical person,
Jesus the Messiah expected by Hebrew prophets, or the icons of western art
merely neutral ciphers of spirituality and faith and thus open to all,
including Jews, rather than specifically ecclesiastical symbols—and thus the
production of which is a necessary ticket of admission for all painters into
the league of succesful artists.
Twin Sisters, Kissing Cousins
or the Rivals Synagoga
and Ecclesia
Only
gradually did Christianity loosen its connection with Judaism, and evidence of
this connection continues for long, notably in Christistian iconography.[ii]
There are three ways (at least)
to look at the relationship between Second Temple Judaism and early Talmudic
Rabbinism and the emergence of Christianity as a distinct, separate and
oppositional religion, in regard, especially, to their attitudes towards the
visual culture, symbolism and the role of narrative, symbolic and
representational art. There is the view
that early Christians were and tried to remain a part of Judaism, seen only
gradually and considering themselves not yet a distinct and other form of
messianic, apocalyptic and anti-cultic Hebrew culture. They were thus wither twins born of the same
mother—a priestly sacrificing Middle Eastern Temple religion—one coming to
believe that the long-expected messianic leader was yet to come to sanctify the
world and establish a properly kosher kingdom in this world, the other having
their faith in a savior who had already entered into current history, been
recognized by the few, rejected by the majority of Jews, who then had him
killed, at whose resurrection he ascended into heaven, and whose second coming
was imminently expected. Or in a second
take, they were kissing cousins, distantly related but at first not mutually
exclusive religions : there was a version of Christianity founded by the James
and the other brothers and entourage of Jesus who dwelt in Jersualem, who sought
to draw into their group other Jews who knew and revered the ancient traditions
of Israel, while others, the followers of Saul known as Paul, more Hellensitic,
believers not in the Jesus who lived, preached and suffered as a man, but in the
inspired and mystical embodiment of the Holy Spirit, Son of God and
transformative being who was God in all but appearance who returned in the
minds and hearts of his believers, and thus could be recognized in the stories,
liturgical acts and imitative lives of saints and sinners of Romans and Greeks
more than in rejectionist Jews. Or still
later these two religions were envisioned, depicted and experienced in a
necessary and nearly eternal rivalry : the Jews who had killed and
continued to disbelieve in Jesus as the Christ and who thus live on in history
in abjection and dispersal as signs of God’s rejection and punishment, yet also
as proof-positive of the narrative legends of Jesus’ career as a man and the
foudnation myths of his church on earth ; and the New Israel that replaced
them, the sacred and spiritual version of Jewish history, the dwellers in the
New Jerusalem already manifested in the world as the amry of saints and martyrs,
and powerful in the institutional body of the caesarian Church. It is this third version that I think best
explains the ways in which Christian art and aesthetics differs from that of
Temple and priestly Judaism and the religion of rabbinical authority, and life
in the world as a nation-in-exile waiting for messianic leadership and performing
sacred rites to ensure that much anticipated rebuilding of the Temple.
The creation of Christianity
begins, not with the Gospel story of Jesus’s birth and short career as a
preacher and miracle worker, culminating in his royal entry into Jerualem,
arresrt, trials, and evenbtual death on the Cross, but rather with his
proclamation of as Messiah, the Christ, resurrected and ascended into heaven to
sit on the right hand of God, the spiritualized manifestation of God. Only after the epistles of Paul and the
formation of a church for the converted pagans of the Hellenistic world did the
early adherents of this new religion begin to call themselves Christians—not
messianic or apolayptic Jews—waiting for the imminent Second Coming of their
Savior. At the same time as the ancient
cult of the priests and the sacrifices in the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed
in 69-70 CE, two new religions were created : one, rabbinical Judaism
based on a whole paradigm of « as if » reinterpretations of the
ancient Scriptures and formulations of sanctification through study of the Law,
the other a melding of mystery cults, emperor worship and Stoic and Neoplatonic
philosophies superimposed on a claim to traditional validity through
adaptations of Hebrew books. On the one
hand, then, the new model of Talmudic Judaism increasingly separated itself
from the emergent and powerful Christian brotherhood, with its focus on
supernaturalism, martyrdom and hierarchical authority, as may be seen in the
way the Haggadah, the revised version
of the Passover story, the Exodus from Egypt and the reception of the Torah as
national Law on Sinai, removed the old narrative of Moses as heroic warrior
leader, prophet and law-giver and focused on the might of the invisible and
unnamable deity, the older saga of Abraham’s separation from the idol worship
of his father in Ur of the Chaldees, and the endless disputes and discussions
of the rabbi exegetes ; on the other hand, the Christians, absointo the
cult of emperor worship, both drew apart from Israel as a useless relic of the
past and at the same time turned itself into the triumphalist replacement
Israel, announcing the Hebrew texts as an Old Testament to be read as a
prefigurative allegories of the the New Disposition, its historical and
homiletic imagery recreated into the aggressive discourses of the Church
Militant. The Hellenistic religion at
first expressed both in the terms of Roman themes and images and of Greek
hieratic icons and mythical events did not need—indeed, could not—draw from
Jewish cultural resources, as these already were aniconic or were suppressed in
a state of perpetual mourning for the lost Temple cult.
Rabbinical inhibitions of graven
imagery for worship gained new force as a means of eschewing association with
the new religion of Christ-worship and later Mary as Cosmocrator-Mother. These hieratic images of the militant and
triumphant church were built around and through the emperor cult, most
strongly in Constantinople and then on into Byzantine Eastern Orthodoxy and
somewhat in Ravenna, whereas the more gritty and aggressive needs of the Roman
Church, particularly in its Gregorian model, with the need for physical relics
and symbolic architecture, melded into northern narratives of the saints and
martyrs of Germanic, Frankish, Vandal, and British humilityy, ultimately culminating,
as it were, in Franciscan piety and affective models of behavior (as rendered
in paintings and sculpture). But the
great iconoclastic reaction that led to the separation of Western and Eastern
Churches in the years prior to the first millenium century was not about the
Second Commandment ; rather it was about the efficacy of iconic images of
worship and continuation of the themes of Christ and His Mother as hieratic
images of imperial power versus the need for physicality, bodily impressions and
imitations of Jesus suffering on the cross to become a Man-God, and a stress on
the earthly and earthy powers of the feudal ecclesia.
By the time of the fifteenth-sixteenth
century Renaissance in Italy (as well as Central and Western Europe), despite
the input from Byzantine scholars and more secular intellectuals, the paintings,
sculptures, and other arts of the West developed a new taste for
self-expression and aggrandizement, both in regard to patrons and artists. They moved towards a representation,
sometimes virtually realistic depcition of the Life and Passion of Jesus, the
disposition and triumphant exaltation of Christ, the maternal love and piety of
Mary and her mystical interceding mercy
in the processes of justice in the world, and the tortures, ecstasies and
intermediating role of the saitns and martyrs.
However, what was represented was not a relativist historical
understanding of ancient or contemporary Jewish life at all. The pictures and stone or wooden shapes of
the Holy Family and the events in Jesus life as a human being were given three
simultaneous time-schemes : in one they were embodiments of the Old
Testament prefigurative roles and thus seen as generalized ancients, more pagan
and Graeco-Roman than Middle Eastern ; in another, they were modeled on the
patrons and the artists and the types of Western Europeans, just as the scenery
showed the landscape and towns of Italy or Flanders or some other Christian
land, instewad of ancient Israel or Jerusalem ; and also they were
mystical images of angels, saints and other members of the heavenly court and
heirarchy. Such Renaissance canvases,
frescoes or sculptured representations sought to transcend and interpret
history and allow contemplation of the things to come that were alrerady
existing in heaven. Nevertheless, with
the emphasis on human expressions in face and bodily movement, the careful
anatomical details of anatomy and the flow of drapery, or the seepage in of
more humanistic concerns for the intrinsic value of daily living, the new art
verged and often crossed over into both secular concerns—the matching of pagan
myths with religious typologies—and an inward turn of individual and private religious
experience. The paintings of the
crucifixion, the piets, the burial and the resurrection of Jesus as the Christ
had within them a more urgent appeal to representing human suffering, grief and
bodily beauty. Though much later such a
cocnern could appeal to Jewish artists who were seeking means to express their
own sense of humanity as Jews, there was always resistance from their
traditional childhoods and from their own sense of unease at participating in
such an alien endeavor.
Chaim Potok's novel, My Name is Asher Lev, deals
precisely with this point: a narrative defense of the titular character, the young
painter's shocking masterpiece, Brooklyn Crucifixion. For with it, Asher Lev has crossed the
boundary, gone to the other side, become a fully fledged artist and not just a
Jewish artist. He has studied Christian
art throughout his career, sometimes inadvertently and unconsciously as a young
child and then increasingly under the tutorship of Jacob Kahn, an older man, a
survivor of the Montparnasse
Circle
Yet it is not only a matter of
disciplining oneself to the external codes of European art read as the symbol
system of Christianity which ipso facto offends against the prohibitions and
inhibitions of Judaism we have discussed earlier. As Bernard Malamud's artist, in his novel, Pictures for Fiedelman, comes to realize
during his study-sojourn in Italy, the key images of suffering and intimacy in
the civilization seem already appropriated as Christian, and a Jewish artist
cannot go back to pagan antecedents, where the simplified outlines of the
madonna and child or the pieta begin
for instance, but must place his or her own experience as artist within the
contours of the Christian expression;
for it is there, the novelist implies, that the images gather into
themselves the intensity of civilized experience. But can we accept the view that an artist's
God is in this sense intrinisicly anti- as well as un-Jewish.
Trying to explain in his mind—because
he cannot say the words aloud—to his father, a respected Hasidic educator, why
he has painted his mother as a crucified Christ-figure and thus offended the
family and shames them within their pious community, Potok's Asher Lev says:
Papa,
listen. I felt Mama's lonely
torment. I wanted to paint Mama's
torment. I wanted it to be a painting, a
great painting because I love painting as you love travelling. I work with oils and brushes and canvas as
you work with events and deeds and people.
There is nothing in the Jewish tradition that could have served me as an
aesthetic mould for such a painting. I
had to go to - I had to use a - Do you understand, Papa? why are you looking at me like that,
Papa? It isn't the sitra achta,
Papa. It's your son. There was no other way, no other aesthetic
mould –
From Kahn he has learned that to
be an artist is to enter the world of pagan and goyish ideas and images, yet
Asher Lev feels himself still bound by emotion and intellect to his
Judaism. The statement by Kahn that
there has never been a great Jewish painter does not stand up to scrutiny,
insofar as one begins to question the standards by which such greatness is
measured. Certainly, the Louvre Museum
in Paris—meaning its curators and patrons—can exclude Jews in its historical
sweep. If you don't paint nudes,
cucifixions or madonnas, then you are excluded from the club. Epikoros
and the goyim are in collusion on
that point!
And
yet Asher Lev learns also, as Kahn had taught, that great art is in rebellion
against Christianity, as well as against Judaism. That is because the definition of art at work
in the minds of these two characters is one of exalted individuality, of the
genius who meets, masters, overwhelms, and then transcends the tradition of
Greco-Christian art. The images of
Christ and the cross are finally aesthetic molds, not insights into a higher
reality, a more perfect rendering of this world. What Potok seems to imply in the novel's
overall development is that perfection lies in pure forms and colors, but to
be understood as absolute art must deny the specific qualities of historically
and culturally-determined sensibilities, the mentalities of diverse people and
ages. It is finally an idealistic view
which denies the substantive specificity of Judaism itself, and under the
illusion of transcendance hides assimilation to the dominant civilization. Potok's conclusion puts Asher Lev in an
invidious and uncomfortable position.
We
may get a better approach to this problem by examining some features of Marc
Chagall's use of the crucifixion as a recurrent motif in his paintings and
stained-glass windows. In 1978 in response
to repeated queries on his problematic use of the Christian images in his art,
going back to some of his earliest paintings, he replied that the Jewish God
was his God and the Jewish Bible his Bible;
and that he never painted a specifically Christian character: his Jesus was a Jew, his Mary and Joseph were
Jews, and the people around Jesus were Jews.
But is it enough to put a tallis
(praying shawl) around Jesus' shoulders, give the disciples Jewish looking
features, and have them inhabit a Jerusalem
Marc Chagall, whom Susan Compton
has termed "the greatest religious artist of our times,"[iii]
is not the first Jewish artist to paint Christian subjects, and at least as
others have ntoed one of the most remarkable Litvak artists in the School of
Paris, and therefore in a sense one of the most representative Jewish painters
in the modern tradition. As we saw
before with Chaim Potok's fictional young painter Asher Lev, the problematic of
becoming an artist in the Western World is fraught with dangers to the Jew
because the centers of Western artistic tradition are almost all saturated with
Christian iconography and assumptions.
Even to become a "secular" painter or sculptor, the modern Jew
needs to study the Christian art of the past and to insert him or herself into
the tradition that "secularizes" that religious material. More than that, if the artist does not work
in a purely abstract or non-representational mode, the associations and
references which spectators can bring to modern art will all almost inevitably
derive from the Christian tradition or its "secularized"
developments. In other words, it is
virtually impossible to paint or sculpt within the Western tradition without
taking part in the Christian tradition.
But does this necessitate specific and deliberate reproductions of
religious icons and themes?
The
answer is complex, even though, to a certain degree, the answer will be
negative so long as the emphasis of the question is on the necessity of the
choice. For Chagall, and for certain of
his Russian teachers and influences in the late nineteenth century, the use of
iconographic subjects--the Crucifixion, the Madonna, and so forth--served many
diverse functions. Not least, but not
most significant in the long run, is that of announcing their independence from
the Jewish traditions of Eastern Europe which,
as individuals, they were often also asserting.
To their own parents and communities, such paintings would be shockingly
offensive, proof positive of their worst fears of the apostasy in these young
men and women. To the general public,
however, the response would be more complex.
If the artist were not known to be Jewish, there would be no shock value
at all, only a consideration of the skill and aptness of the presentation. If they were known to be Jewish, the response
could be either repugnance at the effrontery of the non-believer in usurping
subjects not his or her own; or admiration of the bravery, as well as skill, in
adapting the dominant tradition. The
least significant aspect of the adaptation would be, of course, the
continuation of the Christian tradition per se in a time of secularization.
More
significant to the artists themselves, this self-insertion into the Christian
tradition, where specifically iconographic images and themes are taken over and
recreated in the modern mode, would be the ability to call on public, normative
responses and transform them from a Jewish point of view, even if that Jewish
point of view--deriving from artists who as artists are alienating themselves
from their own natal communities--is aesthetic, eccentric, and rebellious. In that way, the appearance of a crucified
Christ in the midst of a Chagall painting is a Jewish variation on the general
trend amongst artists in Paris at the turn of the century to shock, to adapt,
and to recreate their own traditions as they move into the new styles that mark
their endeavours. But there is more to
it than that. Responding to the rising
Antisemitism of the late nineteenth century and the growing hostility in this
century, Jewish painters like Chagall could not merely play with their identity
as an aesthetic or aesthetic phenomenon.
There could be no merely aesthetic response to the growing horrors, first experienced in the Czarist pogroms of
the 1880s and culminating in the Nazi Holocaust; nor could there be an
indulgence of individual and existential Angst.
An artist like Chagall had to seek something deeper in his own artistic
expression.
Ziva Amishai-Maisels has studied "The
Jewish Jesus" in Chagall's work, placing these paintings into both
historical and artistic contexts, and shown that Chagall's accomplishment must
be evaluated within the frame of nineteenth-century transformations in the
understanding of the historical Jesus.
By making his Jesus on the cross a specifically Jewish figure, wrapped
in a tallit (praying
shawl), wearing tsisis (fringed
garments) and tfillin
(phylactories), and looking Jewish in facial features, Chagall pushes the
Christian debate on the historical Jesus from the second to the third phase.[iv] In the first phase, represented by writers
such as Ernst Renan, the historical Jesus is a Christian in the midst of a
vaguely Jewish Near East. In the second,
the one that was in progress around Chagall at the turn of the century and up
through the inter-war years, Jesus becomes more Jewish in his origins and
surroundings, but is Christian in his teachings and actions, indeed, is
distinguished from his contextual community by his opposition to Jewish laws
and institutions. However, by making his
Christ Jewish both in his origins and in his teachings and behavior Chagall
belongs to the third phase of the hunt for the historical Jesus, the current
scholarly enterprise; in this third phase, it is not Jesus who is Christian but
Paul and the later instituters of the Church, and they are seen to create
Christianity through deliberate and inadvertent misinterpretations of the
teachings and actions of Christ.[v]
While Chagall has no conscious part to play in the development of this
theological activity, because his concerns lie in recreating the suffering
Christ as a recognizable image of Jewish suffering, nevertheless he becomes a
salient image-maker of this third phase.
Chagall's
intentions remain in the realm of his own artistic need to express the deepest
significance in Jewish suffering in Europe.
The figure of Jesus the Jew shocks, to be sure, but not so much the
parents and community which Chagall is seeking to speak for and represent in
this image--to a great extent because those individuals are the victims,
hounded on the streets, forced into concentration camps, destroyed in the death
machines of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Babi Yar.
But Chagall seeks to shock the complacent Christians, those who need to
see in the pogroms and aktions of the
Antisemites the self-destructive false-consciousness (or even
"false-faith") of their own Christian tradition. That this is not only a specific Jewish
perspective is indicated by Amishai-Maisels, who points out that Chagall was
probably influenced strongly in the last years before World War II by the Jesuit
writer, Joseph Bonsirven, whose 1937 Les
Juifs et Jésus, cited British novelist Israel Zangwill's dictum:
"Jews are not only the people of Christ but the Christ of the
peoples". This Catholic then author
adds his own words: "Like Jesus, the Jews have not ceased to mount Golgotha
At the same time, Chagall personalizes the experiences of the Jewish Jesus, as he does of the Jews and other persons who appear in his paintings, etchings, and stained-glass windows. Another article by Ziva Amishai-Maisels discusses "Chagall's Jewish In-Jokes," in-jokes being those which are available only to a small circle of the painter's close associates or other non-public group.[vi] In Chagall's case, many of the in-jokes are those which would be known only to fellow Yiddish-speakers. They take the form of concretizations of proverbs and expressions specific to those East European (Ashkenazi) Jews who converse in Yiddish. When projected into paintings which also play on standard Christian iconography, the effect is to continue the process of re-appropriating Jesus as a Jew and thereby creating anew within Judaism its own artistic iconography for suffering and salvation. For example, Amishai-Maisels points out that in the 1910 "Holy Family" portrait, a young Joseph is carrying a miniature bearded Jesus while Mary reads a book and looks on. Amidst a whole panoply of role reversals, the figure of Christ here embodies the Yddish saying that "Every Jewish child is born old," or more literally, "He was born an old Jew".
In
his illustrations for the Hebrew Bible, whether in books of lithographic prints
or in stained glass windows in Jerusalem, Chagall could focus on what was
specifically Jewish, what Meyer Schapiro sums up as the "strong ethical
and communal" commitment of the community to Zion.[vii]
Schapiro moreover sees in Chagall's work something that draws away from the
Hellenic-Christian notion of spirituality as an etherial, otherworldy
phenomenon, one that intrudes into this world only through the sufferings of
perfection; and writes, that Chagall has taken faces from the ghettos of
Eastern Europe and
has
endowed these faces with bodies of a congruent nature--lumpy, imperfect bodies
of men who sit long at work, or live in prayer and selfless thought, bodies of
a clumsy articulation... thje opposite of the bland Greek and Renaissance figures which
are so well-muscled and balanced, so lithe and supple.[viii]
Calling
this "Jewish Gothic," Schapiro concludes his discussion of Chagall by
this recreation of Western art as analogous to the generation of Yiddish as a
language through the merging of medieval German and Hebrew. It is
...the happy conjunction of his Jewish culture—to
which painting was alien--and modern art--to which the Bible has been a closed
book.[ix]
If the Bible has been a closed
book to modern art it is only in a sense of conscious or deliberate ideological
choice, as men and women who become artists increasingly feel alienated from
the very traditions which nourish them; or, as in the case of painters like Chagall
at the turn of the century, who make a deliberate break with their family and
communities--breaks which, nevertheless, as we review their careers (and as
they themselves also often reflect upon their experiences) prove not to be as
radical as first assumed. Thus Chagall
writes that "in the East I found unexpectedly the Bible and a part of my
very being."[x]But
this is very much a disingenuous statement, insofar as Chagall had long been
grappling, both in his life and in his art, with the Jewish identity he
inherited, with its baggage of preconceptions and inherent attitudes towards
the Bible, or in more East European terms, toards the Pentateteuch, the
Prophets, and the Writings in their rabbinical and Yiddish contexts.
What Chagall means is that it took a
trip to Israel in the 1930s (then still
Palestine) to find himself able to articulate and express in art more
explicitly his own specifically Jewish identity. He could not have had such an experience if
he had not for at least thirty years before that been wrestling with the angel
of his Judaism, an angel which sometimes had to take on the external forms of
Christian iconography. As Jean Casson
points out in his study of the artist's life and works, including his writing,
Chagall is not bound by any "normative" sense of chronology or
causation in his self-understanding:
There is
no attempt to restrict events to the setting in which they occurered, instead
they are rediscovred in the separate, distinct and purely spiritual area that
constitutes the memory, and memory is the storyteller...[xi]
At this point Casson is compelled
to explicate further on the Jewish sense of history, and in citing him now we
provide our own transition to the next chapter in which he undertake to examine
this sense of the past which informs in a fundamental sense Jewish thinking and
the Jewish mentality.
The Jews are indeed a historic people,
and their history is written down in the Bible in the form of glorious
chronicles, with each historic character and each story or event in its place,
interspersed with the enumeration of individuals, the genealogies, references
to places, and the computation of years.
But all this was long ago, and the Bible has become the book of books,
that is to say not a book that one keeps on account of the great deeds it
contains, or to consult occasionally for its vast store of knowledge. It is the book that one reads. And one reads it because it tells stories.[xii]
How wrong Casson is here, as a
gentile trying to categorize the Jewish people simply in terms of a Christian
view of the Old Testament, we shall see in the next chapter. What we need to conclude with here, though,
is with a statement that for Chagall, as for Jewish artists in general, there is
no one simple conclusion at all. If this
painter experiences in his art the timelessness of the Jewish concept of
history, it is an experience which shifts and changes in his lifetime, and
which is always involved with a peculiar self-doubting and self-asserting
Jewish argumentativeness.
[iii] Susan
Compton, Chagall (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and Royal Academy of Arts, 1985), p. 13. Compton
[v] I am
indebted to a former graduate student, Dennis Green at the University of
Canterbury, who pointed out these three stages in the quest for the historical
Jesus in a paper called "The Great Commandment: Jesus and the
Rabbis", presetend to the 7th Binennial Conference of the New Zealand
Association for the Study of Religions, Massey University, Palmerston North,
23-26 August 1991. For the third phase,
cp. Charlesworth, Jesus within
Judaism (1988).
[vii] Meyer
Schapiro, "Chagall's Illustrations for the Bible" (1956) in Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries:
Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), p. 124.
[x] Marc
Chagall, "The Artist," translated from French by Otto von Simpson and
George McMorrow, in Robert B. Heywood, ed., The Works of the Mind
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1947), p. 35
No comments:
Post a Comment