Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art

Judaism and the Visual Image A Jewish Theology of Art

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Judaism and the Visual Image A Jewish Theology of Art

Melissa Raphael

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Melissa Raphael 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-10: HB: 0-8264-9498-6 ISBN-13: HB: 978-0-8264-9498-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Raphael, Melissa. Judaism and the visual Image: a Jewish theology of art/Melissa Raphael. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8264-9498-6 1. Aesthetics—Religious aspects—Judaism. 2. Judaism and art. 3. Jewish art and symbolism. 4. Jews in art. 5. Ten commandments—Images. 6. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in art. I. Title. BM729.A25R37 2009 296.3⬘77—dc22 2008025076

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

For Paul

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

viii ix

Introduction Chapter 1: The Second Commandment in Jewish Art and Thought Chapter 2: Genesis 1 and the Creation of the Image Chapter 3: What does a Jewish Woman Look Like? Gender and Images of Jews in Art Chapter 4: Sublimity and the Representation of the Holocaust in Art Chapter 5: Towards a Theology of the Holocaust Image Chapter 6: The Dancing Figure of Jewish History

1 19 43 65 97 121 150

Notes Bibliography Index

180 212 225

List of Illustrations

1. Nicolas Poussin, Dance Around the Golden Calf (c. 1633–4), oil on canvas, 153.4 ⫻ 211.8 cm, with permission of The National Gallery, London. 2. Isidor Kaufmann, Man With Fur Hat (c. 1910), oil on panel, 41 ⫻ 31 cm, with permission of The Jewish Museum, New York. 3. David Bomberg, Hear, O Israel (1955), oil on canvas, 91.4 ⫻ 71.1 cm, courtesy of the Jewish Museum, New York. 4. Mark Gertler, Rabbi and his Grandchild (1913), oil on canvas, 50.8 ⫻ 45.9 cm, with permission of Luke Gertler and The Southampton City Art Gallery. 5. Isidor Kaufmann, Friday Evening (c. 1920), oil on canvas, 72.4 ⫻ 90.1 cm, with permission of The Jewish Museum, New York. 6. Abigail Cohen, Psalm 1 (1995), oil on plaster on board, 244 ⫻ 152 cm, with kind permission of the artist. 7. Aharon Gluska, Jacob Dykierman, from the works titled Man and Name in the Framing and Reframing series (1996), archival photo, paint and gel, 203.2 ⫻ 137.1 cm, with permission of The Museum of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. 8. Arie Galles, Fourteen Stations / Hey Yud Dalet Suite: Station #5 Bergen-Belsen (2001), charcoal and white conté on arches, 115.5 ⫻ 182.8 cm, with kind permission of the artist. 9. Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion (1938), 154.3 ⫻ 139.7 cm, with permission of The Art Institute of Chicago. 10. Emmanuel Levy, Crucifixion (1942) oil on canvas, 102.1 ⫻ 80 cm, with permission of The Ben Uri Gallery, London. 11. Samuel Hirszenberg, Exile (c. 1904), oil on canvas. Whereabouts now unknown, presumed lost or destroyed. Efforts have been made, without success, to trace the owner of the copyright of this photograph. 12. Jan Burka, Deportees, Terezín (undated) brown sanguine chalk, 500 ⫻ 325 cm, with permission of The Museum of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. 13. Reuven Rubin, The Dancers of Meron (1926), oil on canvas, 160 ⫻ 128 cm, with permission of The Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv.

69 81 84

85 87 95

128

132 138 139

166

168 176

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my thanks to Rebecca Vaughan-Williams and Tom Crick, my editors at Continuum, for their work in bringing this book to press. I am also grateful to Dr Isabel Wollaston at the University of Birmingham for her helpful comments on the proposal for this book. At my own university, the University of Gloucestershire, colleagues in the Department of Humanities and library staff at the University’s School of Art and Design have made no less significant a contribution, offering, as ever, a stimulating environment and practical support for research. In particular, it is my pleasure to thank Dr Shelley Saguaro, Professor Gordon McConville and his doctoral student Brian Howell for their insights into biblical idol polemics, and Dr Dee Carter, whose friendship and theological acuity have inspired my work for nearly twenty years. It is always helpful to discuss aspects of a project in progress with colleagues and students outside one’s own university and I am grateful to Dr Beverley Clack, Dr Susan Morgan, Dr Alana Vincent, Dr Jo Pearson and others who invited me to lecture on some of its content. The late Professor Grace Jantzen first led me, in conversation, to pursue the possibility of a Jewish aesthetic theology, and Professor Bernard Jackson’s kind invitation to deliver the 2008 Manchester University Sherman Lectures on this book’s theme was a further impetus to thinking and research. I thank him and his colleagues at the Centre for Jewish Studies at Manchester University for providing a stimulating intellectual and social environment in which to introduce, over five days in April 2008, some of the ideas presented in this book. I also welcomed Professor David Woodyard’s invitation to give the 2008 Goodspeed Lecture at Denison University, Ohio, as an opportunity to introduce and debate elements of the argument in Chapter 3. Warmest thanks are due to my husband Paul for his unstinting practical and intellectual support for this project, even while finishing writing a book of his own. We completed our respective books over much the same period of time and I enjoyed the companionability of writing alongside him as well as the considerable benefit of his expertise as a historian of the Holocaust. I would also like to thank my daughter Verity for showing her usual good-humoured forbearance with the time and energy that is given over to writing a book, and those friends, especially Rose and Benny Goodman, whose warm interest in this project have helped to sustain its progress. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my exceptional good fortune in having a father who, despite his

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preference for the secular, has always engaged the content and argument of my work. I have greatly valued our conversations on all matters Jewish and the use of his home as a place both to work on the manuscript and as a place to escape it. Parts of this book were published in an earlier form as ‘The Mystery of the Slashed Nose and the Empty Box: Towards a Jewish Theology of Art’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5 (2006), pp. 1–19. Unless otherwise stated, all biblical quotations are taken from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).

Note

Feminist theologians like myself do not normally write books that use the male pronoun for God. In this book, my occasional use of the male pronoun for God is descriptive, not prescriptive. Although it has room for a degree of creative manoeuvre, the tradition’s theological language and concepts relate to a specific, historical model of God that is male in character or at least male by default. To refer to the God of classical Jewish tradition and of almost all modern and contemporary Jewish thought with the pronoun ‘she’ would be conceptually confusing; ‘God-She’ only makes sense in the formulation of a constructive feminist theology, which is not the primary purpose of this book. Like most feminist theologians, I do not object to the attribution of names and qualities to God that are traditionally associated with masculinity, only the a priori exclusion of female God-language from religious speech and texts.

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Introduction

To a contemporary culture in which visual images are ubiquitous, the Second Commandment’s apparent prohibition of images of people and natural phenomena seems excessive, almost fantastically irrelevant; at the very least it is, as someone once wrote of a Henry James play, ‘touchingly ill adapted to the public taste’. Yet it is precisely because our social and economic environment is saturated with images, especially images of perfected faces and bodies that suggest an only partially secularized cultural idolatry of the human form, and because claims are made about the world on the empirical evidence of sight, that it seems more important, not less, to develop a Jewish theological approach to visual images of the human. Not only would a Jewish theology of art enrich other religious and cultural discussions about images, Jewish understandings of the world might themselves be more fully informed than they have been by reflections on how Jews see and compose the world, as well as how they read it. This is not to say that the medium of the visual image does, in fact, best characterize the Jewish appeal to the senses. On the contrary, I suspect that many Jews, whether religious or secular in their Jewish affiliations, have grown up in an environment broadly neglectful of or indifferent to Jewish visual culture. Indeed, on occasion, I have wondered if the motivation for writing this book originated in a sense of visual lack peculiar to my generation. The Jewish urban landscapes that most interested me when I was growing up lived in my imagination alone: increased prosperity had all but emptied the streets of London’s East End and New York’s Lower East Side of their Jewish populations by around the time I was born.1 Jewish Warsaw, its inhabitants and its buildings, had been erased by the summer of 1943. Poetic in the post-memory of later generations, overcrowded and impoverished to most of their actual residents, I made my literary and historical pilgrimages to those Jewish cityscapes half a century or so too late when there was little or nothing left to see. This, compounded in more recent years by membership of an antique, but visually austere, Orthodox synagogue, has sometimes given me a sense that a signifi cant element of my own experience of Jewish history and devotion has been one of looking for something to look at. A few years ago it therefore came as some relief to find that Jewish scholars were becoming ever more interested in their own art and material culture.

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Jewish cultural historians were now insisting that, to varying degrees, Jewish art has always been a significant constituent of Jewish thought and identity. Against the traditional assumption of Jewish aniconism, Judaism does in fact provide ‘a platform for Jewish art in all of its manifestations, in different forms and styles. It does not prohibit visual art nor does it restrict it to abstract representation. Jewish art is an expression of the very soul and spirit of Judaism and of the Jewish artist. Its visual vocabulary can be religious, philosophical, social and national. It can open “the curtain behind which Eternity is hidden.” ’2 Such claims were to prompt an enquiry that is open to the possibility of a Jewish theology of art because of the Second Commandment, not in spite of it. Recent scholarship on Jewish material culture reflects a wider surge of critical interest in religious art and aesthetics. A growing body of Catholic, Protestant and meta-denominational Christian aesthetic theology is now cognizant that theology can be articulated in other modes than those of the verbal alone.3 Intended for both a Jewish and non-Jewish readership, the present study hopes to contribute to the expanding field of aesthetic theology which, to date, has been predominantly conducted from within the Christian theological academy. At first sight, a Jewish aesthetic theology is a less promising project than a Christian one. Certainly, it is less plentifully resourced. A Jewish theology of the visual image has to make its own resources by setting the work of historians of Jewish art and culture in conversation with modern Jewish theology and seeing how their combined insights help us to engage a body of Jewish art spanning well over 150 years. In this way, Jewish art can begin to resource theological interpretation of the post-Holocaust and contemporary situation. The lack of any self-identified Jewish aesthetic theology to date requires some explanation. Archie Rand, Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University and creator of 13,000 square feet of mural cycles in the Orthodox B’nai Yosef synagogue in Brooklyn – the only muralled synagogue functioning in the world – argues that the visual arts alone are vilified, isolated or ‘orphaned’ in Judaism. The contemporary rabbinate is at best ‘timid’ in their approach to the visual arts. Yet for Rand, visual art, ‘because of its emblematic immediacy, more than any other artform, announces a people’s right to a history and to self-esteem.’ Text alone is not sufficient; ‘congested Jewish visual energies’ have not yet been given an outlet. Mid-twentieth-century abstract expressionism merely postponed Judaism’s appreciation of the visual dimension. ‘There is still’, claims Rand, ‘no critically discursive umbrella under which Jewish artists can congregate.’4

Recent challenges to the aesthetic hierarchy in modern Jewish thought While Jewish artists have deplored this cultural and scholarly desideratum, the (predominantly modern) Jewish assumption of its own aniconism has meant

Introduction

3

that the aesthetic has played little or no theologically decisive role in Jewish belief. If they address the question at all, Jewish scholars assume that the linguistic and the aural are the medium of revelation and are therefore to be greatly preferred to images and the visual. Hearing God rather than, in some manner or form, seeing God, is believed to confer a decisive moral advantage, not least because ‘to hear’ is translatable in Hebrew as ‘to obey’. Hearing and commandments are assumed to be cognate in a sense that seeing and commandments are not. The communicative possibilities of the aural are too often set in a moral and spiritual ranking above the visual. Hermann Cohen’s view that the Second Commandment’s suppression of the plastic arts has produced a heightened dependence on language that has liberated both the rationality and the verbal lyricism of the Jewish soul has been broadly characteristic of modern Jewish thought.5 Yet all intellectual and religious arguments and assumptions have a historical context, and those of modern Jewish aniconism and logocentrism are no exception to the rule. Reinforcing ancient aesthetic misgivings and reluctances, modern Jewish aniconism was powerfully shaped by the Protestant iconophobia of those intellectuals whose acceptance, even approval, the German-Jewish community sought in its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century philosophical and historiographical apologetics. German-Jewish philosophy tended to interpret the Second Commandment restrictively as a comprehensive ban on the production of images, an interpretation that underpinned its claim to conceptual purity and its pre-eminence as a rational and enlightened religion. To a large extent, the separation of the aesthetic and the ethical in modern Jewish thought is grounded in a Kantian account of the aesthetic. Following Kant, and later Hermann Cohen, for both of whom prophetic monotheism was necessarily opposed to art, visual abstraction has come to be regarded as the defining mark of ethical monotheism. The ethical rejection of representational mimesis is to be set over and against the sublime not-yet of the messianic world to come.6 The ‘purer’ or more refined the Judaism, the less visual it will be. Even by the end of the twentieth century, when the trauma of the Holocaust had left not only Jewry but Europe as a whole with a profoundly altered political and philosophical climate, the nineteenth-century view continued to be very widely rehearsed and still in roughly the form proposed by Heinrich Graetz in his The Structure of Jewish History: that Greek revelation is visual and the Hebrew, verbal; that Greek deities could be visualized, but the God of Israel could not. The God of ethical monotheism was to be listened to but not seen: ‘Paganism sees its god, Judaism hears Him’.7 Despite a number of recent challenges, this view still predominates and can be found in contemporary Jewish thought.8 Jacques Aumant’s The Image recently concluded that Jewish civilization is founded on language not images,9 and in a footnote to his 2006 edition of the Orthodox daily prayer book, Jonathan Sacks restates quite categorically

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that Judaism is culture of the ear, not the eye. We cover our eyes as we recite the first verse of the Shema to signal that Jewish belief is non-visual.10 The idea of Jewish aniconism, the idea that Judaism has no art, persisted right through the twentieth century, despite a wealth of historical evidence to the contrary assembled by archaeologists, art historian and ethnographers.11 Equally, modern Judaism has been largely oblivious to the gendering of claims that Judaism is an auditory, not a visual, tradition. For almost all of Jewish history, Jewish has been far less an auditory and literary an experience for women than it has for men. As onlookers to Jewish study and worship, rather than its speaking subjects, Judaism has comprised a more visual experience for women than it has for men. Women are Orthodox Judaism’s audience; for women, Judaism is a visual spectacle in ways that is not for men who are its active subjects or religious protagonists. And in the more conservative communities today, a Jewish woman remains a watcher rather than an actor, and an incidental or contingent listener. She is not an interlocutor with Israel where speech is exchanged between equals, nor is she God’s allocutor – the one whom God has addressed. Moreover, Jewish Studies has privileged the reading and hearing of the text even when women’s essentially non-literary experience of Judaism clearly counts against the general validity of such claims. Dan Levene’s recent research on so-called magic bowls dating from late antiquity that were used to prevent miscarriage, child death, menstrual disorders and protect the family is just one illustration of this tendency. Occasionally inscribed with love charms, the bowls were inscribed with spiralling esoteric Jewish Aramaic text and images of natural objects, shackled demons and other images. Although the bowls – at once art and artefact – were an element of Jewish women’s material culture and were often made for and commissioned by women, they are logocentrically described as a ‘rare archive’; ‘in essence, a collection of manuscripts.’12 It is only since the late 1990s that ‘a few pioneering cultural studies on Jewish subjects [have] treated both the visual and the verbal, moving beyond a limited conception of Jewish culture.’13 Zachary Braiterman’s The Shape of Revelation, published just as I was finishing writing this book, makes an exemplary contribution to this new understanding of Jewish culture in its investigation into the ‘form’ and ‘sensation’ of revelation in the early-twentieth-century Jewish philosophy of Buber and Rosenzweig, interpreted as the product of a meta-textual cultural encounter with early German modernism’s spiritual aesthetic. The Jewish cultural renaissance of that period, finds Braiterman, was ‘immersed in the language of plastic expression’.14 Braiterman’s study, like this one, has been inspired by the work of a group of contemporary scholars who have questioned any strictly dichotomous opposition between an aural Judaism and a visual Hellenism. According to Martin Jay, Judaism’s ‘challenge to the hegemony of the visual’ was a modern one not, in fact, successfully launched until the late nineteenth century.15 In a different field, Elliot Wolfson rejects any account of Judaism as comprehensively aniconic as ‘a gross oversimplification’

Introduction

5

of the tradition.16 Despite the inevitable tensions between visionary, theophanic and aniconic texts in the biblical and rabbinic literature, Wolfson finds that between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages Jewish mysticism was ‘overwhelmingly visual’ and that sight enjoyed an ‘epistemic priority’ over the other senses.17 Jewish mystics, he notes, used visionary techniques in order to ‘see’ the imaginal body of God. Kalman Bland likewise rejects what he sees as the received but now outmoded opinion of modern Judaism: that Jews are historically indifferent or hostile to the visual and have produced no significant artistic heritage. Scripture, he claims, ‘is not an iconoclast’s manifesto’. After the discovery of the muralled synagogue of Dura-Europos in 1932 and a mosaic pavement from a synagogue in Sephoris in 1993, biblical and rabbinic sources are more accurately understood to have been spiritual and intellectual frameworks, not absolute proscriptions. The Bible forbids idolatry, but knows full well that not all statues, paintings and architectural structures are idolatrous. Nor were medieval halakhists iconoclasts. Throughout the medieval period, mimetic replications of the entire human body may have been abjured, but Jewish regard for the visual intensified: Jewish pilgrims were impressed by the world’s great architectural monuments and Jewish artisans produced ever more elaborate ritual objects, embroideries, jewellery, ceramics, boxes, amulets and tombstones. On the basis of his study of medieval Jewish aesthetics, Bland concludes that Jewish aniconism is an ‘unmistakably modern idea’. The biblical text has been interpreted through the lens of modern philosophical and apologetic interests, even though, in his view, the Second Commandment actually forbids no visual image except that of God. Not until the modern period is the visual always subordinated to the aural. The Jewish (and Christian) assumption of Jewish aniconism is historically, politically and culturally conditioned by factors such as Protestant iconoclasm, the rebuttal of antisemitic charges of Jewish materialism, and Jewish apologetic in which abstract reasoning and non-figurative art were to be credited to the genius of Jewish aniconism before they were to be credited to modernity.18 Bland’s thesis recognizes that Judaism is more than the sum of its scriptural and rabbinic texts and their interpretation. Judaism is permeable and adaptable to its different social and political milieux and therefore not susceptible to generalization. In more specifically theological terms than Bland would deploy, Torah is inclusive of all Jewish experience, including aesthetic experience, in so far as that experience is itself a living commentary on Torah. The age of revelation is not only a biblical one. When Moses speaks of the awesome deeds God performed and ‘that you saw with your own eyes’ (Deut. 10:21), he might address all Israel, past, present and future. It is a highly circumscribed view of revelation to assign it to what is read in books alone. Embodied persons and the objects that express and support the life of the body also situate and narrate Torah. It is not only the word that is transmissive of tradition; of the eternity of the Jewish

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people. This study is therefore driven by an appeal for a further change of critical emphasis: that the phenomenological and historical questions of what was, or is, the status of the visual image in Judaism should give way to the more pressing theological and ethical question of what its status should be.19 Although Bland probably underestimates Judaism’s visual reluctance and indifference, his and other liberal interpreters’ reading of the biblical texts as only prohibiting the making and worshipping of sculptured images of gods or of God himself (as in Deut. 4:15–18, 5:8; Ex. 20:4, 20) seems reasonable: while visual images can be, and very often are, idolatrous, that possibility is contingent, not necessary. The abbreviation or foreclosure of Jewish aesthetics by overly restrictive interpretations of the Second Commandment has drained the visual of communicable theological meaning and thereby weakened the transmissibility of Judaism. The question of the transmissibility of Judaism in fact requires no artificial dualism of hearing and seeing or a ranking of the senses. The Second Commandment need not leave Judaism dependent on hearing alone. There are many good theological and ethical reasons for renewing a commitment to the Second Commandment, but, as this book seeks to demonstrate, an iconophic Judaism is not without attendant risks. An iconophobic Jewish culture is one that is likely more pronounced in its suppression of the female image than that of the pious male, to the point of the former’s unknowability. Not only is the eroticization of the female image integral to the problematic of the feminine in Judaism, an iconophobic Judaism is in danger of compounding the genocidal disappearance of Jews and the hiddenness of God’s face in Auschwitz. A Judaism that understands itself to be aniconic is one that neglects the possibility that a renewed post-Holocaust relationship between God and Israel and between men and women can also be mediated through images, not least the primary image in the world: the imago dei. Like Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas once wondered if modernity is not ‘witnessing the magnificent funeral celebrations held in honour of a dead god’. Recent history has, in fact, seen the resurgence of religion, if sometimes in uncongenial or immoderate forms; God is not dead after all. Even so, Levinas’s sense that ‘the ontological status or regime of the revelation’ is ‘a primordial concern for Jewish thought, posing a problem which should take precedence over any attempt to present the contents of that Revelation’, remains pertinent.20 The present study is an enquiry into the capacity of the image to be a medium of present, not merely historical, revelation. It asks what Jewish visual art and culture, and more, the visual spectacle of Judaism itself, can contribute to understanding how the will and presence of God is revealed to a world that is no longer certain how and where to perceive it. This is therefore not a book about the whole visual dimension of Judaism. An enquiry into the visuality of the relationship between God and Israel would be far too ambitious a project for a single volume and even the theoretical possibilities of images alone have had to be historically and conceptually contained. I have not attempted to catalogue the history, themes and range of

Introduction

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Jewish art. The category of Jewish art is as wide as that of any other community and includes synagogal architecture, funerary monuments, illuminated manuscripts, liturgical seats, pulpits and the other fittings and ornaments of religious Jewish life at home and at worship; as well as the modern and contemporary art that is now referred to in essentially secular terms as ‘Jewish art’. My own training and interests have, in this book, inclined me to address a far wider readership than that of specialists in the history of Jewish art and its related classic texts; this book may refer to relevant ancient and medieval Jewish thought and artistic production, but it offers a principally contemporary post-Holocaust theological aesthetic prompted by modern Jewish thought and modern (more than contemporary) Jewish art. I have not made any futile attempt to elucidate a single ‘national’ Jewish artistic style.21 Nor do I attempt to chart the history of the interpretation of the Second Commandment, offer an exhaustive definition of idolatry or a survey of the biblical and rabbinic texts that condemn it. A theology of beauty would also be a rather different project to that undertaken here. There is a natural slippage in discussion of the visual image towards consideration of the nature of beauty as what is pleasing to the eye. An aesthetic theology might be expected to offer an account of the nature and judgment of beauty. However, this book is not, primarily, an enquiry into what Judaism may or may not regard as beautiful or its views on the meaning and value of beauty. This is, instead, a positive theology of images on the assumption that certain images – those of moral subjects whose appearance or phenomenality are not a substitutionary object of worship – are permitted. It should be unnecessary to say that this study does not in any way countenance the visual imaging of God. No Jew doubts that images of God, even in abstract forms such as pieces of wood or rock, are not merely transgressive, but a facile and impertinent category mistake since God is non-material and cannot be represented in a material form by a subjection to the natural laws of finitude and change. God, as pure spirit, cannot be delimited by any bounded spatial exteriority or form. An image of God would be an attempted theft of divine freedom; a fruitless attempt to take God captive to the limits of the human imagination. Similarly, that the human is made in the image of God does not render the human face an icon or cast of God. God cannot be read off from the human face. The human face is not some sort of emanation of a divine prototype or Urbild. In fact, an interpretation of the Second Commandment as a proscription of images of God (as distinct from the gods) would be otiose: because God is spirit, not body, there is no possible likeness of the divine; logically, not even God could make a material image of God-self.

What is Jewish art? While theologians may have not studied Jewish art for theological purposes, there is a considerable body of historical scholarship on Jewish art and the

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interpretation of the Second Commandment that contextualizes the theorization of Jewish art, especially its modern (rather than contemporary) phases.22 Two related aesthetic problems have exercised scholars of both Jewish culture and law. Halakhists have asked how liberally the Second Commandment can be interpreted. And usually, but not always, consequent on those deliberations, Jewish art historians have sought to define Jewish art. For the evident fact of Jewish art does not quell the sense that Jewish art remains a problem, a dispute or a set of questions: what is it about Jewish art that makes it Jewish? Is there a continuous tradition of Jewish art running from the biblical period to the present that transcends its locality?23 (Gabrielle SedRajna thinks so, but most historians of Jewish art do not.) If there has never been a single, national Jewish attitude to visual art, nor, since late antiquity at least, one definitive Jewish style, what is its common Jewish denominator? Must Jewish art produce and reflect Jewish cultural identities, or can it be any work of art by anyone who happens to be Jewish? Must Jewish art be understood as the product of an encounter with modernity in which older precautions against idolatry have been renegotiated? In the second half of the twentieth century, Jewish art historians commonly asserted that non-figurative modern abstract art is a paradigmatically Jewish way of honouring the requirements of the Second Commandment. But does this sort of normative account of Jewish art preclude the Jewishness of Jewish figurative artists who paint Jewish life, and who defines what is and is not Jewish art when some of those who have been claimed as quintessentially Jewish artists have not wanted to be? In fact, not all artists who are Jewish wish to be identified as Jewish artists, or limited to Judaica in their choice of subject matter. The New Yorkbased abstract expressionist painter, Barnett Newman, for instance, strongly objected to his work being pigeonholed as Jewish art and resented any claim on his name as a Jewish artist. In 1965, when asked by Arthur Cohen what he thought about Jewish art, Newman answered dismissively, ‘Not very much, not very interesting if there is such a confection, and it is doubtful that there ever was.’24 But this did not deter one of the foremost historians of Jewish art, Avram Kampf, claiming Newman not only for the canon of Jewish art, but as its paradigm. Kampf writes, ‘If there were a Jewish art, Newman’s work would be regarded as its most authentic and classic expression.’ His contemplative ‘colour field’ paintings, devoid of imagery, consisting only of ‘a single flat colour divided by one or more bands of contrasting or complementary colours’ marks a peculiarly Jewish adherence to the Second Commandment; a ‘quest for the absolute with its inherent antagonism to the image’ that is an ethico-aesthetic rejection of the voluptuousness of western art.25 The more recent consensus is that essentialist, normative accounts of Jewish art ignore irreconcilable differences and discontinuities between its histories. It is now common to assert that ‘there are no unifying theories of Jewish art or of ways to study it.’26 Margaret Olin speaks for many in proposing that Jewish

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art may not be intrinsically Jewish but can ‘speak Jewish’ in certain contexts and to certain interpreters.27 Olin’s argument might apply, for example, to Alex Katz’s Untitled (1961), which depicts the back of a man in a short-sleeved blue shirt on sand dunes looking out to sea. There is no readily apparent reason for saying that this is Jewish art, any more than there is for Michael Gross’s Self Portrait (1983) in which the Israeli artist depicts himself in a few simples clean blocks of colour. While no one should presume to exclude such paintings from any ethno-aesthetic canon, such paintings give no indication of Jewish intentionality; they are not Jewish in content, iconography or reference, but might under certain circumstances or in certain contexts ‘speak Jewish’ to the particular interests and perspectives of their creators, viewers or curators. But Olin’s seems to me to be too relaxed a definition of Jewish art. If, as appears to be the case, there is no defining cultural and historical style owned by Jewish art alone, its subject matter should, in my view, be limited to Jewish themes and experiences depicted by Jews conscious of, if not always devoutly observant of, Jewish tradition. As Elisheva Revel-Neher has pointed out, it is not so much a question of how and why Jewish artists have resisted the Second Commandment, but, as Jewish cultural historians have begun to realize, how they have used it in their art, consciously or otherwise, to express their identity as those with a faith in the one transcendent God.28 Jewish art is therefore not only a sub-category of the fine arts. It has an ancient ceremonial dimension that should not be ignored. And whatever is honoured with the classification of Jewish art should be, in my view, the servant of Jewish spiritual or religious values; of Judaism’s situation, if not its purposes. Jewish art should acknowledge its Jewishness in so far as it situates itself in Jewish history and the cultural and religious life of the global Jewish family, and consciously intend to illuminate the meaning of one or both of these. (Marc Chagall is best known of the twentieth-century artists who positioned himself thus while not excluding Christian themes from his own Jewish expression. But equally, R. B. Kitaj was, on such terms, a Jewish artist, though one notably uninterested by Chagall’s work, whose later period he found schmaltzy, even kitsch.) Although a far from secular account of Jewish art, this is an inclusive as well as restrictive definition. A theological account of Jewish art need not confine its attention to representations of religious narratives and worship alone. After emancipation, European Jewish experience, values, purposes and identities have, in fact, been encompassed by a wide range of artists, contents and styles not unrelated to Christian art and aesthetics and to the wider history of modern art.

A very brief history of Jewish art With or without a commitment to the idea of a single, unified tradition, some of the key periods and attitudes in the history or histories of Jewish art, if already

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Judaism and the Visual Image

familiar to those who are working in the field, can be very briefly outlined for those who are not. In the biblical period the cult was notable for its visual beauty. Although a Jewish artistic style had yet to develop beyond the lavish ornamentation and visual symbolism of the first and second Temples, their splendour signaled both their political prestige and the glory of God’s presence in the cult. It has long been assumed that the sacral ornamentation of the two Temples was non-figurative; that the Jewish political and religious establishment was hostile to imagery. On the basis of the early Pentateuchal text and other documents a form of aniconism was widely regarded as a means of distinguishing the Israelite cultic dispensation from that of its pagan neighbours. Archaeologists have recently undermined some of these arguments and have cited the use of figurative representations of cherubim and animals in Solomon’s Temple in particular as evidence of a fairly robust culture of figural representation. Nonetheless, theologically, it remains the case that the Israelite’s God had liberated them from slavery and they owed him their loyalty. Image worship was a mutinous betrayal of the covenantal terms of the relationship. The ban on images bans the worship of other gods. It was from about the eighth century BCE, that images came to be understood in less henotheistic terms. Images gradually came to be perceived less as rivals to God than as a blasphemous attempt to reduce the supernatural God of spirit into a piece of mere natural or humanly crafted material; idolatrous images signal the gravest theological error, one for which the prophets assure the people they will be severely punished.29 Moreover, colonial rule in late Hellenistic or Hasmonean Palestine repeatedly imposed its own sacral images on the Jewish population (sometimes with gross sacrilegious offence) as symbols of its political and cultural regime. The desecration of the Temple by Antiochus IV in 167 BCE was a traumatic case in point.30 After centuries of military and spiritual struggle against the seductions of pagan idolatry and the triumphal presence of statue-idols of the Roman emperor/gods, it seems probable that by Late Antiquity (from about the third to the seventh centuries of the common era), images had, for many, been thoroughly tainted by association.31 And yet Late Antiquity also saw the reintroduction of figural representation and the rise of a distinctively Jewish art and architecture. Throughout the twentieth century a series of archaeological excavations demonstrated that synagogal art and architecture flourished in Jewish Late Antiquity. The discovery of their magnificent and often figurative carvings, mosaics and frescos suggested first, that rabbinic opinion did not entirely reflect or determine attitudes to Jewish art, and second, that the rabbis (a more socially, geographically, historically and spiritually diverse body of commentators than is sometimes acknowledged) were well aware that not all images are objects of worship, even when situated in pagan cultural environments.32 In short, Jews did not entirely eschew the Greco-Roman aesthetic; they were also its cultural contributors.33 Hellenistic and Roman aesthetic

Introduction

11

influences were fully apparent in the magnificent synagogue of Alexandria and in the form and decoration of Herod’s Temple. Jews have not stood alone in their attention to the Second Commandment. From the mid-eighth to the mid-ninth-century sculptures and reliefs were destroyed in the Eastern Church and through much of the western world. Jewish communities would not have been oblivious to these iconoclastic dramas. During periods of intense Christian iconoclasm (such as in eighthand ninth-century Byzantium) and in areas of the world dominated by a broadly aniconic Islam, Jewish art barely existed at all. But it is important to note that there was no consistent inconoclasm instigated by Jews themselves. Periods of rabbinic prohibition and laxity had long alternated.34 Elements of cultural and intellectual confluence in medieval Judaism and Islam, as well as the relatively high degree of institutional power accorded to the rabbis by Islamic rule, further encouraged Jews living in Muslim lands to refrain from figurative representation of animals and people in the synagogue. Jewish illuminated manuscripts were generally decorated with abstract forms of flowers, vines and so forth, not images of people. Nonetheless, an aesthetically appreciative culture flourished.35 Medieval Jews living under Muslim rule were prominent in the silk trade and sumptuous gold-thread and silk embroideries were produced during this period (sometimes by women). Less fortunate, however, were the Ashkenazic Jews under Christian rule for whom crafts and membership of their respective guilds were often proscribed. Moreover, even though numerous eminent Talmudic rabbis had been craftsmen by trade, eventually the study of Torah came to take socio-religious priority over expertise in crafts. The decorative arts were now more often pursued by those considered to be of lesser intelligence. Until the period of Emancipation, periodic expulsion, the confiscation of property, cultural isolation behind ghetto walls, and the internal cultural demotion of craft trades all served to visually impoverish Ashkenazic communities.36 It is further arguable that despite the existence of elaborately decorated ceremonial objects and synagogues, and the growth of a (more or less) secular Jewish art after Emancipation, Jewish religious life and thought has been in general retreat from the visual since the medieval period. Jewish communities in Islamic countries readily adopted Islamic visual prohibitions that reinforced their own; Jewish communities in the Catholic countries that persecuted them abjured visual images almost on principle, and Jewish communities in Protestant countries sought to impress their religio-cultural commonalities on their hosts by means of their own sternly biblical repudiation of images.37 Kant’s admiration of the Second Commandment’s proscription of any barbaric urge to see that which exceeds the bounds of sensibility (there was, he thought, perhaps no more sublime passage in the Pentateuch than that setting out the Second Commandment)38 did not pass unnoticed. The modern Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) went on to use the Second

12

Judaism and the Visual Image

Commandment to highlight the affinity between Jewish and Christian monotheism (and to imply that if Christians were really monotheists they would not make art either).39 The aesthetic affinities of Jewish and Protestant culture notwithstanding, nineteenth-century Christian antisemites preferred to exploit the apparent philistinism of the Second Commandment to keep Jews out of the lucrative art world and to demonstrate that Jews lacked originality, creativity and a sense of the beautiful. In an antisemitic milieu Christian art and Christian theology were mutually reinforcing: the aesthetic ‘blindness’ of Jewry was regarded as a symptom of their theological blindness or failure to recognize the messiahship of Jesus. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the basis of discourse on art was also increasingly nationalistic, which effectively excluded the Jews as a stateless group.40 After Emancipation halakhic control over western and central European Jewish culture had weakened and where Jews sought to integrate into mainstream society, their art gradually lost some of its distinctive cultural and historical identity.41 Despite antisemitism’s best efforts to exclude Jews from the discourse, practice and trade of art, Jewish involvement in art as patrons, painters, collectors, critics and dealers increased over the course of the nineteenth century.42 One of the first collectors of Jewish art had been the Court Jew, Alexander David of Braunschweig (1686–1765) who emulated the great collectors whose private collections were the forerunners of the national museums. David was followed by other wealthy assimilated Jewish patrons of the arts who collected Judaica for nationalistic or scholarly reasons, or simply from pride in their own heritage.43 Jewish art was bought for its artistic merit and because Judaica and Jewish art depicting traditional Jewish scenes and characters reminded the Jewish bourgeoisie of a vanishing world that was already in decline. Moritz Oppenheim, often described as the first Jewish artist, was especially popular. His paintings, which might now appear sentimental, were in large part a serious attempt to stem the tide of assimilation and were much reproduced. Through collecting and exhibiting images of lives secure in a tradition’s governance that was no longer their own, acculturated Jews could remain nostalgically attached to an authentic Jewish past. Although it is probably the case that the composition and performance of music gave nineteenth-century Jews greater access to modern European bourgeois life than painting, emancipation allowed Jews access to and involvement in the visual arts as art for art’s own sake, rather than art in the service of a ceremonial religious end. By the early years of the twentieth century Jewish art, loosely defined as that which reflects Jewish experience, had become an object of Jewish study and curation. Early-twentieth-century European Jews developed their use of various visual media as expressions of their own identity: painting, film, photography, graphic arts, music and theatre. After formal training in central and eastern European art schools, artists also advanced

Introduction

13

their cause by forming societies of exhibitors such as the Yung Yiddish (Young Yiddish) group in Lodz or the Jewish Society for the Propagation of the Fine Arts in Warsaw.44 The pace of aesthetic production and change increased sharply with the rise of Zionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Zionism used art as a remedy (among others) for Jewish alienation. With the gradual reoccupation and cultural demarcation of Jewish land came a new emphasis on Jewish visual arts as an exercise in the construction, or as they saw it, the rebirth, of a national identity. The early Zionist movement was not slow to exploit the ideological impact of images. Even the images printed on postcards and delegates and visitors’ cards printed for the Zionist congresses were designed to enthuse the delegates who felt them to be the harbingers of Jewish nationhood, especially when emblazoned with the new national symbol – the Star of David.45 An image of Theodor Herzl, the Zionist leader of the period who convened six Zionist conferences between 1897 and 1902, reproduced from a portrait by Hermann Struck, graced numerous posters, cigarette boxes and sweet-tins. His noble, confident profile helped to represent and recommend Zionism to the Jewish world.46 At the Fifth Zionist Conference in Basel in 1901, Martin Buber mounted a historic exhibition intended to define Jewish art and call for the development of a unified national art in Palestine. This was followed in 1903 with the publication of his Jüdische Künstler, which promoted Jewish art as the actual and potential expression of a national and collective Jewish soul – a view reflecting both late-nineteenth-century nationalist views of art and his own doctoral studies in the history and philosophy of art, awarded in 1904. As Buber wrote in a letter to the artist Lesser Ury: ‘A national art needs a unified community of people, out of which it stems and for which it exists.’47 Martin Buber and Rabbi Abraham Issac Kuk were key figures in the promotion of the visual arts, centred in Jerusalem, as site and symbol of national vitality. The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 1906, under the leadership of Boris Schatz, was established to unite the development of Zionist ideology and art and to make an academic contribution to the historical study of Judaism.48 Even today, the study of Jewish art and architecture is far more prevalent in Israeli universities than those of Europe and America.49 In the early-twentieth-century diaspora, Jewish artists played a significant role in the development of modernism, while also exploring modern Jewish identity. In 1907, a historic exhibition was mounted in Berlin to explore the Jewish artistic predicament and included the work of Camille Pissarro, Maurycy Gottlieb and Lesser Ury. The Jewish Museum in Oranienberger Strasse, Berlin, opened in January 1933, just six days before the National Socialists came to power. But it was too late. The museum’s art exhibitions became a cultural focus and refuge for a mere five years before its closure after the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938.50 By 1937, the Munich exhibition ‘Degenerate

14

Judaism and the Visual Image

Art’ had derided distortion in modern art as symptomatic of its ‘degenerate’ ‘Jewishness’. At around the same time, Jewish artists and collectors were being coerced into selling their works to Nazi dealers for risible sums. As the Holocaust escalated in scale and ferocity, art was nonetheless produced in hiding and in the camps and ghettos. Usually, this was a clandestine testimonial art in the form of line drawings, though camps such as Theresienstadt, Laufen and Tittmoning had their own reasons for permitting artists to continue to draw and paint. Glenn Sujo is right that their work is not merely the documentary art of prisoners but belongs within the canon of twentieth-century drawing practices and styles, especially that of German Expressionism. 51 The term ‘Holocaust art’ also includes art produced by survivors after the war (Samuel Bak’s paintings are notable in this category). After the Second World War, a revival of synagogue life in America necessitated the commission of Jewish artworks for the new synagogues being designed and built at this time. The collective slaughter of European Jewry in Holocaust had reinforced American Jewish consciousness of the Jews as a physical congregation. Art was, again, being used to reconstruct and narrate a new non-European Jewish identity. 52 New Jewish geographical, cultural and sexual identities have informed Jewish participation in all the major movements and trajectories of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century visual art, though, with an interest in post-Holocaust theology to the fore, I have largely left theological study of contemporary art to other scholars for whom it is not too soon to comment.

Using art as a theological resource We have seen that until the modern period Jewish art was more or less confined to cultic or synagogal decoration and to domestic religious artefacts whose ornamentation in silver, embroidery or other worked materials was to glorify the God whose worship a given object served. From the biblical to the rabbinic periods and on into the contemporary period, it has always been the custom to beautify ceremonial objects in honour of God’s glory and in celebration of the human love of God and Torah (BT Shabbat 133b).53 The ceremonial dimension has rendered Jewish art a function of Jewish worship as well as a visual expression of Jewish identity and experience. Bearing in mind that Jewish art can be defined moderately restrictively as an interpretative servant of Jewish history, belief and values, it is clear that Jewish art and Jewish theology can be mutually informing. Theology does not exist in a place apart from culture or from practice and experience. The view that Judaism is legal, ritual and social in character, where Christianity is doctrinal or creedal, is now somewhat dated. Christianity lives or applies its theology, it does not merely confess or systematize it. Similarly, Jewish theology, the discipline Arthur Cohen once

Introduction

15

said ‘Jews eschew while nonetheless pursuing it with covert avidity’, has not been a Christian intrusion into Jewish thought, but ‘an indigenous endeavour to illuminate [Jewish] experience’. Indeed, Cohen notes that ‘in so far as the Jewish people was convoked by the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, its life thereafter was devoted with considerable passion and intelligence to the issues raised by that holy convocation: Who is this God that calls us forth to be his own and what is the character of life under his dominion?’54 Classically, Jewish theology proceeds by the threefold conception and affirmation of the existence of God, the divine revelation of Torah, and the election of the Jewish people by God, the creator, revealer and redeemer. That is, God creates the world for a moral and spiritual purpose that is defined by Torah and the establishment of a covenantal relationship through which not only the Jewish people, but the condition of all nations will be transformed and redeemed. Needless to say, pre-modern, modern and postmodern theologies differ in their emphases, interpretation and configuration of these elements. 55 That rather formal account of Jewish theology would seem to relegate the aesthetic to a subject of at best peripheral theological interest. But this need not be the case. Theology, some of whose more allusive forms might be classed as religious art, is speech about God in relation to the tradition as a whole and it is implicit a wide variety of hermeneutical, pastoral, liturgical and creative activities. The composition of new blessings, poems, hermeneutical stories or midrashim, translations, rituals and visual art itself, together constitute an aesthetic as well as intellectual response to God. God’s relation to the world is known and cultivated in the whole expressive range of Jewish thought and creativity including, but not confined to, halakhic (legal) discourse. All these embody a theology in so far as each is an elucidation of what a Jew might believe consequent on their own knowledge of the tradition, interpreted through the particularities of their collective and personal experience. Since theology is not an isolated body of doctrines organized by its internal logic alone, Jewish theology is implicit in any Jewish texts – including visual ones – that in some way seek to represent the being, will or self-revelation of God in ways relevant to the age. The same experiential principle of response applies to the study of Jewish art. David Freedberg has been committed to the study of the relation of images and their beholders on the grounds that ‘a history of art that stands back from the natural symptoms of response merely toys with the small change of intellectualism’.56 Like Freedberg’s, this book is committed to the study of the disclosive, relational possibilities of the image, in distinction from the history of art which traditionally prefers to examine not the effects or efficacy of images but their historicity or merit.57 Mieke Bal’s study of ‘visuality in discourse and discursivity in images’ has also been influential. Bal has examined the relation between these two forms of discourse, especially the cultural impact of encounter on vision and on subjects. Instead of trying to define visuality per se,

16

Judaism and the Visual Image

she has explored ‘aspects and effects, forms and meanings that visuality possesses or makes possible’.58 In turn, this book suggests some of the theological effects and meanings that visual images represent or make hermeneutically available to their viewers, especially after the Holocaust’s genocidal erasure of the Jewish face or presence from view. There are, then, a number of possible methods by which a Jewish aesthetic theology could proceed. This aesthetic theology is a necessarily selective correlation of Jewish theological texts with those that document and theorize the history of Jewish art, and with twentieth-century figurative Jewish art. This book is premised on the conviction that Jewish art can be as much an expression of Jewish meaning, memory and possibility as a more explicitly and intentionally confessional theology. A Jewish theology that is fully inclusive of the aesthetic dimension, even if it cannot hope to cover all, or even very many, of its possibilities, is, I hope, a timely arrival. I have written this book at a moment when it is ever more freely acknowledged that ‘not all our knowledge of Jewish ideas comes to us by way of the written word. That abundant literary corpus must often be augmented, and even corrected, by the testimony of the arts which equally bear witness to what people have most valued in their lives.’59 As Richard Cohen observes, ‘The study of everyday life requires historians to look beyond the textual sources and examine visual material not merely as the backdrop of life but as its very matrix.’ In that sense ‘clothes, food, furniture, souvenirs, knickknacks, photographs, monuments, and established masterpieces have become part of the [Jewish] historian’s terrain.’60 Visual anthropology has provided a similar method of image-based research whereby visual evidence, including a people’s art, is recognized as a self-representative record that reveals their history and is embedded in a complex network of relationships.61 This is a theology of art that makes reference to Jewish works of art not just by way of coincidental illustration but in the conviction that certain images that are intentionally Jewish; that situate themselves in a particular or putatively universal Jewish condition, are a distinctive type of theorization of Jewish experience that can be ‘read’ as a theological resource no less than can a written one. If Jewish cultural historians now recognize that the visual dimension helps us to understand how Jews have construed the world, generated its meanings and infused it with emotion,62 then the visual dimension is as properly theologically heuristic as the auditory or literary. A number of theological commentaries – on gender and embodiment, on holocaustal suffering, and on diasporic movement to name just three that are developed in the present study, can be derived as much from the witness of Jewish art as they can from the more traditional written text. Granted, in what might be considered a very Jewish manner, this book prints many words, but few images, to promote the latter’s cause. I am primarily interested in the communicative and transmissive theological possibilities of the image as a theological source and illustration, and

Introduction

17

only secondarily in the history and criticism of particular images. Nonetheless, I remain committed to the idea that if Jewish visual material provides ‘visceral, subjective, and affective [images] providing insights into ways Jews lived from early modern times’,63 they will also provide insights into what Jews believed and will come to believe about themselves and their relationship with God and with the world. Moving from method to content, it might prove helpful to the reader to close this Introduction with a summary of the argument presented in its next six chapters. This book will argue that since Jewish theology traditionally arrives in different ways at the notion of the human face as reflecting the glory and pathos of the divine ‘face’ (or presence) in whose image it is made, it is reasonable to suggest that permissible images are those that defer to the trace of the divine in the face. Permissible, even counter-idolatrous, images are those that are made in, or which invoke, the love and justice God precisely creates the human in God’s image to pursue. Yet because the vocation of Israel is holiness, a post-Holocaust Jewish image must also be more than a testament to some generalized love of the human. It should also be a separative image bearing witness to the sanctity or integrity of the human and a prophetic image calling for the redemption and resurrection of the human from those ideological structures and practices that diminish, exploit, abuse or erase it. In a post-Holocaust age an image that is not merely non-idolatrous, but counter-idolatrous, is therefore a corrective image that is lifted up and displayed just as Moses’ divinely sanctioned bronze serpent was held up so that those who saw it would live (Num. 21:4–9). Clearly, not all art that might be considered entirely permissible by Jews is intentionally prophetic. But an image that is not merely permissible but revelatory should constitute some form of sign or standard of God’s judgment on idolatry: on history’s violation of the human and, broadly speaking, a messianic anticipation of its restoration in remembrance of God’s first creative judgment, repeated six times over in the first chapter of Genesis, that the world is itself a spectacle or created image that is good to look upon. Above all, Jewish images of the Jewish face are, or must move towards becoming, images of Israel. Although I argue that we do not yet know what a Jewish woman, as religious agent, actually looks like (normative representations of Jewish appearance are invariably male) it is the people Israel, women as well as men, that is a re-presentation of God. Israel renews God’s presence through its own image or spectacle. As a collective image of God, Israel itself becomes a redemptive image or work of art. To that extent, this book defines Jewish art normatively and comprehensively (though nondenominationally) as the art of being a Jew in a historical and eschatological relationship with God. Dostoyevsky once said, ‘Incredible as it may seem, the day will come when men will quarrel more fiercely about art than about God’ and in some circles, that day arrived quite some time ago. But for a Jew, the question of art should

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Judaism and the Visual Image

not be detachable from that of God. Therefore, by the end of this book, I will have defined Jewish art as something more than the sum of its decorative traditions, paintings and drawings: namely, as the visual configuration of the Jewish people as an object of God’s aesthetic judgment and as a figure whose living ‘dancing’ form is created in the responsive mediation of revelation. It is the revelatory process(ion) of the figure of Israel as a collective body moving through time and space that constitutes the redemptive inscription or scripture of Torah – an image of how to live – in its most inclusive and active sense. The diaspora is therefore no mere historical contingency but part of the very mode and process of God’s self-revelation to the world – a different sense of script-ure: that of the figurative drawing of truth onto and within the material world. This movement produces a unitary spectacle or image to its divine beholder that thereby defines Jewish art not as the production of ceremonial or cultural artefacts, nor as the anti-images of absence, incompleteness and deliberate distortion that have been traditionally been something of an artistic homage to the Second Commandment, but as the figurative image traced by the sanctificatory passage or dance towards divine presence.

Chapter 1

The Second Commandment in Jewish Art and Thought

Perhaps the most ironic of modern Jewish engagements with the Second Commandment is that of Chaim Soutine, whose transformation from the tenth son of an impoverished hasidic tailor in a Russian shtetl to an artist in Paris began in 1913,1 when he achieved his dream of going to art school by means of an alleged violation of the Second Commandment. Two boys had beaten Soutine for making an image of their father, the rabbi. When his mother sued the brothers for assault, a court awarded compensation of fi fteen roubles: enough to get him to art school in Minsk, where he could make a profession of violating the Second Commandment.2 The story of Soutine breaking the spell of the Second Commandment and taking flight from the ghetto into the freedom of modern Europe has accrued the aura of legend: it is a story of boundaries crossed from one lost, fantastic world into another – a passage from the decaying black-garbed shtetl into the most vibrant, colour-saturated moment of Paris’ cultural history. It is easy to imagine Soutine defiantly producing images, some of which wrench at the senses to this day, against a world of comprehensive observance of the Second Commandment banning all mimetic representation of objects. But it is more complex than that: early-twentieth-century eastern Europe was not a world wholly bereft of art and Soutine’s traumatic images, painfully unseductive, seem hardly idolatrous. If the Second Commandment is a merely ‘restrictive’ ban on the representation of God alone, Soutine, who was to become more interested in the texture and plasticity of paint than the image, was innocent of its violation. Even if it is hard to be entirely sure what the Second Commandment is commanding, in the art historian Margaret Olin’s experience, the Second Commandment is still enthusiastically invoked by Jewish scholars who may be negligent of the other nine. She notes the comic irony that, even on a Saturday, a roundtable discussion on the relation of the Second Commandment to the making of Jewish art can attract a ‘sizeable’ Jewish audience.3 The Second Commandment remains ‘significant as a badge of Jewish identity’; ‘it belongs to the special domain of Jews for whom it functions as a source of pride.’4 But

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Judaism and the Visual Image

because perceived violations of the Second Commandment no longer provoke much of a reaction in any but the most Orthodox communities, Monica BohmDuchen describes the traditional Jewish suspicion of the graven image as ‘virtually obsolete’.5 Intellectual interest in the Second Commandment might be alive, but far less so its observance. The late Louis Jacobs, whose theological positioning was analogous to that of American Conservative Judaism, found that the commandments fall into three categories: those that are significant, those that are meaningless and those that are positively harmful.6 Using Jacob’s categorization, the Second Commandment remains, in my view, highly significant, and meaningful though, if its jurisdiction is over-extended, occasionally harmful. The commandment should not fall into disuse. And although it is too soon to comment on contemporary Jewish art, this chapter suggests that the Second Commandment has, in fact, been variously observed in modern Jewish art, though whether out of deference to religious loyalties and sensibilities, or merely cultural ones, is difficult to say. The theme that, in my view, unites modern Jewish image polemics is not so much the older premodern fear of erroneous worship but, still, a fear of the death that was always regarded as the final consequence of idolatry. In modern Jewish discourse on images we find a widespread conviction that images transmute life in time into the silence of an object caught in the faux eternity of a still, two-dimensional plane. But what is interesting is that Jewish art – like any good art – is actually very adept in refusing to yield power to its own representations; adept in refusing to donate the life of the image’s object to art. As any such discussion requires some historical context, we will begin with a brief examination of the biblical and rabbinic interpretation of the Second Commandment, going on to note the modern, largely Germanophone, assumption that Judaism’s moral and intellectual pre-eminence is securely rooted in its preference for the auditory over the visual. Although it is readily apparent that the Second Commandment has been differently interpreted in differing historical periods and geographical locations, the task of the present chapter is not to survey these differences but to discuss how a selection of modern Jewish thinkers – notably Rosenzweig, Levinas, Schwarzschild and Kochan – have defined and construed idolatrous images, and how it has been possible for modern Jewish artists to represent the human face in ways considered by themselves or others to be loyal to, or at least in continuity with, their own aesthetic tradition.

The Second Commandment in biblical and rabbinic texts Religious traditions are capacious and both Judaism and Christianity’s attitudes towards the Second Commandment are multiple, varying politically

The Second Commandment in Jewish Art

21

and philosophically across time and place.7 Moreover, a stable content for the judgment of idolatry is remarkably difficult to establish since the term can refer to almost any theologically erroneous practice or attitude against which orthodoxy defines itself. Judith Plaskow was not the first to note that the differentiation of Israel from the Canaanite dispensation as a holy nation entailed abjuring their gods by means of caricature as literal and orgiastic worship. (‘Paganism plays essentially the same role in the Tanakh that the Pharisees play in the New Testament: Each is set up as the despised Other over and against which the superior new religion defines itself.’) The charge of idolatry, condemned by Plaskow as too often an act of ‘unthinking contempt for another tradition’ is dogged by polemics and prejudice.8 A number of different Hebrew words can be translated by the term ‘idol’, each with their particular nuance and it is clear that the category of idolatry refers to more than just false images of God or images of false gods. Hence Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, the best known of recent commentators on the concept of idolatry, warn that it is a mistake to believe that an essential content of idolatry can be isolated, not least because the discourse is diverse and highly polemical.9 The category of idolatrous objects, values and practices attempts to set a cultural, spiritual and politically differentiating boundary between Israel and its God and the foreign or false gods of pagans. But since the notion of a ‘true’ God and a ‘false’ one is culturally interrelated, ‘the boundary between the nonidolatrous and the idolatrous is drawn in different locations’. In the Hebrew Bible the category of the strange god marked the boundary of the true God but also, polemically, ‘served as a category of criticism within the non-pagan community. It is this complexity that gave an astonishing fluidity to “idolatry,” a category that is supposed to be the firmest and strictest of all.’10 It is not possible to know precisely how the biblical writers construed idols or, indeed, defined the difference between a figurative and a non-figurative image. It can be difficult to distinguish between figurative and non-figurative images. Even in cultures which appear to abjure the figurative, we need to ask what the criteria might be for distinguishing between the figurative and the non-figurative or the ornamental. That some images and designs do not appear figurative to modern western eyes is not sufficient. Ancient patterns and signs may be figurative, even if the cultural conventions of their figuration is no longer known or intelligible.11 David Freedberg regards the customary polarity of iconic pagan polytheisms and aniconic monotheisms as simply unworkable. The Maori, for example, seem to refrain from representing the supreme being, but nonetheless deploy anthropmomorphic imagery; Buddhism’s first century or so seems to have prohibited images of the Buddha, but not thereafter.12 There is, however, a broad contemporary consensus among biblical scholars that the biblical writers did not see idols as the residence of demons and that neither the biblical authors nor the idolators confused the idol – a sign of the god – with the signified: probably neither saw images of the gods as the literal bodies of gods or even as portraits of the gods. Although idols were

22

Judaism and the Visual Image

considered extremely powerful in their effects, the biblical ridicule of pagan idols as ‘things of nought’ (hebel is one of the Hebrew terms used) seems to have been an element of the polemic that sought to abolish the gods’ hold over Israelite consciousness and to vitiate the spiritual and political power of Israel’s enemies. The label ‘idol’ could be a satirical reduction of other peoples’ gods to nothingness or mere folly. A central question for any seeking biblical legitimation of a Jewish theology of art is whether biblical revelation regards all or only some images as idolatrous. An answer to this question may be provided by the scriptural context in which the Second Commandment is articulated. The key biblical texts setting out the Second Commandment are Deuteronomy 4:15–19, 23, 5:8 and Exodus 20:4. The 1985 Tanakh translates these as follows. In Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people, not to act wickedly and make for yourself a sculpted image in any likeness whatever: the form of a man or a woman, the form of any beast on earth, the form of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the form of anything that creeps on the ground, the form of any fish that is in the waters below the earth. And when you look up into the sky and behold the sun and the moon and the stars, the whole heavenly host, you must not be lured into bowing down to them or serving them. (Deut. 4:16–19) Deuteronomy 4:23 repeats the Second Commandment in a form that notes that the commandment is to be understood in terms of the particular historical covenantal relationship between God and Israel that must not be forgotten. Here, Moses’ repetition of the warning, ‘be most careful’ (vv. 15, 23) not to make idols suggests that an image or object can readily slide into idolatrousness. In other words, it is not the objective nature of the image or object that is the problem, but human forgetting. It is not the image that is idolatrous but the human response. In Deuteronomy 5:8 Moses sets the prohibition as the second of a list of commandments known as the Ten Commandments: ‘You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters below the earth.’ This repeats Exodus 20:4, where God commands from Sinai: ‘You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth.’ (A carved or graven image or idol is generally denoted by the word pesel; temunah can be translated as form or likeness.) The two passages appear to have the same wording, but on closer examination there is a slight but significant variation in the articulation of the Second Commandment between Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 5:8. That is, Deuteronomy 5:8 forbids the making of a pesel of any temunah. Deuteronomy only prohibits the making of a pesel when it comes into the category of temunah

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(a pesel of a temunah). Exodus 20:4 forbids the making of a pesel or a temunah. Exodus’s version of the Second Commandment appears to be the more restrictive, prohibiting both pesel and temunah. Yet the following verse, Exodus 20:5, ‘you shall not bow down to them or serve them’, appears to immediately gloss or qualify verse 4 by suggesting that it is the worship of images that is forbidden, not the making of an image of an object as such. Any interpretation of the Second Commandment must always bear in mind that, in its biblical instantiation, the Second Commandment is indivisible from the First. The Second Commandment is grounded in the prohibition of Ex. 20:3: ‘You shall have no other gods besides Me.’ The opening declaration of what would become monotheism, but here probably refers more to God’s pre-eminence, is safeguarded by the Second Commandment’s proscription of images of objects that would allow people to create and worship other gods in their own image or in nature’s image.13 In later prophetic texts, idolatry is construed as a political rebellion against God and a betrayal of his trust, through the root metaphor of God’s marriage to Israel. God is not only Israel’s husband whose patience is taxed to breaking point by her infidelities, but also her exclusive leader and protector. The covenant’s obligations are political and idolatry is an act of disloyalty that impugns God’s sovereignty. In short, the Second Commandment must be understood in its scriptural context – as must the other texts concerning imagery (Ex. 20:23, 34:17; Lev. 19:4, 26:1; Deut. 27:15), which also belong to discussions regarding the worship of foreign gods. The contemporary interpretative consensus is that the Second Commandment does not forbid the making of images, but rather their worship. With due consideration of its scriptural contexts and for sheer common sense, the Second Commandment can be interpreted as prohibiting images that might in certain circumstances serve as idols, not as an inherent refusal of images. The Bible does not regard the making of decorative art as inherently problematic. (Academic, secular art did not, of course, exist until the early modern period.) Art dedicated to the service, praise and glorification of God is not prohibited. The righteousness of Bezalel, the artist-craftsman appointed by God to construct and decorate the ark of the covenant and the Tent of Meeting, is not in question. In Exodus, Bezalel crafts utensils for the tabernacle but there is no suggestion that he is an idol-maker (31:3, 35:31). On the contrary, Bezalel is filled by God with intelligence, skill and a developed aesthetic sense. Above all, his creativity is moved by the divine spirit and it is the spirit, which an idol signally lacks, that imbues his work with beauty. Exodus 31:1–6 suggests that an artist or craftsman filled with the spirit of God and with wisdom and discernment, whose creativity is dedicated to the service of God, is not a violator of the Second Commandment, but is one qualified to fulfil it.14 It is only when removed from its context that the Second Commandment is seen as a comprehensive negation of the possibility of Jewish figurative art.

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It seems clear that images are only forbidden when and if they serve the purpose of pagan worship or sub-religious practice.15 Symbols of divine power and glory associated with the exercise of divine will such as Moses’ bronze serpent or the ephod of Gideon are, however, permissible. Solomon’s Temple is engraved with images of trees, flowers and cherubim that are not considered idolatrous even though they are images of natural objects. In fact the biblical writers were almost modern in their thorough demystification of pagan religion. Images of foreign gods were perceived not merely as images of the wrong divinity, but as mere lumps of humanly fashioned matter – wood, stone, silver and gold. The idol lacked divine power because it was a purely human artefact. The idols were therefore not superhuman, but sub-human bits of wood and stone that could do neither harm nor good. They are simply ‘the work of men’s hands’ (Ps. 115:4).16 Image making was, moreover, the arrogation of a divine function: it is God who makes humanity in his own image (Gen. 1:26–28), not humanity who makes God in its own image. The divine image is in the human alone. God fashions the human, but the human cannot fashion the divine. And the image of God in the human does not take the literal form or likeness of God but manifests God’s presence by means of a living, participatory revelation. The only legitimate image of God, then, is the human and human flesh is not made of gold or silver, ‘but dust and ashes’ (Gen. 3:19; Job 10:9). Unlike the idolators’ lifeless lumps of metal which must be lugged on their backs from place to place and which do not answer when they cry out to them (Is. 46:6–7), the human person is alive and can speak and walk, while the idol is unmoving and unmoved, deaf, dumb and blind, in short, dead (Wis. 15:16–17; Jer. 10:14–15). The deadness of the idol, like other sources of impurity, is contagious. Biblical writers insist that the idols are both corruptible and corrupting: ‘Those who fashion them, all who trust in them, shall become like them’ (Ps. 115:8; Ps. 135:15–18). Spiritless idols made of inert natural materials gods are not only empty of spirit, but communicate their deadness to their worshippers and drain them of spirit as well (Ps. 115:2–8, 135:15–18). The people’s hearts are hardened by the stone hearts of the idols and the hardened heart is one that rebelliously rejects God who demands to be loved ‘with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might’ (Deut. 6:5), and turns instead to idols who cannot love or be loved. Only the new covenant promised by Jeremiah, Ezekial and Hosea will cleanse the people and fill them with the spirit, turning their hearts of stone to flesh, that they may be faithful to the commandment (Ezek. 11:18–26).17 By contrast, those who make a sculpted or molten image and set it up in secret are cursed (Deut. 27:15). And those who worship such images are blinded; they grope like a blind man at noon yet, cursed with the sight of their own misfortune, they watch their sons and daughters taken into slavery and are driven to madness by the horrors they have witnessed (Deut. 28:29, 32, 34).

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Jewish monotheism would come to be underpinned by the notion that its non-finite, unitary God can have no visible likeness (Ex. 20:3–4). Deuteronomy 4:15 reminds the Israelites that they saw no form when the Lord spoke to them at Horeb from the midst of the fire. In Exodus 33:23 only God’s back is shown to Moses from the cleft in the rock in which he hid. In the Bible, theophany occurs through dynamic natural phenomena, not in the finite form of a historical person. God ‘appears’ by speaking or shining through the dissipating cloud; the burning bush that will flicker and fade into glowing embers and ash. The Sinaitic theophany is from out of thick cloud, smoke, thunder and lightening: ‘the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently’ (Ex. 19:18). However, it is well known that much of biblical and rabbinic tradition is rather less than consistent in its refusal to imagine God or to use tropes that imply some sort of analogous relation between the verbal image and God. In Deuteronomy 5:4 the Lord spoke with the people ‘face to face’ and on a number of occasions the Bible suggests that God does indeed have an image but it must not be represented (Ex. 33:20; Num. 12:8; Ex. 24:11; Is: 6:1; Ezek. 1:26). This may be why God dwells in deep darkness or thick cloud (1 Kgs. 8:12). Early and later forms of Jewish mysticism are also replete with visual descriptions of God’s body and rabbinic midrash refers to God being seen at the decisive moments of Jewish sacred history: the crossing of the Red Sea, the giving of the Torah and so forth.18 Halbertal and Margalit point out that the prohibition against idols and images is therefore not securely based on the claim that God has no image.19 For them, the distinctive nature of Jewish worship is grounded not in the issue of whether its God has an image, but whether or not it is permitted to make a similarity-based representation of this image. Halbertal and Margalit usefully distinguish three categories of representation. The first is that of representation based on similarity where an image – perhaps a photograph – represents a person because it is similar to her; the second is that of causal-metonymic representation where an element of a person – say the handkerchief of a loved one – represents the whole, and the third is rule-bound, learned, conventionbased representation where, for example, particular words come to represent particular objects.20 The biblical tradition properly forbids similarity-based representations of God as erroneous on many counts. Above all, if God has no image any representation of God, let alone devotion to that representation, constitutes worship of a false god or non-god. Further, to make a representation of God is wrong because it is a diminution of his uniqueness and authority. If mimetic likenesses were to be made of God, he would lose value just as the value of a work of art might be reduced if many near-perfect imitations of it were in circulation. Moreover the proper sense of an unbridgeable ontological gap or distinction between God and his worshippers is based on the fact that they

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never see God and that any image they make is therefore of an imaginary God. This may be compared to the practices of ancient emperors who would speak to their subjects from behind a screen but were never seen. There are, in short, two opposite approaches to the task of creating a feeling of remoteness and authority: one is to distribute pictures of the king everywhere, and the other is to prevent anyone from ever seeing the king.21 The latter is the Judaic way. God’s refusal to allow his representation in any image set him apart from other gods (that is, marked his sanctity) and his worshippers’ refusal to represent him distinguished them as holy from other peoples. However, biblical tradition does allow metonymic representations of God such as the images of cherubim in the Holy of Holies in First Temple as they are associated with him in their function as his chariot and cannot become substitutes for God. Or again, theophanic cloud or fire are media of revelation and so enjoy some causal or instrumental relation to divine will, but they are not resemblances of God and are therefore legitimate representations of his presence.22 The prohibition of idolatrous images made for the worship of pagan or foreign gods outlines the predominant meaning of idolatry found in First Temple Judaism. But after the Canaanite cults ceased to pose any real threat to Israelite devotion and identity, the prohibition of idolatry turned inwards and it became less a religio-political offence against God than a theological one of making unacceptable representations of the true God.23 By the medieval period, idolatry had become an essentially metaphysical error. Maimonides knows that linguistic, especially anthropomorphic, images of God are no less dangerous and erroneous than visual ones. (Indeed, he accepted that legitimate visual arts could refresh the mind, soul and body.) But anything suggesting an analogous relation between God and ‘man’, is gravely erroneous: there can be no representational correspondence between the incorporeal God and objects in the world.24 Much of The Guide of the Perplexed is devoted to his insistence on the non-literal, metaphorical nature of biblical anthropomorphism and his assertion that only a doctrine of negative attributes could spare Judaism the shame of thinking that it can know God’s essence or that God can be imagined in images or language.25 Jewish philosophy in the tradition of Maimonides claims with absolute consistency that the Jewish God has no image at all and that those who ascribe a corporeal image to God, whether conceptually or materially, forfeit their share in the world-to-come. But, to repeat, Jewish tradition broadly follows Nahmanides and others in accepting that there is no injunction against making images that are not objects of worship, though special considerations should apply to images of human beings.26 Space does not permit a survey of the range of post-biblical Jewish interpretations of the Second Commandment. Suffice to say, some rabbis are lenient, arguing that not all images are made or treated as idols; others are more restrictive. (Rabbinic attitudes to the representation of the human form vary even in contemporary communities. Despite a history of earlier leniency,

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representation of human and animal forms are not acceptable in contemporary Sephardic synagogues; in Britain, more or less cross- denominationally, the human form is not represented in synagogues, but figurative art, including representation of the human form, is sometimes found in progressive American synagogues.)27 The notion that the rabbis read the Bible with hermeneutical sophistication and that rabbinic opposition to the Second Commandment is not as pronounced as might be supposed, was first proposed by Erwin Goodenough in his 1953 Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period where he argued that, despite being ‘a people of the book’, Jewish life included the production of visual art.28 The rabbinic understanding of idolatry was ethically and culturally nuanced, not merely superstitious. As Halbertal and Margalit point out, ‘It is not insignificant that the Tractate Avodah Zarah (“Idolatry”) in the Talmud is a formulation of the types of contact between Jews and pagans, as the category of idolatry includes a criticism of the culture in which idolatry developed.’29 That is, rabbinic discourse on idolatry is not only a narrow consideration of what may or may not adorn the synagogue. It is arguable that the rabbis understood the Second Commandment as a warning that God can and will protect his own face from idolatry: from the human appropriation of divine power by the substitution of its own face for his and his for its own. God turns his face from sin (Is. 59:2) and all categories of sin, not just violations of the Second Commandment are comprehended in the sin of idolatry. The rabbis attributed the departure of the shekhinah (God’s indwelling presence) and the hiding of God’s face to the sin of idolatry (Sifra 104a). Paradigmatically, God’s shekhinah departed while Israel was punished for the sin of making the golden calf.30 The most famous instance of rabbinic permissiveness is that of Rabban Gamliel who felt able to enter and use the Roman baths at Acre in which stood a statue of the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite. His common sense told him that the image was, for him at least, merely decorative and an image that is not treated as a god is permitted (BT Avodah Zarah 44b). Nachmanides, commenting on Exodus 20:3 (‘You shall have no other gods besides Me’) also opined that the next verse only proscribes images made with the intention that they be worshipped. Until the nineteenth century, rabbinic rulings on art were, of course, made primarily with reference to the decoration of the synagogue. Some rabbis permitted the use of figurative images for the purposes of synagogal decoration as long as they were not the objects of worship (the interiors of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Polish synagogues were, for example, densely muralled). The rabbis did not, then, impose a blanket ban on the production of any image. The ruling of the early modern Rabbi Obadiah Sforno is an isolated exception to the relative permissiveness of the rabbinic aesthetic, where, regardless of intention, Sforno judges the making of any image to be an act of ‘rebellion’ against God.31 While decorative representations of objects are generally permissible, the two-dimensional representation of the human being, who has a unique

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ontological relation to God, is more problematic and may not fall into either of the two categories of representation, namely images made for the purposes of worship or images made for the purposes of adornment. Although rabbinical portraits abound, especially after the mass-reproduction and circulation of images became possible, no single halakhic opinion on the legitimacy of the rabbinical portrait prevailed throughout western and central Europe. Most authorities permitted them, though only if no more than half the body was depicted, and without rendition in sculptural form or relief.32 By virtue of their rabbinical vocation alone, pictures of male rabbis could hardly be mistaken for gods. Yet two-dimensional images of persons, especially in their complete form, could be considered idolatrous for the image of a person is unique by virtue of the unique relation of the human being to God: he or she is made in God’s image, alive by virtue of God’s breath or spirit, and a moral and rational agent subject directly to God’s commandments. The sanctity of such a standing in relation to God must be protected from the violation of profane sight, but it must also be prevented from arrogating any more power than its standing warrants. Sculpted and embossed images are, however, yet more problematic than flat images on account of their presumptuous realism and in their recall of cultic statues. The three-dimensional representation of a whole person in the form of a statue, even if only for commemorative purposes, is an offence against the rabbinic theological aesthetic, even if an actual violation of halakhah cannot be conclusively established.33 Above all, it is the human countenance, lit by the spirit, that is a manifestation of the divine, and it is therefore the imaging of the face that stands in greatest need of limitation, especially if the image is raised in relief or otherwise embossed. The image of a face in profile is far less problematic than a frontal portrait where the bond between the human face and the divine countenance is most directly manifest. On the basis of Rabbi Joseph Caro’s Shulchan ’Aruch, the accepted codification of Jewish law (with reference to the eight paragraphs of Chapter 141, ‘Laws about Images and Forms’) it is widely argued that representations of divine and mythic beings, humans and celestial bodies can only be made on condition that the images are incomplete. Images of people, their faces especially, must be partial, defaced or broken – given, say, only one eye or a broken nose – if they are to be a halakhically legitimate representation. Defaced images of human faces demonstrate that the image is essentially a counterfeit – its ugliness protests its reproduction and warns of its inauthenticity: it is unworshipable. Only the original face, of which the image is a mere representation, is allowably beautiful. This preemptive wounding of the object at the moment of its imagining is found in various forms throughout Jewish art. An early illustration of the aesthetic of incompletion is found in Rabbi Ephraim of Regensberg’s twelfth- century ruling that flat paintings of human figures were permissible as long as they were not depicted with human faces. The aesthetic of distortion is commonly found in

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illuminated medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts, an important instance of which is in the earliest remaining German Haggadah from the Upper Rhine in Germany, the Birds’ Head Haggadah (c. 1300), which used birds’ heads, blank faces, veils, helmets, crowns or rear views to portray the human face.34 Some of the figures were given animal’s ears and all the male adults are shown wearing the conical hat that had been compulsory since the Lateran Council in 1215.35 This aesthetic of broken bodies (referred to by Rabbi Jacob bar Asher in the fourteenth century as depictions of ‘bodies without heads’) persisted into the art of Enlightenment Germany, though without its medieval delight in the grotesque. Moses Sofer of Pressburg, for example, writes in 1810 to R. Moses Lieb, Head of the Rabbinical Court of Feisung, of the procedure whereby a relief image is diminished to the point of permissibility: ‘It is enough to cut the tip of its ear or the tip of its nose. . . . That is how it appears to me . . . and what I saw my teachers do, and I have done with many images that are on ceremonial objects in my home.’36 If the aesthetic of distortion is distinctive of some Jewish art, it is certainly not peculiar to it. The use of distortion as a means of avoiding the production of idolatrous images is also to be found in medieval Christian illuminated manuscripts that include a deliberate mistake or imperfection in order to remind their reader that artistic perfection would be an idolatrous appropriation of divine creativity. The Lindisfarne Gospels, for example, include occasional blanks or variants in the design such as on the birds’ wings centrally positioned on the carpet page to John’s Gospel that lacks the ink tile pattern that decorates the others.37 Or again, the modern Christian artist Georges Rouault painted pictures of outlandish figures such as clowns, outcasts and prostitutes precisely because, as Brown and Loades put it, ‘distorted figures speak of an alternative order of beauty that lies beyond their present condition’.38 Despite instances of a distortive aesthetic in the Christian tradition, we shall see that the technique has been claimed to be an intrinsically Jewish formulation of a theology of image.

Approaches to images in modern Jewish thought The medieval view of idolatry as a conceptual error more than an act of rebellion against God, persists in modern Jewish thought. For Hermann Cohen, in his 1919 Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, as for Maimonides, it is not only images that are idolatrous, but words. It is a cognitive failure of language that leads to idolatry’s betrayal of God.39 Monotheism is properly understood as an ‘undivided surrender’ to the one God that excludes service to any other god. The destruction of idolatry is a fundamental human duty and it includes a refusal of the plastic arts (as distinct from lyric poetry) that begins with the depiction of nature but ends in the depictions of gods.40 Deceitful

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images should be satirized or mocked and for which their makers and devotees should be (echoing Isaiah 44:9) ‘ashamed’. Image worship is false worship, but the worship of God is ‘devotion to the true being’ which must entail ‘the fight of being against seeming, the fight of archetypal being against likenesses that have no archetype’. For Cohen, the root of paganism is not in the deification of natural phenomena as such, but in art, which turn natural phenomena into objects of desire. God is the archetype for the mind alone; that he is not an object for imitation is a proof of his very truth.41 Cohen regards true religion as a striving for the ethical ideal of holiness. Like Kant, Cohen insists that the Second Commandment makes a unique social contribution. The Second Commandment is the precondition of justice and holiness as its ban on images of the divine disallows any positive knowledge of God and awakens the longing for a God who is always beyond the limits of thought. Longing for God, truthful religion, in turn drives the task of redeeming the world, even when its messianic ideal might never be attained. A form of this moral and political argument against cognitive idolatry, sponsored, as it were, by biblical idol polemics, was to be renewed decades later in both Christian and Jewish feminist theology. Rosemary Ruether criticizes Christian art for its overly literal images of the divine not because they violate the prohibition against images as such but because their cognitive error fosters political idolatry. Where divinity in Christ is mediated through an imperial iconography, ‘to the extent that such political and ecclesiastical patriarchy incarnates unjust and oppressive relationships, such images of God become sanctions of evil’. Under Ruether’s interpretation, Judaism fares better than Christianity since (momentarily forgetting traditional Jewish liturgy’s readiness to praise God in the patriarchal idiom lordship and kingship) Ruether celebrates the Jewish reluctance to make even verbal idols of God. By rendering the name of God un-pronounceable and written without vowel sounds, and in the enigmatic self-naming of God as ‘I am who I am’ or ‘I am who I shall be’, Jewish consciousness is, according to Ruether, liberated from idolatry.42 Judith Plaskow, from a Jewish feminist perspective, also insists that figurative images are not the only potential idols: verbal images can also be idolatrous. While the feminization of verbal images of God, even as a wholly non-literal means to replenish the imaginal repertoire of Jewish feminists, has incurred the charge of paganism and idolatry, Plaskow reminds us that feminist theology construes idolatry as the projection of patriarchal values and potencies onto an essentially unknowable God. Monolatrous insistence on one (male) concept and linguistic image of God that decertifies another (female) one as an idol is itself equally or more idolatrous than any feminist model of God since it aggressively presumes an absolute knowledge of God and the exclusive right of naming God.43 But at least for the purposes of the present study, the two most significant modern theorizations of Judaism’s negotiation with the Second

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Commandment are those of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. We turn first to Rosenzweig’s most influential work, The Star of Redemption (1921). Here, Rosenzweig (who numbered among Hermann Cohen’s students while he was teaching in Berlin), follows Cohen, who, like Maimonides, locates the problem of idolatry in the wrong ways in which people think about God and in the way they use language to speak about God.44 Idolatry is an essentially cognitive failure and it is this that is the ultimate betrayal of God.45 But while Rosenzweig considered himself a disciple of Cohen in many respects, he also differs from Cohen in rejecting the fundamental premise of modern GermanJewish ethical monotheism: that the Second Commandment imposes a ban in all visual representation. Against the grain of German-Jewish rationalism, Rosenzweig revalues vision. Images may be a second-rate art-form, but they are only a denial of divine freedom when the image is worshipped as divine.46 Rosenzweig’s style can be impenetrable and subject to varying interpretation,47 but it seems clear that, in some senses, art, for Rosenzweig, ranks higher than thought alone and where vision is a type of mystical experience of figure or form; of how things ‘look’ in a system of revelation, it is higher than the auditory. In Part Three of the Star Rosenzweig ranks the sight of the truth above the audibility of the truth: ‘Light does not discourse, it shines. . . . It shines, not like a fountain, but like a face, like an eye which is eloquent without the lips having to move. Unlike the muteness of the protocosmos, which had no words yet, here is a silence which no longer has any need of the word.’48 Yudit Kornberg Greenberg is of assistance in interpreting Rosenzweig’s theology as an epistemological triad: first, ‘at the bottom, is the muteness of creation, in the middle is the speech of revelation, and at the top is the vision of redemption’. Part Two of the Star celebrates speech as the great heteronomous reality, but in the third part of the Star Rosenzweig has moved from a hermeneutic of hearing to one of seeing. Now revelation is the matter of ‘seeing images of God’s truth that characterize redemption’. Rosenzweig’s phenomenology of religious practice has led him to ‘a face-to-face confrontation with truth in its most concrete configuration, its human body. In this encounter, the sight of the human other consummates the moment and the truth about God; it is the earthly figure or theophany of the divine. Here presence is the stillness of light that brings into visibility the facial contours of the other. . . . The human face is an embodiment of God’s truth’. Rosenzweig’s Star now describes an allsurpassing revelation from which it can be deduced that ‘certain embodiments of divine presence bring us to a visionary experience of God’.49 By the end of the Star, the Star of Redemption has become itself a face: The Star of Redemption is become countenance which glances at me and out of which I glance. Not God became my mirror, but God’s truth . . . He allowed himself to be seen. . . . He led me to that border of life where seeing is vouchsafed. . . . But what he gave me to see in this Beyond of life is – none

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The sublimity of religious vision is one thing; art is another. While revelation might take a visual form, the practice of visual art is, in Rosenzweig’s opinion, both limited and limiting. The visual image becomes idolatrous when its static nature stultifies the dynamic will of God towards redemption. The truth, not yet, is still on its way. In contrast to the art of poetry, especially the sonority and rhythm of liturgical poetry, where the language of the poem is the form, medium, idea and content of its truth, the plastic arts belong to a self-contained, unreal world that is immune to revelation and in which the original vision is detached from its object. Like Buber, though with greater emphasis on the communal and liturgical dimensions and less on the realm of private experience, Rosenzweig insists that revelation is a relational, dialogical encounter between God and ‘man’. Yet, as would Levinas, Rosenzweig finds that plastic art rigidifies life as it is closed off from any object that is not itself.51 Life runs in it just for the expressive moment of artistic vision and the viewer’s glance is at once overcome by its own absence of life, for art is of the realm of the enclosed self, not the communal soul. The problem with images is the absence of language: without a spectator the image is ‘mute’, it is entirely dependent on the beholder for it to have any appreciable effect on reality. The work of art is a thing merely displayed to a spectator: it is silent, disconnected, without community and invites introversion into the self. 52 As its own referent alone, it is autonomous, whereas in the poetry of the hymn or prayer the soul, in motion, petitions the transcendent.53 By contrast, the image does not pronounce; its muteness is associated with the pagan or Greek dispensation that was prior to the dispensation of the revealed word in Judaism and Christianity. Again, the Second Commandment is accorded a defining role. For Rosenzweig, Judaism is ‘that which resists vision for the sake of the redemption of the world’. Art must be sacrificed for the redemption brought by pure monotheism in which speech alone is communicative of revelation. Rosenzweig places the beauty of biblical poetry and liturgical verse above art; language precedes revelation and speech is the medium and act of revelation. This is a Jewish Romantic aesthetic in so far as poetic speech is credited with being the only art that immediately expresses the soul. Religious poetry is at once immanent and transcendent; at once tragic and joyous.54 Against the tide of Jewish rationalism, revelation is not about thought or reason, but speech. Revelation is produced in the active response: God commands ‘today’ and we hear ‘today’. The heard commandment is God’s summons to love. His first word to the soul is ‘love me!’, and it demands a reply. Revelation is therefore essentially dialogical.55 Revelation is not mediated by Law but in the fact of God’s address and the event of communal hearing and verbal response.56 As his friend and

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collaborator Martin Buber had insisted, revelation has a divine-human mutuality, it is not something that occurred once in the past but is existentially participative. Although images can be idolatrous, Rosenzweig knows, as have others before him, that not all images are idolatrous or complicit in improper or erroneous worship. Indeed, Rosenzweig is hardly proposing a Judaism without figures and images; he accepts that images, or perhaps more precisely, figures, can be redemptive. According to Leora Batnitzky, Rosenzweig also elucidates a significant connection between Judaism and art: Judaism is, for Rosenzweig, itself a work of art, they both, in their isolated self-containment and lack of a home or shelter induce the feeling of shock or uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit). That unease at the Jewish spectacle can translate into antisemitism, but the effects of antisemitism – persecution and diaspora – are instrumental to the geography of the Jewish mission to the gentiles and the uncanny spectacle of the Jewish people, properly resident in neither history nor land is, on that count, redemptive of Judaism’s spectators.57 Far from entirely dismissing art, Rosenzweig goes some way to revalorizing the visual which had been dismissed by neo-Kantian Germanophone Jewish philosophy. Contra Hermann Cohen, and posthumously, after Rosenzweig’s death, contra Levinas, images are not ‘shameful’. An original work of art, rather than the representation or mere copying of an object, can evoke a response in the viewer and in so far as it awakens a feeling for eternity, it is alive.58 Rosenzweig, then, does something more interesting than either rejecting or celebrating the image. He makes it integral to the possibility of revelation and the meaning of Israel as itself an image of revelation. Explicitly rejecting the Augustinian supercessionist claim that Jews are blind to God’s revelation, Rosenzweig rejoices in Israel as the ‘blindfolded synagogue’. Israel is indeed, as Christendom has charged, blind, but not because Jewry does not accept Jesus’ messiahship, but because it stands, as it were, at the centre of a flaming Star of David whose light blinds it to the world and to itself. In the ‘innermost constriction of the Jewish heart there shines the Star of Redemption’.59 Jews possess no vision of God precisely because of their blinding proximity to God – Israel is itself the image of God’s revelation.60 Being revelation, Israel is itself the true image of God’s revelation to the world. The Star – both as figure and book – ends in a cosmic explosion of light. From the centre of the Star of David, with Judaism as the heat or core of the star and Christianity its rays, God’s countenance shines forth upon us. In Rosenzweig’s words, ‘The Star of Redemption is become countenance which glances at me and out of which I glance.’61 The word finally falls silent and ‘divine truth become figure, there shines forth none other than the countenance which God turned shiningly towards us. Yea, we now recognize the Star of Redemption itself, as it has at last emerged as figure for us, in the divine visage.’62 ‘Only when we see the Star as countenance do we transcend every possibility and simply see.’63 Just as

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Moses caught sight of the promised land before he died, but did not enter it, just beyond the borders of immanence, of life, God’s truth is finally seen, not merely heard.64 Abraham Joshua Heschel was to make much the same point: ‘There are moments in which, to use a Talmudic phrase, heaven and earth kiss each other; in which there is a lifting of the veil at the horizon of the known, opening a vision of what is eternal in time.’65 But although Heschel also accords imagination and aesthetic appreciation a role in the affective reception of revelation, the experience of revelation is not, for him, a primarily visual event. In God in Search of Man (1955), Torah is an exposition of an originally wordless or metalinguistic revelation. It would be an act of idolatry; an attempt to depict God, to represent or even imagine the content of revelation by visual means.66 Revelation must not be imagined as if it were a physical process or a psychophysical act and God must not be imagined as a corporeal being.67 Rather, it is language that evokes the feeling of revelation and revelation is properly known through feeling since God himself also feels. It is feeling – the aesthetic, but not the visual – that moves one to halakhic sanctification of the world. It is not through art, but through Jewish observance and ethical activism that we see prophetic justice and come to know God. Heschel accepts that Judaism is an emotional bond with God created not only through words inscribed in texts: ‘the meaning of the Torah has never been contained by books.’68 But nor is Torah contained in or by visual images. Although Emmanuel Levinas was wont to claim Rosenzweig as his philosophical predecessor, Levinas’s manifesto for Jewish aniconism has little of the mystical and ecstatic tone that permeates parts of The Star of Redemption (a work that is not so much aniconic as merely wary of visual art and that articulates some good reasons for its partial preference for liturgical poetry). Levinas is the most significant of recent Jewish philosophers to make a clear and highly critical distinction between Jewish theological ethics and the aesthetic. His criticism of the aesthetic is stated with particular vehemence in early texts written in the late 1940s but rehearsed again in his later work of 1961, Totality and Infinity. Levinas, like Kant, regards the proscription of images as Judaism’s supreme commandment.69 Making a clear – even absolute – distinction between ethics and aesthetics,70 Levinas insists that, in contrast to an image of a face, the transcendent alterity of another’s actual face is presentative of the infinite; it is a revelation whose ‘nudity’ is a moral summons commanding absolute responsibility for its care. That is why its infinity cannot be reified into an image to be merely enjoyed.71 Although opinion is divided on the impact of Rosenzweig’s thought on his own, Levinas, like Rosenzweig, understands revelation as a linguistic event in time. The Torah as the linguistic commandment of infinite responsibility for the other does not consist in the (re)presentation of the physical, visible, presence of the self to the other, but in the transcendental event

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of summoning itself. It is this that signifies a relation to God, known in the otherness of the relation to the other. What is required is not a contemplative, ‘beautific’ vision of the other, but a donation of the self to the other.72 Art, however, is founded not on an act of giving but on a fraudulent exchange, that is, on a procedural substitution of the object and its concept for its image. An image is a substitute for a face;73 and worse, as an image the face is closed up into a mask or caricature.74 Using somewhat overblown adjectives, art is condemned in his 1948 essay ‘Reality and its Shadow’ as ‘monstrous’, ‘wicked’, ‘cowardly’ and ‘inhuman’. Art is the captivation of an audience which, rendered passive, is relieved of responsibility for the other.75 Art renders its subjects anonymous and then, magically, speaks on their behalf.76 An image of a person is therefore a deception, a forgery, a copy, cheating the viewer of the reality of its object. An image is no more than an effigy, silenced and demoted from the grammatical first to third person. By contrast, ‘the face of the other destroys and surpasses at every moment the plastic image that it leaves behind.’77 Levinas therefore condemns the image as a totalizing injury to the Other, a kind of lethal weapon. Art exhausts or is allergic to alterity. Making a likeness of the other is a reduction or appropriation of the other by the same. The image ‘neutralizes’ the real and living face-to-face relationship.78 For the ‘optic’ element of the ‘vision’ of the face is not an exterior image but an interior encounter produced and taught discursively by direct, unfigured language which is a medium of personal presence.79 The self is not, nor should be, offered as ‘a spectacle’ in relation to the Other; instead, by speaking, ‘by offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays.’80 In Levinas’s essay, ‘Revelation in the Jewish Tradition’, language is not just the medium of revelation; revelation is the quality of language itself. The otherness of language is ontologically akin to the divine. Revelation is a textual or scriptural event, an exegetical moment and a prophetic commandment to hear and meet the obligation of the other. Revelation is not an aesthetic moment; the trace of the divine is in the commandment as a linguistic event. ‘It is as an ethical kerygma that the Bible is Revelation.’81 While Levinas’s vehement critique of the aesthetic can be traced to Plato’s view of the arts as merely beguiling,82 it was also prompted by his ethical rejection of Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade’s then vogueish religious experientialism, with its emphasis on the pre-ethical, non-rational experience of the numinous as the original and primary impetus of religion.83 Rejecting the affective dimension of religion aroused by its own sacred spectacle, and perhaps the numinous pagan choreography of Nazi self-glorification, Levinas insists that Judaism is not ecstatic. Judaism has the good religious taste to be a living dispensation by virtue of its great moral freedom. God is not incarnate in anything but his word so that intimacy with God is solely a matter of ethical and legal education in Torah.84 Revelation, heard from afar, makes an

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appeal to the exercise of the intellect, whereas the aesthetic appeal of numinous experience is ‘a form of [mindless] violence’ against the rational subject.85 Judaism is, in this sense, non-experiential. God is a God who hides his face; there is no palpable presence.86 In being addressed by the word alone, we are obligated to an absence or an averted face.87 We see only the back of God – a God in retreat, a departure, an absence in the making. This is a God of ‘pure passage’, a God that ‘shows itself as past’.88 It is because Levinas has just lived through a period of sustained and extreme violence that this attack on visual art is more than just an anachronistic venting of puritan spleen. It is post-Holocaust anguish that contributes to the inflation of his vocabulary,89 just as it is widely agreed that Levinas’s ethical philosophy of the face, especially in Otherwise than Being, is that of the shattered face of the Holocaust Jew. The immediate context of Levinas’s disparagement of art must be at least in part a response to the holocaustal assault on the human which turned living beings into objectified things that no longer belonged in this world, and after which even serious art seemed inadequate to its task, or, worse, another subtractive act of violence against the face. Nonetheless, we are still left with a fear that exceeds its immediate historical cause that an image of a person is a subtraction of the person from life. Like a puppet that cannot hold its own strings, the image is a ‘disincarnation of reality’. ‘Eternally, the smile of the Mona Lisa about to broaden will not broaden. An eternally suspended future floats around the congealed position of a statue like a future forever to come.’90 Not only time, but nature is eerily becalmed by art: ‘All the arts, even those based on sound, create silence.’91 The artistic gaze, in effect, kills or freezes its human object: art, he says, proceeds ‘as if death were never dead enough’.92 In short, art, for Levinas, is idolatrous not because it is an object of improper worship or a sign and project of human hubris, but because it is so total a disengagement from life and a substitution for life as to lull us to ethical sleep; to be a carrier of death. Levinas’s is not a lone iconophobic voice. In the closing years of the twentieth century, and again at odds with modern western positivist occularcentrism, Lional Kochan, in Beyond the Graven Image: A Jewish View, presented another uncompromising Jewish attack on visual images. Kochan’s aesthetic is grounded in a Levinasian suspicion of religious experience. For Kochan, like Levinas, Jewish holiness cannot be assimilated into a general hierophany.93 The autonomous designation of ordinary objects as holy, conferring on them the power to manifest the divine, is tantamount to idolatry. Only Torah appoints things to holiness and Torah is not literature (let alone visual art). Torah’s statutes must not be deprived of their force by the aesthetic so that, finally, it ‘calls for nothing more than admiration and lacks all power to address any capacity for volition’.94 Like Levinas, Kochan casts the appeal of the aesthetic as passive and disarming: an emasculation of the ethical imperative by feeling alone.95 For the visual to become pre-eminent is, he says, eventually to degrade Torah

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‘to a spectacle and thus mute its summons to action and thought.96 Introducing the aesthetic into the environment of worship obscures and silences the text and distracts from its demand. Whereas the visual is the media of illusion, seduction and deception (Numbers 15:39; TB Sotah 8a) that lends itself to ‘the aesthetico-idolatrous impulse’,97 the aural is the medium of instruction, understanding and transmissibility.98 Therefore to aestheticize Torah is to turn it into a mere object of contemplation and to turn the living God in whose name Torah speaks into ‘a non-god’. To confuse the ethical and the aesthetic is to bring together ‘two ultimately incompatible worlds of discourse’ in a fatal combination ‘in which only an ethical void survives. The use of aesthetic appeal solicits the very acme of “alien worship” [idolatry], eventually to create a universe of reified entities’.99 Like Levinas, Kochan rebukes the gaze for turning the divine image, Medusa-like, to stone. (Compare Sartre’s conviction that the look, le regard, is a refusal of our subjectivity and a reduction of the human to the status of thing.)100 In sum, echoing Cohen, the denunciation of graven images is a prophetic call for ‘the repeal of the existent, equating the overthrow of the idol, no longer a mere image, with the age of the messiah.’101 It is easy to dismiss Levinas and Kochan’s image polemics as antiquated and excessive. Although lop-sided, prejudiced and indifferent to counter-argument, their critique should, I think, be accommodated within a contemporary Jewish theological aesthetic. This is not because a Jewish theological aesthetic must reject art or because Levinas is the ultimate authority on all matters Jewish (Christian and Jewish thought are interpenetrated in his work and he did, in fact, decline to identify himself as a Jewish thinker: ‘I am not a Jewish thinker, I am just a thinker’).102 It is rather that Levinas’s criticism should be central to a Jewish aesthetic because, as we shall see in the next chapter of the present study, he is often right about so much that is wrong with images.

Does the Second Commandment produce distinctively Jewish images? We have seen that modern idol polemics, especially after the Holocaust, associate images with a theft of the spirit; leaving their object in a state of exquisite rigor mortis. However, this modern Jewish polemic neglects the fact of Jewish art which is not idolatrous and which has not been the death of anyone. It is, in any case, clear that before embarking on any denigration of Jewish visual art, due consideration should be given for the specific scriptural and historical context of the Second Commandment, to the biblical valorization of decorative sacral art, as well as to the permissiveness of some rabbinic views of art after the third century of the common era when the idolatrous practices that had once threatened the Israelite dispensation had all but passed into history. Put these together, as Jewish cultural historians like Kalman Bland have done,

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and it seems certain that Judaism is not essentially aniconic. True, Judaism is not a markedly iconic tradition and modern Judaism cannot be said to have considered art as a locus theologicus, but legitimate concerns about the making of images do not lead Judaism to favour a general and indiscriminate ban on visual images. Steven Schwarzschild attributes the relative poverty of visual arts in Jewish history to the prohibition of idolatry. Even so, he has found what he considers some ‘basic specifications’ and some ‘compelling reasons’ for theorizing a universal Jewish aesthetic; a distinctive approach to the production of images. Referring us to Hermann Cohen’s Kantian reading of the Second Commandment as ‘Thou shalt not make an image of the moral subject’, Schwarzschild points out that it is generally agreed that it is not so much the depiction of material objects that is proscribed, as instantiated images of spirit. Indeed, one cannot make an image of spirit without making an egregious category mistake. It is, he says, ‘a mistake with the widest and most grievous consequences: The whole universe is misunderstood and, therefore, maltreated. It is a sin.’103 An undistorted and complete representation of a person is theologically dangerous as humans are ensouled bodies, made in the image of God. To represent their physical appearance ‘tout court’ as the whole person is to misrepresent both the human and the divine. Referring to the Rabbi Joseph Caro’s ruling, itself based on much older strategies for detonating, as it were, the power of an image, Schwarzschild writes, ‘there remains only one legitimate way of depicting the human: to indicate in some physical way that the physis is only an inadequate manifestation of real nature; and since spirit cannot be pictorially added to the body image, something must be taken away from that appearance.’ Yet Schwarzschild insists that the aesthetic of distortion does not dishonour the human. On the contrary, the distortion of the human image in Jewish art is ‘in effect not a reduction but an expansion of the human form. The negative commandment prohibiting the depiction of the complete human person is in substance a positive commandment to introduce the human spirit into the human form. In short the slashed nose is the symbol of the soul.’104 The only permissible image of spirit is the actual presence of a person, not his or her re-presentation in art. Because art cannot represent spirit, the Shulchan ’Aruch permits only the representation of the absence of spirit when depicting human beings. The ‘theology of the slashed nose’ answers the question of how one might depict an absence: the nose is split or one eye is removed to symbolize that the body seen in the representation is not a representation of an inspirited person. The possibility of art, then, is at once permitted and denied. Whereas Lionel Kochan regards the overthrow of idols as a sign of the messianic age, for Schwarzschild, the aesthetic of distortion is linked to the messianic anticipation of the world as it ought to be, but is not yet.105 Schwarzchild further claims that the Jewish requirement of deliberate mis-drawing – a rejection of the Greek principle of art as mimesis or

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imitation – is one of the earliest and originary principles of modernist art, so that ‘in modernism, art is assimilating Judaism’. For Schwarzschild, modern distortive art of the kind for which Picasso is most well-known, is an assimilation of Judaism; the mark of a ‘quintessential and aboriginal’ Jewish aesthetic.106 But it is difficult to isolate an intrinsically Jewish aesthetic or approach to image-making, especially in visual art that is not religious in its intention or subject. One of the Jewish artists most often cited as a modern exemplification of the distortive aesthetic is Amedeo Modigliani whose sensual elongation of heads and bodies, as in Reclining Nude (c. 1919), typifies his approach to representation. According to his dealer, Leopold Zborowski, Modigliani referred to himself as a Jewish artist and was known to use mystical Jewish symbols in his work. It is tempting, then, to suggest that Modigliani’s technique was a way of positioning himself in a Jewish aesthetic tradition. Yet the elongated mask-like faces and blank expressionless eyes in portraits such as that of Anna Zborowski (1919) might equally demonstrate the influence of African art on Modigliani and other painters and sculptors of the period, notably Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. And Modigliani’s highly sensuous representations of nude women (often women of questionable virtue) are, after all, hardly typical of Jewish art. Or again, Chaim Soutine’s images are often painfully distorted, but this may be as much due to his interpretation of the plasticity of paint as of the figured object itself. Maryan S. Maryan’s more recent theriomorphic distortion of the human image in paintings such as Personage with Donkey’s Ears (1962) is one that the rabbis might have found more acceptable. But in this and other such works, Maryan, a survivor of Auschwitz, uses the aesthetic of distortion to express disgust with both the human and the divine. His observation of the Second Commandment, if that it is, makes it difficult to tell the difference between the vicious ‘animal’ who is the perpetrator and the ludicrous animal who is his dehumanized victim. When the Nazi aesthetic ideology saw distortion as a mark of non-Aryan ‘degenerate’ art, they might have been closer to the truth than they knew. It may be no coincidence that this uneasy conversation between the dehumanizations of the Holocaust and the Jewish tradition of the distorted face is also evident in Art Spiegelman’s comic-strip novel, Maus – A Survivor’s Tale,107 in which he tells the story of his parents’ Holocaust experience, using the heads of mice for Jews and cats for Nazis. Where some have isolated the aesthetic of distortion as the chief characteristic of Jewish images, Irene Korn regards micrography, where miniature writing is worked into the shape of images, as the only uniquely Jewish art.108 As if posing a riddle – ‘when is an image not an image?’ – micrographic images such as Moshe Hayyim ben Menasha Mordecai’s Moses and the Burning Bush (1988) might be said to represent a quintessentially Jewish approach to the production of a legitimate visual image. The Hebrew letters and words, used to almost pointillist effect, configure into the shape of a visual image. Words

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and letters break out of their linear formation and regroup to form figured objects. Practised from the ninth century to the present day, micrography is exemplified in the late-fi fteenth-century colophon by Joseph ibn Hayyim in the Kennicott Bible, where the figures of animals, mythical monsters and naked human beings are shaped into Hebrew letters. Calligraphic art underwent something of a renaissance in modern Jewish art. In early-twentiethcentury revolutionary Russia, the constructivist El Lissitsky used words as a form of two-dimensional revolutionary architecture. Others like Ben Shahn made pictures from them, fascinated by the kabbalistic mysteries of their combinations; the contemporary artist Grisha Brushkin produces images that are themselves fragments of sacred text or manuscripts, replete with annotation and erasure. Image and text are cross-referenced and the material sanctity of the word as figure is secured. In turn, the written word sanctifies the figured image because the word is an inscribed figure given life by the spirit and therefore entitled to the same infinite respect accorded to the human body, another conduit of spirit. In calligraphic art, the word, in becoming a figure: an image made of words, not flesh, cannot die but will speak its spirit forever. But it is the art of pure abstraction, also claimed as the ultimate Jewish art, which exceeds any of the measures taken by the anti-idolatrous techniques of distortion and calligraphic images. It is a deliberate step into nothing and nowhere. In my view, abstraction is another anticipation of disappearance; another pre-emption of death. Again, turning the Nazi contempt for modern art as an essentially Jewish phenomenon on its head, mid-twentieth-century Jewish commentators interpreted the Second Commandment as a peculiarly Jewish liberative manifesto not only for rationalism and modernism, but also for the inevitable end of modernism: pure abstraction. In the 1957 catalogue for an exhibition of artists of the New York School, Leo Steinberg proclaimed, ‘Both Jewry and modern art are masters of renunciation having at one time renounced all props on which existence as a nation or art, once seemed to depend. Jewry survived as an abstract nation, proving, as did modern art, how much was dispensable.’109 Steinberg finds in abstraction a freedom from representational content and a refusal of the figured or imaged, both of which constitute an inherently Jewish aesthetic, underwritten by the Second Commandment. Harold Rosenberg, in his 1966 lecture at the Jewish Museum in New York, ‘Is There a Jewish Art?’, expanded on this point, observing that, The Old Testament is filled with a peculiar type of ‘art,’ which we have begun to appreciate in this century: Joseph’s coat, Balaam’s ass, the burning bush, Aaron’s rod . . . the idea that if you inhabit a sacred world you find art rather than make it is clearly present in the Old Testament . . . when the mind of the people is loaded with magical objects and events . . . Jewish art, then, may exist in the negative sense of creating objects in the mind and banning physical works of art. In this sense, the Second Commandment was

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the manifesto of Jewish art. In our day, an anti-art tradition has been developing, within which it could be asserted that Jewish art has always existed in not existing.110 For these critics, a Jewish aesthetic shares – even founds – modernist theories of art’s repudiation of narrative. Jewish art’s paradoxical refusal of the image even as it produces it, distils or purifies art until it signifies nothing: no more than a field of colour or the application of the paint itself. It is probable that were Rosenberg writing today, he would also claim conceptual art as paradigmatically Jewish. For conceptual art exists as art in the mind alone; it exists without essence as an interpretation, not a representational object. In conceptual art anything and nothing is art, which might seem to some an ample qualification for the label ‘Jewish’. But normative accounts of Jewish art have fallen out of fashion. In the postmodern era, Jewish art is just art that ‘speaks Jewish’ to its creators and viewers. Just as the aesthetic of distortion is not peculiar to Jewish art even if it is congenial to Jewish art, Jewish art encompasses far more than abstract expressionism. Notwithstanding the over-representation of Jews as leading exponents of postwar American abstract expressionism (Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman were leaders in the movement), Anthony Julius has recently rejected the thesis that abstract expressionism is the fulfilment of an aesthetic founded in adherence to the Second Commandment. Julius points out that other spiritualities and ideologies than those of Judaism were operative in abstract expressionism and, in any case, most of the twentieth century’s prominent Jewish artists (Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine, Kitaj and others too numerous to mention) were notably figurative in their approach.111 Nonetheless, Julius cannot resist offering an alternative argument for a distinctively Jewish approach to image-making. In an argument traceable to Hermann Cohen’s appreciation of subversive irony or prophetic ridicule in art, Julius insists that the Second Commandment does not merely prohibit idol-making, but actively mobilizes idol-breaking. So for Julius, it is iconoclastic art that is the most characteristically and faithfully Jewish interpretation of the Second Commandment. If a Jew is defined, as in the rabbinic midrash, as one who testifies against idols, then images that subvert images belong to an authentically Jewish artistic tradition. Although not exclusively practised by Jewish artists, iconoclastic art, typified by the aesthetic of distortion and the rabbinic permission to mock idols (but nothing else), does not merely avoid the making of idols, but breaks them. Ironic art is a bloodless revolution, subverting power by ridicule: achieving much the same diminution of power as when a child draws a comic moustache on the photograph of a celebrity in a newspaper. This practice is epitomized, for Julius, in the work of the Russian Jewish Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s art of the mid-1990s, where the terror and threat of the Soviet era is not denied, but, in a far more effective act

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of demotion, teased. In their work, monumental images of Lenin and Stalin – totalitarian idols – are not destroyed but simply rendered absurd.112 It has become clear that, as might be expected, modern Jewish thought is at best ambivalent about images, fearful of their capacity to either idolize or diminish their object. Jewish art does much, I think, to allay those fears – whether by abstraction of the image, pre-emptively damaging the image, ‘writing’ the image, or subverting it with visual irony. But to suppose that some form of aniconism or denial of the propriety of images should be a default aesthetic for Jews neglects or simply rules out the possibility of prophetic art that has already taken steps to defuse the threat of art. Jewish art, like any good art, is not hubristic. It can re-mind the viewer of something that the world has lost, that has been taken away and that must be replaced or restored to a form of presence. Cognizant that the first image was made by God when God created the human, prophetic images can, in attentive love, re-view and re-draw the world to sanctity – to wholeness and completion against brokenness. This book hopes to show that an image does not have to either kill its object or induce moral paralysis in its viewer. A counter-idolatrous image can ‘pray’. With the exception of Buber and Rosenzeweig, most Jewish thinking about images is either historical or philosophical, and, thereby, theologically inconclusive. It is for that reason that the next chapter of this study turns from aspects of the history and theorization of the Second Commandment to its cosmology.

Chapter 2

Genesis 1 and the Creation of the Image

Cultural historians may be right that the visual life of Jews has been far richer than Jewish religious thought would have us suppose. But it would be diffi cult for any Jewish theologian to challenge the epistemic priority of the written, spoken and heard word in Jewish religious thought and practice over other forms of discernment. Yet by its very nature as a communication to the senses, any theologian considering the nature of revelation is also considering an aesthetic category and moment. And, in fact, recognition of the aesthetic dimension of revelation was at least implicit in the twentieth-century Jewish existentialist theology of Buber, Rosenzweig and Heschel, all of whom, in their different ways, theorized the human encounter with God within experience; revelation was not, for them, only or primarily a formulation of law. For Buber, in I and Thou (1923), the book that established a mood and framework for all his subsequent works, Judaism is an encounter, in love, with God as ‘You’; pure presence to the I. Although Jewish tradition actually prefers to speak of God as ‘he’, not the almost importunate ‘you’, Buber insists that the God discoursed upon as ‘He’ is a thing or idol, just as the God of Sinai, apart from the integrated sensual, emotional, interpersonal relation between the human and the divine, is a merely historical God. Theology need not ‘strip away’ the world of appearance to get to some truth beyond sense experience; beyond encounter: ‘There is no world of appearance, there is only the world. . . . Only the spell of separation needs to be broken.’1 Revelation is palpable in the noise and colour of the world around us.2 Buber and Rosenzweig’s theologies of experience (Erlebnis) were coloured by the neoromantic Jugendstil and the expressionism they encountered in their formative years: ‘both thought in terms of multiform and complex patterns’.3 The affinity between the German-Jewish philosophy of Buber and Rosenzweig and early German modernism is most readily apparent in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption where creation, revelation and redemption constellate into a metaphysical form: an image of God’s face. In a visionary sense, we see the lifegiving truth, though it is not strictly an object of knowledge. Rosenzweig, who worked closely with Buber as both critic and collaborator, thereby also rejected any equation of revelation and law and, at the same time, rejected the liberal

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historicization of Judaism as the object of scientific study to be correlated with rational norms and ideas. Rosenzweig recast halakhah as the commandment to love that is declared in the aesthetic experience of liturgical worship.4 The revealed commandment is a function of creation, before it is a function of Sinai or its texts. Creation itself is the possibility of revelation and revelation is the possibility of redemption.5 And in the moment of our redemption we are created: ‘this inversion of chronological sequence establishes the life of the eternal people. For the eternal life constantly anticipates the end and thus turns it into the beginning.’6 Heschel, in God in Search of Man, also affirms the extra-textual, experiential dimension of Jewish spirituality and theology.7 According to Heschel, there are ‘three trails that lead to Him’: the first of these is ‘the way of sensing the presence of God in the world, intimated in the spectacle of creation: “Lift up your eyes and see, Who created these?” (Isaiah 40:26)’; the second is the way of sensing his presence in the Bible; the third is the way of sensing his presence in sacred deeds.8 Aesthetic knowledge of God is therefore, for Heschel, aesthetically mediated as well as read and heard. While Jewry has been historically reticent about the Jewish soul’s personal quest for God ‘in the world, in things’ (as opposed to in the biblical text and in the performance of sacred deeds), quoting Job 19:25–27, Heschel encourages Jewry to venture beyond historic and legal study and, on less familiar territory, ‘delve into the religious drama of Israel, to grasp what it was that enabled Job to say: “As for me, I know that my redeemer lives . . . [that] Out of my flesh I shall see God. My own eyes shall behold, not another’s. My heart faints within me.” ’ Who, today, Heschel wonders, would have the confidence to speak as Job once did? Yet the biblical literature is insistent in its search for God’s presence; it is not satisfied with an awareness of God’s presence, but wants to see God face to face: to behold the beauty of the Lord and feel him close by (Ps. 24:6, 27:4, 73:28).9 Although Heschel’s acknowledgment that revelation is an aesthetic as well as cognitive experience does not grant him permission to make any visual representation of revelation in images, he affirms that, as the years pass, these sparks of aesthetic illumination accumulate and make it impossible for him ‘to remain certain of the impossibility of revelation’.10

The first visual image But an aesthetic theology does not need to be inferred from modern existentialist Jewish theologies which, in Buber and Rosenzweig’s case, were conceived almost a century ago, or pieced together from other literary sources despite the Second Commandment. The very fact of the creation of the visual as such, and the fact that creation was created as a visual phenomenon, theologically exceeds the question of the permissibility of figurative images. The

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received, but pointless, moral dichotomy between hearing and seeing; obligation and entertainment, is abolished cosmologically in Judaism’s imagining of the world’s first moment, in the creation narrative of Genesis 1:1–31. It is this hyper-concise, sparsely worded text (a form which itself encourages the exercise of the visual imagination rather than overwhelming it with language) that, above all others, has taught each Jewish generation the entire meaning of their ‘human destiny and national identity’,11 and which, in my view, sets the scene and terms for a Jewish theology of art.12 Genesis 1 suggests that the Second Commandment was, and remains, the basis for a theology of art, not an archaic obstruction to art or its theological interpretation. It is undeniable that by the third verse of the Bible God is using speech to create. But the foundational structure of the heaven and earth is created without the word. The first speech of God in verse 3, where God says, ‘Let there be light’ is an impersonal statement in the jussive: what is ‘said’ is not addressed to any yet existent other and is therefore less speech than the exercise of an imaginative act of will that calls things from the eternity of divine vision into the now of what is no longer God. In that sense, the repeated formula ‘and God said’, is redundant until v. 28, when he has created and blessed the human, commanded that they multiply and given them mastery over the earth. Before that, God, who is alone in the cosmos, does not speak to an empty auditorium; his word only becomes speech when he has created an allocutor: someone to address and to hear it. But primordially, God finishes making the world and the first thing the world experiences, as it were, is not God’s word but its being an object of vision: God looks at it and sees (that is, perceives, not pronounces) that it is good. The word refers to the appearance of the world, not the other way round. A Jewish aesthetic theology grounded in the account of creation in Genesis 1 must note that when God looks at what God has created he does not merely register its spectacle, he applauds it. (Sarna denies that ‘God saw’ indicates a ‘visual examination’. He interprets God’s seeing as a form of ‘perception’; Wenham, however, says that in the ‘God saw’ of v. 4, ‘God the great artist is pictured admiring his handiwork.’ Neusner uses the term ‘inspection’ to indicate God’s power to see at once all that he has created.)13 In a refrain repeated six times over, God makes a primordial aesthetic judgment that the world is beautiful in the perfect unity of its form and function. By the end of the sixth day ‘God saw (vayyar) all that He had made, and found it very good (1:31).’ ‘Tov’ – a more comprehensive Hebrew term than the English ‘good’ that translates it14 – signals God’s satisfaction or pleasure in what he sees. It is beautiful, pleasant, or lovely in so far as it is excellently fit for purpose; the connotations here are less moral than aesthetic. God’s first judgment is not an ethical judgment because it is extra-historical; primordially, the aesthetic precedes the moral. The moral commandment is consequent on what God has first seen to be visual pleasing. Creation’s original goodness is aesthetic. It consists not in moral qualities that

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could only be a potential function of its historicity. It is good in as much as it is a harmonious division and classification of categories until its functional arrangement gives God aesthetic pleasure. Beauty is a cosmological symbol of readiness for the ethical, but ethics is born with human freedom. The cosmological priority of aesthetic pleasure is evident again in the creation narrative in Proverbs 8:22–31 where Wisdom, created with the foundations of the world, dances before God, the spectacle of her sheer vitality is a symbol and celebration of the good order of the world God had made. Again, it is the aesthetic, rather than the moral, that is the first cause of happiness to God. But it is not enough that God creates the possibility of his own aesthetic pleasure. God’s infinite surplus of being overflows into creation as the gift of creativity itself. Before God gives over the conduct of the world to human agency, he has created the possibility of aesthetic pleasure. Even as he begins to create heaven and earth, God creates the possibility of the visual image in the first command of all: ‘Let there be light’ (Gen. 1:3). The creation of light, and then the lighting of the sun, moon and stars to shine as lamps from the ‘expanse of the sky’ upon the earth (Gen. 1:14–17), enables first God, and then all created things, to see the world as a phenomenal entity that is a pleasure to behold: a composition or image. God creates not a primeval sound, smell or other impression on the senses, but an image or appearance: something to see.15 God brings together the operation of his will, love and reason to bring the world from the pitch darkness of the divine imagination into a light that reveals space: a stage. Bathed in a light which God saw was in and of itself good (1:4), creation is first of all, to God, a visual spectacle or image. In that the world is a spectacle to God, God is not only the revealer but the one to whom something is and can be revealed. Why does God create a world that is a visual image or spectacle; that situates revelation within a composition? Bearing in mind Paul Klee’s famous aphorism ‘Art does not render the visible but makes visible’,16 or Lyotard’s: the point of a work of art is ‘to make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible’,17 the world is a work of art that makes God visible in so far as it is a representation of God’s glory first to himself and then to the created other. It is created as an image that enables us to see or discern truth. In Genesis, the creation of light and the subsequent aesthetic judgment of creation as good in so far as its forms are hospitable to the flourishing of life, prompts God’s creation of history: to show, tautologously, the world that world he sets before it. God spreads creation out as if it were a great woven carpet unrolled. Revelation is a spectacle or bringing to light by which God prompts moral and existential choice; that creates, in other words, the possibility of history. God’s first commandment, ‘Let there be light’ (v. 3) – that there be light by which to see – was surely the proto-halakhic commandment. For it is only after the creation of natural light, which reveals the world’s state and creates the possibility of life and history, that there is the creation of moral light by which to see human

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and animal others as God wants us to see and treat them. God’s presence or countenance becomes the light in which the righteous walk (Ps. 89:16); by God’s light ‘do we see light’ (Ps. 36:10). Conversely, like an idol, the sinful man ‘sees many things but does not observe them; his ears are open, but he does not hear (Isaiah 42:20)’. Going about in darkness is a prophetic metonym for a lack of ethical understanding of the nature of humanity and divinity and relation between the two: ‘They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness’ (Psalm 82:5). When God withdraws the light of the divine countenance because of sin we are left ever more incapable of perceiving his image in anything at all. Later, in Deuteronomy 30:15, God says to Israel, ‘See, I set before you this day life and prosperity, death and adversity.’ It is a later verse (v. 19) of this much-quoted text: ‘choose life – if you and your offspring would live’, that is the customary homiletical focus. But this misses the import of the first part of the text, where, in order to know how to choose life and flourish, we are urged to come and look at something God wants to show us. Like the silver yad or pointer used by a reader to follow the words of the sefer Torah, God trains our eye to read the world as a visual text before it is a literary one. We act upon the world by looking at it as an aesthetic whole. Buber is, I think, referring to the aesthetic composition of meaning when he writes of the child whose world is created in his first aesthetic experience: ‘From the glowing darkness of the chaos he has stepped into the cool and light creation without immediately possessing it: he has to get up, as it were, and make it a reality for himself; he gains his world by seeing, listening, feeling, forming. It is in encounter that the created reveals its formhood.’18 God intended a gregarious, populous world. A mere twenty verses into the Bible; a mere four days into creation, the seas are heaving with life and the air is filled with the beating of wings. By the fi fth day, the earth is teeming with life. And by the end of the sixth day (Genesis 1:26) God has done something qualitatively different. He has proposed and then effected the appearance of humanity in creation in his own image. It is a theology of image derived from the first chapter of Genesis that can, above all, support a Jewish aesthetic theology. In making an image of God-self, God does not make a reverse image of what God would see if he were to look in a mirror, but an image of God that enables the human to be a visual hypostasis of divine value and purpose. In the tselem God gives the human an aperture onto God. A theology of image where humanity bears the image (tselem) and likeness (demuth), a term whose meaning is virtually indistinguishable from that of tselem,19 of God conveys that in so far as persons are in some sense figured by God to resemble their creator, God’s will is knowable and, more interestingly, imag(e)inable. For the human being is a divine work of art that represents and expresses the spirit and will of its creator, not just verbally, but visually. Art reveals mimetically the essence of the object represented.20 The human being is a divine work of art that mimetically

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reveals the essence of its creator. The image of God in the human is therefore no mere authenticating ‘stamp’ but a mimetic or imitative revelation of God’s holiness. Wary of encouraging idolatrous worship of a finite god, Jewish commentators have been inclined to downplay the apparently unsophisticated visuality of the Bible’s theophanic appearances and, wary of implying that the human ‘likeness’ to God is evident in physical attributes, they have preferred to interpret the latter as a spiritual, rational or behavioural affinity between God and persons. In more political terms, the tselem has been likened to, or described as, the inscription of God’s rule onto the human, much as a coin may bear the head of the emperor. It is common to interpret tselem with reference to Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultural practice, where the ruling monarch would be described as being in the image or likeness of a god in order to elevate his power and authority over the people. Analogously, the image of God in the human (normatively, of course, the male) is an assertion of human dominion over nature as God’s representative on earth and that which distinguishes the human from the animal. Yet Genesis democratizes the concept and practice: here each person, not the king alone, bears the stamp of royalty, and this confers ethical responsibilities rather than divine power.21 Maimonides provides an influential variant of the functional, rather than bodily, interpretation of tselem. In the opening pages of The Guide of the Perplexed he interprets tselem not as a physical resemblance but as a reference to humanity’s capacity to reason and will that is analogous to God’s. Most modern Jewish theologians follow suit and construe tselem as an abstract spiritual likeness of will, reason, intelligence and love (though for David Blumenthal, tselem must also indicate a human likeness to some of the less congenial dimensions of the divine self).22 Although I would make no claim to know what the essential theological claim of Genesis might have been, or even that it has one, political or attributional notions of tselem seem not entirely faithful to the visual emphases of Genesis 1. Although no person is permitted to make an image of God, conversely, it is significant that God can and does make some sort of cast or image of himself in the human, as well as theophanic images of himself, in order to make his will known. Numerous biblical verses suggest that the predication of a visual appearance to God (whether metaphorical or actual in the disguise of human or natural forms) was central to the ancient Israelite theological imaginary. Similarity-based representations of God are properly prohibited and erroneous on many counts. However, causal metonymic representations of God such as the cherubim behind the curtain in the Holy of Holies are permitted as they cannot become substitutes for God but are associated with God in their function as his media of revelation (his chariot). The same is true of the theophanic cloud or fire since these do not presume to resemble God and are therefore legitimate representations of divine presence.23 Moreover, the Hebrew word tselem, translated as ‘image’ in Genesis 1, although rarely used

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in the Bible and of uncertain etymology, generally refers to physical similarity of appearance (in Genesis 5:3, for example, Seth is fathered after Adam’s image).24 Ten of the seventeen occurrences of the word in the Bible refer to a physical image. Admittedly, if Genesis 1 is assigned to a late P source, where anthropomorphism is uncommon, a physical interpretation of the term is problematic. It is also argued that in ancient near eastern usage, the image of God describes the king’s being or function, not his appearance. Yet Gordon Wenham is surely right to conclude that since Israelite ontology does not make a dualistic distinction between the human body and soul, it seems reasonable to assume that the image of God characterizes the dynamic unity of a whole rational embodied, enspirited person.25 The image of God in the human does more, then, than confer God’s love, power and or authority upon the human. The tselem is more than a stamp or seal of approval that validates human rule in God’s stead (as it implies, patriarchally, in Genesis 1:26). As a feminist theologian I reject idolatrous masculinist assertions that male power is of common political coin with God’s by some putative mark of divine appointment. Leaving aside patriarchal arrogations of the divine image as a licence for subjugatory dominion, it seems to me that the image of God in the human has a number of closely related functions. Differing interpretations of tselem in Genesis 1 are perhaps not decisively at variance with one another. Most inclusively, one might say that in creating the human with personal affinities to the divine personality that are sufficiently visual in character or activity to merit the term ‘likeness’, God directly reveals to sight his normative idea or the truth of what the human, and indeed the world before us, is and ought to be. The tselem constitutes a theology of human embodiment, phenomenality or appearance. In creating the human being with personal affinities to the divine personality that are sufficiently visual in character or activity to merit the term ‘likeness’, God directly reveals to sight his idea, or the truth, of what the human is and ought to be. Consequently, the image of God in the human sacralizes human image-making in so far as a non-idolatrous image of a person or natural object is an attempt to understand and elicit a response to its quiddity and its predicament. Human images can offer an intimation of God as one who is receptive to and moved by the sheer grandeur and awful pathos of the spectacle of human endeavour, just as God was moved by the sheer grandeur of the cosmos at creation. This is precisely the ethico-redemptive function performed by images that neither make a claim on their object nor project a power onto that object to which it can make no moral claim. That people, not other things in nature, make images is a mark of their commonality with the divine. That God creates people in his image and who themselves make images tells us something about the transmissibility of value and meaning from God to the world. The human composition of the visual into images is a cultural function of the divine will to self-revelation or presence.

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The human creation of images is a witness to the exercise of divine creativity in which the possibility of history – that is, the creation of the human – occurs by means of the creation of a series of ever more complex images and compositions. The creation of the human as at once a representation of God (something more than just his appointed representative or agent on earth) renders humanity accountable before God. For if God is represented to the world by his image in the human, what humans do to one another is also done to God. Nature does not make images of itself. An image does not evolve over millennia like a natural thing but is perhaps the one thing brought into existence by a single idea and by fiat. Through the creation of something quintessentially non-natural, God makes knowledge of God a possibility. Just as God’s image in the human is a medium of divine self-revelation, so too (non-idolatrous) images of the human have a disclosive function. In its affirmation of an ontological affinity between the divine and the human, a theology of image offers an episteme whereby revelation is communicable, since only cognate, personal entities can engage one another covenantally, in love. As David Blumenthal puts it, from the theology of image in Genesis 1, flows all knowledge of God and humanity. The imago dei states a principle ‘of dialogue, of reciprocal addressability. The theology of image implies mutuality of demand and claim’.26

Holiness and the mimetic image It is entirely possible (if somewhat unfashionably anthropocentric in an age ecologically inclined to disprivilege the human) to suggest that in God’s creation of humanity as that which alone of all created things bears his own image, God establishes an affinity to love. Love is a defining capacity of both the human and the divine and the ultimate content and purpose of revelation (Deut. 6:4–5). By virtue of the tselem, imprinted like a kiss, God’s love can be given, received and transmitted. God’s command that humanity multiply (Gen. 1:28) entails that through biological reproduction or ‘increase’ the divine image is reproduced in each successive generation. Love reproduces its object. Although I think that tselem is more than the imprint of God’s love, it is at least that. In and through marital – that is, covenantal – love, God’s love is sent across creation for its blessing. In that sense, the image of God in the human is the prototype of all non-idolatrous images for counter-idolatrous images are properly only images of what is loved. God holds the image or spectacle of the world within God-self just as we bear God’s image in our own person. Just as people carry small photographs of spouses and children in their wallets and show them proudly to strangers, divine love makes and carries images so that their object will not be forgotten. The image of God carried in and on our person wherever we go reminds us that we are loved and reminds us of the object of our love, even when we

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are estranged from him. The image is, then, a token of reunion, pending the messianic age. Like an image carried in a wallet which is no longer looked at when the family is reunited, the image of God in the human is only a substitute or promissory note for the eschatological moment in which we see God face to face. It is, perhaps, this sense of the image as that by which God will always strive to overcome the historical alienation of creation from his own imagining and achieve oneness that informs Heschel’s conviction that, ‘The Bible speaks not only of man’s search for God but also of God’s search for man. “Thou dost hunt me like a lion”, exclaimed Job (10:16). . . . All of human history as described in the Bible may be summarized in one phrase: God is in search of man.’27 After Heschel, one might say that, like a beacon or flare, the imago dei is a way of God finding and knowing his people. The will to find and be at peace with the loved other is something that God and persons have in common; it is an impulse or movement in which the image holds. But Genesis 1 is not interested in love, as such. Even if, like a kiss, the tselem is the seal or imprint of divine love, its purpose is not to imbue a feeling but to set the task of sanctification. For it is in and by the imago dei that we are appointed to holiness.28 It is no coincidence that Genesis 1 is usually assigned to a P, or priestly, source. The chapter is profoundly informed by the concept of holiness: the visual ‘goodness’ of creation is created by repeated acts of separation.29 And it is the act of separation that later becomes synonymous with Israel’s divine election. Israel is ‘expected to become as discriminating as her God (as in Lev. 10:10, 20:25’).30 God’s pronouncement of the world as ‘tov’ is surely the first cause of the covenantal command that Israel be a people – a kingdom of priests – whose task it is not to love the world in some diffusely beneficent sense, but to sanctify the world by labouring to maintain its original integrity of form and structure – what makes it tov. Genesis 1 does not so much articulate a theology of love, but of holiness. The image of God in the human is in that sense what makes sanctification possible. The human person is the first thing set apart, marked, to be (humanly) holy as God is holy. In Genesis 1, creation occurs through acts of categorization and separation that prevent blurring and mixing. The very patterning of the text obeys the principle of order, where life is progressively supported by a hierarchy of elements moving from the creation of inorganic matter to that of a being in the image of God.31 In God’s art, light is distinct from darkness, water from land, clean from unclean, work from rest, male from female, human from divine and so forth. Holiness is therefore not only a cultic or moral responsibility for purity, but also and primarily an aesthetic one incumbent upon the whole people. The task of keeping the world beautiful, ‘tov’, signals its absolute value. The world is holy, kadosh, not merely because God created it but because God rejoices in its integrity of form. The original goodness of that form must be protected or set apart from that which would dissolve it; from the touch of the profane (hol) that contaminates the holy or differentiated (kadosh) by the chaos

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of the undifferentiated (hol). God’s configuration of objects into an ordered expressive sequence or shape by acts of separation or habdalah is preserved by the continuous priestly labour of maintaining and restoring the clarity of its original form. (As Max Glickman says in Howard Jacobson’s tragi-comic novel Kalooki Nights, ‘it’s the aesthetics not the morality of Habdalah that’s decisive: the laws governing art and form, giving due place to this or that, honouring the beauty of things in their separateness and season. Aesthetics. It’s all aesthetic with Jews.’)32 The cosmology of habdalah in Genesis 1 seems to found a distinctively Jewish aesthetic, if one that is somewhat fastidious and, in its divisions of what is organically connected, not wholly unproblematic.33 Beauty consists in a separation of forms, materials, times, spaces and categories that compose or structure the world into a graded order of being that is ethically functional and, correspondingly, in a form pleasing to behold.34 Genesis 2 begins with God’s declaration of the seventh day as holy because on that day he completed his work of creation. This day henceforth sanctifies creation by virtue of its memory and re-enactment of aesthetic completion as that which is at one or at peace with itself. The Sabbath is not so much a day without work as a day in which nothing more is permitted to be created. Israel’s task of sanctification is therefore, at its most inclusive, the sabbatarian task of keeping creation in the state of good order that humanity came to it and that will continue to give both God and creation itself aesthetic pleasure. Because the commandment ‘You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy’ (Lev. 19:2, 20:26) is the command that the human model itself on what God is and does, human holiness, after the manner of God’s, purifies the world by (re)ordering it every Sabbath according to God’s first vision of the world in its pristine beauty. But that there is a need to appoint a people under the commandment to sanctify presupposes the risk that is inherent in the creation of the human. The historical spectacle is one in which the consequences of human freedom are almost immediately disappointing to God. Almost before the paint is dry, as it were, he decides to ‘blot out’ or scrub out human and animal life from the painting (6:7, 7:4, 23). In the Flood narrative of Genesis 6–8, God, in an act of almost childish petulance, spoils his own work. He effectively tips a jar of water over his own painting. It was no longer tov and perhaps, in the moral freedom that constitutes the historical process, it never could be. The moral chaos of history is punished by the natural chaos of torrential rain. Rain is used by God as an agent of purification that must now wash away the chaos of moral freedom. God’s aesthetic judgment of the world as perfectly ordered for its flourishing was a judgment on nature, not history. God overcomes natural chaos in the very act of creation but cannot, by himself, overcome historical chaos because that is out of his hands: it is a consequence of human freedom. Historical chaos mixes up or dissolves moral and ontological categories (epitomized by the sexual relations between divinities and human women who bore

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children without clear physical or ontological boundaries; who were neither human nor divine (Gen. 6:1–4). Corruption is at once a moral and aesthetic failure and it is a failure witnessed by God. In painfully ironic recall of the moment God first saw and rejoiced in the newly created world, now, ‘the Lord God saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the Lord God regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened’ (Gen. 6:5–6). The great sadness of God as he ‘sees’ the actual spectacle of history contrasts sharply with his joy on first beholding its possibility. It is only human holiness, in the image of God’s, that can imagine the world as God first saw it and repair the damage to creation. An aesthetic function of holiness is to restore light or happiness to the divine countenance. Our labours to sanctify the world satisfy a creative and emotional need in God for beauty.35 In order to obey God’s Levitical command to Israel to be holy as God is holy we need to be able to see as artists see, namely, able to configure the world into a state of visual composure or shalom. Just as God’s spirit first swept across the waters, ordering chaos into beauty (Gen. 1:2) now, in historical turn, our spirit must move over the waters of historical chaos and calm them. Israel’s work of sanctification is a re-making of the world whose labour includes the restoration of beauty to the world as a visible sign – like the covenantal rainbow God raises up in the clouds (Gen. 9:13) – of its being fit for the blessing of God’s presence. The sanctified world is therefore not so much one that conforms to a human idea of beauty, but is one that is beautiful in so far as it is ordered in accordance with God’s commanding vision in and from the moment of God’s first sight of the world at creation. Genesis gives an account of creation as an ordered whole that can precisely be an object of divine and human aesthetic judgment. Torah – the sum of Jewish life and thought – patterns the world back into an ordered and classified whole pleasing to both divine and human sight. It is the restorative nature of holiness, more than the affective purposes of love that best answers the question, why, in Genesis, God creates human beings in his image and likeness. The tselem enables the human to act both on God’s behalf and in imitation of God. The tselem makes the human representative of God so that he can summon Israel to model her conduct on his; to be holy as he is holy; to be holy as a people set apart to God; who will follow God and no other (Deut.13:5). Trans-generational holiness is the ultimate nature and purpose of the imitatio dei. Genesis 1 offers a primary model of imiatio dei in that it suggests that making oneself and the world around us visibly tov by acts of separation or creative division is a mimetic repetition of God’s creation and first sight of the world as perfectly fit for life. Sanctification is a work of restoration that makes something beautiful again. It does not need to be the case, as is so often argued, that the Jewish imitatio dei is essentially that of moral action, not that of Greek poesis, ‘making’.36 By acts that set things apart from

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contamination – a form of sacral and aesthetic hygiene – holiness restores the world to its likeness to the world God first created; not as an unchanging, unmoving replica of that first world, but something that still bears and yields the impression of God’s first idea and first joy. The aesthetic dimension of human sanctification transcends that of reverent ornamentation of ceremonial artefacts. The commandment to holiness obligates Israel to preserve the original beauty of the world that God commanded into being, which is the sphere of the visual. The creation of the human in the image of God is therefore not only a condition of the transmissibility of love but of cross-generational holiness. Genesis 1 offers a primary model of imiatio dei in that it suggests that making images that are visibly tov: that are beautiful because they render the world holy or fit for God’s sight or countenance, is a mimetic repetition of God’s creation of the world as fit for life. The command to holiness is an ethico-aesthetic commandment ontologically predicated on the imago dei. On these grounds we are permitted, or perhaps even obligated, to make images. The denigration of images as sub- or para-Jewish misses the theological point that the creation of the world is a visual phenomenon. It is a complex beautiful appearance available to divine and human sight – not only an idea in the mind of God – that mandates the human creation of images. The visuality of the world is also a mandate for an aesthetic theology, as the entire scheme of creation and redemption is given an aesthetic dimension in which all Jewish history can, finally, be imag(e)ined.

The Second Commandment as an ethical imperative Election by God entails the imitation of God’s holiness. Israel’s conduct must befit the majesty and moral goodness of God. She must abjure idolatry and its correlate dietary and cultural practices and, in separating herself from the nations, must actively pursue goodness by acts of kindness, mercy and justice.37 In other words, without wishing to suggest that Israel monopolizes ethical virtue, the priestly obligation to maintain the cosmic order that was the cause and object of God’s first aesthetic pleasure is a necessarily ethical one.38 The practice of sanctification sets apart or protects creation from the fundamental moral transgression that is the violation of an object’s integrity. If there is a distinctively Jewish aesthetic it is not, then, one derived from subject matter or style. This is not merely because instances of any such styles can be found in non-Jewish art as well. A Jewish aesthetic is not another cultural or ethnic style but is, by virtue of its being Jewish, an aesthetic determined by theological ethics. More basic than adherence to a specific style, a Jewish aesthetic is one that should be faithful to the Second Commandment’s proscription of idolatrous images. That is, a Jewish art is one that saves God’s face in the human face the dishonour or shame of exposing it to ridicule, violation or substitution.

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In that the relation between the divine and human face, namely the presence of the divine to human consciousness, is conditioned by the consequences of human choice, Levinas, Schwarzchild, and Halbertal and Margalit, are right, in their different ways, to construe the Second Commandment in essentially ethical terms, ‘based on moral intuitions about the character of interpersonal relationships and the various expectations people have of one another’.39 The ethical and the aesthetic demand of the face are one because whatever the harmony of its proportions or its conformity to a secular physical ideal, a theology of image deriving from the first chapter of Genesis demands that faces – appearances – be taken absolutely seriously. If God and persons share some perceptible resemblance or common ‘stamp’, then all Jewish constructions of ethical meaning involve a theological discernment that is also an aesthetic experience of a visual phenomenon. As Rosenzweig recognizes, ‘it is in the eyes that the eternal countenance shines for man.’40 The planes of transcendence and immanence intersect in the face. Before the Jew, the Commandment, or the Torah, the face is a ‘vessel for receiving and expressing God’s truth’. And because it sees God’s countenance it must die; it is consumed by its own radiance.41 Levinas also affirms that ‘the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face’.42 There is an ineffable trace of the divine in the face of the other; the face is the locus of knowledge of God in history. Although Levinas may not have accepted the interpretation, his theology of the face can render ethics something akin to a vision of God.43 Levinas’s philosophy of response is predicated on the trope – perhaps the actuality – of the face (he is not entirely consistent on the matter). But an aesthetic theology, which must in some sense conflate the divine and human face, cannot but be at the same time a practical ethical theology. If ‘the withholding of beauty itself fosters certain dehumanizations and oppressions’,44 and beauty signals blessing or the world’s readiness for peace and flourishing, then an obligation to what is tov or beautiful about the world (as distinct from the beautiful being the good) is the beginning of ethics. It is not at all that, to borrow Lyotard’s words, ‘obligation is a modality of time rather than of space and its organ is the ear rather than the eye.’45 Looking at the appearance of the other as no more than an appearance is a reduction of the other to an ‘it’. But a counter-idolatrous image of the other (whether in person or in a picture) as one who is a ‘Thou’ to its viewer assumes and develops an ethically responsible subject.46 In relation to the visual one is not merely viewer or audience but, as oneself a visible created thing, a participant in what is seen. David Freedberg’s theory of aesthetic response entails ‘recognition of the deep cognitive potential that arises from the relations between looking – looking hard – and the figured material object’.47 Theologically applied, there is a relation between God’s seeing and loving the world, which is a work of art that is alive, not merely an idea of the world in God’s mind. The world is responsive to God’s joyous gaze. In God’s sight it becomes what it was made to be. God’s commandment,

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as the act of God’s infinitely loving attention to the world, beautifies its object by its re-call of the world in and to its first order. As Heschel wrote in another context, ‘To the religious man it is as if things stood with their backs to him, their faces turned to God, as if the glory of things consisted in their being an object of divine thought.’48 What God sees reflects the light of God’s glory or countenance and is thereby appointed to holiness. That is why Isaiah, in seeking God’s forgiveness for Israel, urges God to see Israel – ‘Oh, look down to your people, to us all!’ (Is. 64:1–9). This and subsequent chapters of the present study argue that art can be, though is not always or even very often, made or interpreted for the sanctification of the world, not for the alienation and possession of its object. As a function and instrument of human holiness, the aesthetic is not, as Levinas thinks, an indulgence (‘feasting during a plague’)49 that is shamefully indifferent to suffering. To the contrary, the Second Commandment does not prevent art that properly investigates the human and natural condition and protests their violation. Art can be a means to the sanctification of the world as Levitically commanded, though it is not the only one. Just as God sanctifies the human by making it in his own image, humanity can sanctify God’s creation by its representation as a creation of God in God’s image, not the hubristic glory of its own. The face is not, or should not be, rendered a mere work of human art that stands over and against its divine prototype. But a face drawn or painted in such a way that its viewer can see the world through its subject’s eyes, not to look at it as another thing in the world, is an image that is neither idolatrous nor a pointless reproduction. Permissible, that is prophetic, images are those that command attention without seduction and whose integrity or beauty is a gift given without expectation of exchange. Despite Levinas’s inclination to deny that the ethical demand of the face is in any way an aesthetic demand derived from actual sight of actual faces, he admits that his ethics is ‘an optics’, even if it is not a literal vision.50 On those grounds alone, Levinas’s ethical dismissal of the aesthetic is negligent of the aesthetic qualities of his own ethic of the face, which, whether or not it is predicated on the literal sight of the face of the other, turns ethical obligation into a particular type of seeing: that of theological discernment. Levinas knows that moral evil or domination is tempered by the pathos, vulnerability or ‘nudity’ of the face. While Levinas denigrates aesthetics, in fact, the ethical response to the pathos or beauty of the face is an aesthetic one: an image or appearance summons an ethical response. The sight of the face as an image before us can be the pre-face or preface to an ethic of the face. It is in the nature of responsibility to come to the aid of the other: to respond and not to pass by. The image detains its viewers, compels them to stop and look and thence to act. God commands that we pursue justice above all else (Deut. 16:20). To say that the tselem is a means of representing God on earth makes representation function as a verb akin to that of making a legal representation on behalf of the other. Just

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as a barrister represents her client, human picture-making can be a deposition of evidence showing how history has both fulfilled and fallen short of God’s first creative idea. Yet it seems clear that religious Jews are at best ambivalent about figurative art’s contribution to human well-being and do not consider it part of the priestly vocation of Israel. In Chaim Potok’s novel, My Name is Asher Lev, the Rebbe permits and oversees the young Hasid Asher Lev’s career as a young artist, but at a discreet distance and with only occasional contact. By the time Lev is a grown man, the Rebbe continues to take a loving interest in Lev’s development as an artist, but has also exiled him from the community on account of it. Less tolerant than the Rebbe, Asher Lev’s father speaks for midtwentieth-century religious Jewry when he angrily expresses the view that, ‘to draw, to make lines and shapes on pieces of paper’, is ‘a futile indulgence’ in the face of evil’s ‘immutable darkness’. 51 Not only is art a goyische practice – ‘In the entire history of European art, there has not been a single religious Jew who was a great painter’52 – it is a waste of time that could be spent studying Torah. In no uncertain terms, Lev’s father, the voice, as it were, of the Second Commandment, tells him that ‘Art is not for people who want to make the world holy.’53 This refrain is repeated several times in a sequel to the novel.54 Lev’s art labours under the psychological and practical burden of the traditional association of figurative art with idolatry; with the sense that it is an essentially foreign impetus that even if it does not violate the human, cannot sanctify it without at the same time turning it into an idol. Yet it is important to recognize that the rejection he suffers trying to combine Orthodoxy with a career as an artist is not born of mere cultural prejudice. There are ways in which the Second Commandment is morally vigilant that make it both integral to any contemporary Jewish aesthetic theology and to a Jewish approach to art.

The Second Commandment as a critique of idolatry in contemporary culture It is arguable that the purpose of the Second Commandment is to hide faces from exposure to profane sight, protecting their integrity by not reproducing them at all. It is also more than justifiable to argue that all images of the human are proscribed precisely because the human is created in God’s image, which is the only image that is impermissible under any and all circumstances, and which must be protected from the vagaries of human moral freedom. To make an image of the human might be said to be a paradigmatic violation of the Second Commandment because it is to make an inferential or reverse image of God. Even though an image of the human is not a straight image of God in absentia, non-linguistic images of God may be proscribed because the

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human face is in some limited sense an image of the divine and, as such is, it is, as it were, under copyright and should not be reproduced. Because idolatry is an ethico-theological error, it is a theft of God’s image before it is a transgression against the human. In refusing any division or multiplication of the divine being into images, the particularity of the human face is a function of monotheism: there is one non-reproducible God and he cannot be multiplied directly or indirectly by any means, including artistic means. The human image is sacred because it is that which is in greatest ontological proximity to the holy. The ethical force of the Second Commandment is onto-theological. It is because humans are made in the image of God that Maimonides counts the prohibition on making images of the human so essential that he treats it as a separate commandment to that of the general prohibition of idols.55 In the modern era, Heschel also adduces one strand of rabbinic opinion to affirm that there can be no representations of the human precisely because of humanity’s likeness to God.56 Undoubtedly, such a theology of image protects the spirit in the human face from exposure to the violatory or deadening gaze (though it is also something of a blunt instrument that indifferently suppresses good and bad images alike). Conservative readings of the Second Commandment suggest that a Jewish theology of the visual image cannot approach its contemporary cultural context uncritically. The relevance of the Second Commandment is not confined to the early biblical period’s negotiation with indigenous paganism. On the contrary, the Second Commandment’s set of moral, political and philosophical claims has become as, or more, relevant through modernity and into the late or postmodern period where faces are used to sell products and materialist ideologies. In this historical period, as much or more than others, Jews should be properly hesitant to allow people to make life-like images lest in their Godlike capacity to make things in their own image, they become unnatural: too like God or too like the gods. In a contemporary secular economy, art, coupled with science, can be one of the chief marks of human hubris: of the attitude that ‘anything God can do we can do better’. As if anticipating the cosmetic surgeon’s ever more ‘routine’ remaking of the human female face, Plato warned artists not ‘to paint eyes so beautiful that they do not look like eyes at all’. In our secular late or postmodern age, the Feuerbachian notion that we create God in our own image has been made redundant. In this sense, Second wave feminist criticism of monarchical models of God as fantastic projections that ordain and sanction male authority and power to name and own the world came too late to be strictly relevant. Plutocratic culture now openly creates the human in the image of gods. While medieval portraiture generally refused to glorify the human form, at least since the Renaissance, images of the human have usually been those of the social elite and have been the obsequious servants of their sitter’s power and self-regard. In the contemporary ‘hypervisual’ age, as Nicholas Mirzoeff

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has termed our own, where idolatrous images are almost too ubiquitous to notice, the Second Commandment is as or more prophetically pertinent than it has ever been, and it remains one of the great ethico-theological contributions of Judaism. While contemporary art’s diverse visual projects are generally serious investigations into a post-heroic human condition, contemporary popular culture is saturated with images that make no moral or intellectual demands and which, unlike those of contemporary art that are accessible only to a cultural elite, are almost impossible to avoid. Here, dazzling images of a pantheon of celebrities inculcate a passive, covetous way of looking at things and people whose existence has become the mere occasion of purchase, ownership and display. If non or counter-idolatrous images of the human are quite rare in mass culture, they are definitive of what is called, perhaps imprecisely, great art. (Rembrandt’s Head of Christ no. 1, usually supposed to be modelled on the face of a young Sephardi Jew recently arrived in Amsterdam from Spain, springs immediately to mind.) So too, do photographs that are disclosive, but nonintrusive, images of a person’s state caught in a real moment in time, especially, though not exclusively, photographs of people in poverty and war. These might be said to be more than permissible images in so far as the integrity or subjectivity of their object is not taken, but, in the exercise of prophetic insight into their predicament, given back. But in the marketing of a consumer culture, non-idolatrous images are the exception, not the rule. Far more prevalent, for example, are the contemporary technologically perfected images of women that epitomize the hubris of the idolatrix whose art does not only improve on nature, but appropriates control of God’s design, rewarding transformation into the hyper-disciplined physical form rather than moral transformation. The Romantic sacralization of beauty as a justification of life itself (already a moral risk) has now been outpaced and democratized by the reproduction and circulation of numberless images of flawless human beauty and limitless affluence that signal cultural and economic power precisely in their sublime indifference the pathos of the human condition. Of course, modern culture is not unaware of the problem of its own idolatry. (Andy Warhol’s quasi-religious iconography of the ‘idols’ of his age seems to have been both an homage to mass-produced images of celebrity and a critique of them.) But an image made in the theistic spirit of love is different. Theistic love is not so much the Hellenic desire for an object whose virtue or beauty merits desire, but a form of compassion for that which may not. Yet the digitally improved image is a triumphalist two-dimensional idea deliberately vacated of the reality it purports to represent. Justifying nothing but its own appearance, popular culture’s depiction of itself in and through its images (of women in particular) render them no more than projections of desire that alienate power and agency from a living thing to a dead construction. In fact, the actual state

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of an image’s object is no longer, nor needs to be, knowable. Denied historical subjectivity, the object has being, but no becoming. The imaged object has been re-formed into a shape at once so plastic that it can be filled in accordance with any aesthetic specifications and fantasies, and a shape so rigid that it is no longer subject to the organic processes of bio-temporal change. (The life-size plastic inflatable sex-doll is both a metaphor for, and a crude instance of, the increasingly pornographic contemporary substitionary idolatry of the female form.) In this instance, Levinas is right that images reduce the living inspirited human form to a frozen, dispirited form. Such images of women act as ‘remote controls’, immobilizing or ‘pausing’ the human as that whose perfection is not permitted to alter with age; which is eternally present to our desire; that will never die because it was never allowed to live. It is precisely in a paparazzi culture entranced by surface and the parade of wealth, and where surveillance is a poor substitute for collective social responsibility, that to see rather than to look is an ethical and religious imperative. It is, above all, an idolatrous visual culture like our own, where the powerful can make, in the broadest sense, pornographic objects of subjects, that requires a prophetic theology of the truthful image. A truthful image is an image faithful to the Second Commandment read in the light of Genesis 1:6. Images that defer to the divine image in the human are permissible, even instrumental to revelation, for the human face is not a portrait of God but is expressive of God to the other in ways that site revelation in the inter-human encounter. A prophetic image is a call to relation; a visual summons. Its visual beauty is not necessarily the quality of being exceptionally pleasing to the eye, 57 rather, as an image of that which should be loved, not wanted, it imposes a demand to be seen and, in the act and consequence of seeing, cared for. The fourth and fi fth chapters of the present study are predicated on the assumption that most images of the Holocaust are exempt from the prohibitions of the Second Commandment. By defi nition, an image of a victim of Nazi Germany, even one taken by a perpetrator, can never arrogate hubristic power to itself. Rather, it is a witness to the sin of idolatry, here, the definitively idolatrous idea of a ‘master-race’. The pathos or vulnerability of human beauty then becomes a locus of judgment on that which is maliciously destructive. And more than that, it is transfigurative: its object is made beautiful in so far as it evokes disinterested, restorative love in those who behold it. The shadow of God’s presence moves across the face as it moved over the waters at creation. Where once the spirit swept across the waters and calmed them with its gentle breeze, it now composes a set of features into a human face. As a sur-face or over-face of divine self-revelation the human face is holy and is therefore subject to the Second Commandment that prohibits not all and any images, but idolatrous ones. The Second Commandment is properly applied when it is used to keep the human face safe from violatory exposure: from

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hatred that would erase its humanity. (Nazi posters, films and cartoons where the male Jewish face was morphed into that of a rat or caricatured as some other voracious agent of destruction in order to justify his extermination are paradigmatically idolatrous both in desecrating one type of face and assuming the sole legitimacy of another.)58 But the Second Commandment also protects the face from desire that would consume it, and from worship that would render it not a human face but that of a god. Idolatrous images of the face are resistant to the movement of spirit: they have replaced the divine image with their own captivating idea that in arresting spirit to a single plane of immanence, destroys it. To that extent the prophetic criticism of idolatrous images as blind and blinding remains apposite to this day. Images of the human that are mere screens on which to project the alienated values of a hubristic culture; that depict people intended to be no more than objects of desire or hatred, that is, pornographic objects, are properly subject to the prohibition of the Second Commandment because they supplant God as the sole object of worship or, by mockery, exposure or distortion, destroy his image in the vandalism of hate. These are idolatries of substitution or replacement. An idol is an image of a person or category of persons whose subjectivity or actuality has been emptied by blind aspiration for an aesthetic ideal (one that is usually sexist or racist in character). An idol is a removal of the object it (mis)represents from the ordinary sphere of the human and a promotion of its material power and appearance to that of a god. At the same time, idols in human form are necessarily spiritless and so diminish the human by its representation as no more than a material state. To take but one example, although worship of a perfected female appearance can bring considerable material reward to women who model rather than embody the human, the immediate consequence of constantly, almost compulsively, reproducing its image is that those whose image substantially fails to approximate to that of the impossible ideal are placed in the category of appearances that are less than normatively human. Women are particularly susceptible to either cultural idolization or cultural invisibility (both are forms of disappearance) because they do not have the social power of selfrepresenting subjects who name reality for themselves and on their own terms. It is necessary, then, to change Hermann Cohen’s Kantian reading of the Second Commandment ‘Thou shalt not make an image of the moral subject’ into ‘Thou shalt only make an image of the moral subject’. Only images of the human that intend to be images of instantiated spirit are images that defer to the divine image in the human. In this context, the rabbinic aesthetic of the ‘slashed nose’ or damaged face remains pertinent as a timely rebuke to hubristic idolatry. But it is also a highly ambiguous one. On the one hand, the aesthetic is too punitive; an incitement to vandalism. The broken, dehumanized image of the Jew replicates history’s assault on the Jewish face (recall the Nazi assaults on male Orthodox Jewish

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faces by Nazis tearing, burning or hacking off their beards, intent on demonstrating that the Jewish face was a subhuman face). Because the human body is already damaged by a history of murderous abjection and assault (including that futile contemporary struggle against time to perfect the naturally imperfect body), its image surely does not have to be broken again to be permissible; to inaugurate justice. A theological aesthetic of dereliction alone would compound the disappearance of European Jewry and the apparent absence of God as they went from view. In this sense the anti-aesthetic of the broken and the incomplete more properly describes the appalling rigours of Jewish history than its eschatological resolution. Moreover, the image of Jewish women needs no erasure or diminution as the sexualization of the Jewish female body as a seductive, dangerous spectacle whose redeeming virtue is its modesty, has already powerfully discouraged its representation. On the other hand, less literally understood, an image of the broken body is an antidote to the idolatry of physical perfection as the highest human attainment. Granted, physical perfection was once a qualification for the priestly office of cultic holiness, but in the prophetic cast of mind redemptive figures are themselves sacrificially broken, suffering bodies that are a visual rebuke and judgment on the human aspiration to omnipotence. The visual brokenness of the body forbids the imago dei from over-extending itself. Images of the body should not be accorded power over others by commanding and subjugating the desire of the spectator who wants that body to yield to their own desire. Rather, counter-idolatrous images of the body command compassionate love and the will to restitutionary justice to all bodies. The Servant of Isaiah 53 (more familiar in Christian terminology as ‘the Suffering Servant’) presents just such an image to view. The Servant has ‘no form or beauty, that we should look at him: no charm that we should find him pleasing’. This is ‘a man of suffering, familiar with disease. As one who hid his face from us, he was despised, we held him of no account. Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing, our suffering that he endured’ (vv. 2–5). This ideational image of a suffering body is, by its nature, in conformity with the rabbinic aesthetic of distortion. It is a counter-idolatrous image because it is an image in representative solidarity with all whose pain must be consoled and healed. The Servant could not be further from an image of patriarchal might which, blinded by its own power and glory, refuses to see the different bodies whose invisibility is effectively a social and cultural erasure. Without sacralizing suffering itself, visual images of historical, damaged things are urgent images, insistent on the need for healing and restoration, or in rabbinic and mystical terminology, tikkun olam. A post-Holocaust theology of the broken image, where the tending of the divine image in the human is a means of restoring the human as the subject and object of ethical choice, can draw upon Buber’s later acknowledgment of the role of art in the perfection of relationship, as well as Hermann Cohen’s messianic view of art as properly depicting the world as God wills it to be.

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As noted in Chapter 1 of the present study, the neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen denies the possibility of images of God or the human. Representation of the divine and the human in a monotheistic religion is achieved in poetry, not the plastic arts. Cohen requires art to subject the world to ethical criticism, and the envisioning of its social transformation. Cohen dismisses the merely ornamental character of elite self-representation in art. Instead art has a responsibility to represent proletarian struggle. The aesthetic in the form of ‘the appearance of the good’ infuses ethics with joy. An image of a good deed in the mind’s eye alone is enough to move Cohen to tears.59 Steven Schwarzschild, building on Cohen’s political and intellectual legacy, observes that the radical notion of the eternal delay of the Messiah effectively asserts ‘that the universe is always infinitely different from what God wants it to be and what we must, therefore, make it, insofar as this lies within and perhaps beyond our power’.60 Art in the service of the prophetic imagination is therefore not only a refusal of idolatry, it represents the effects of social sin and judges them; it envisions a state of transformed or mended social and spiritual being which is itself the messianic state. Although Buber’s aesthetic is more sensual than Cohen’s,61 his account of the role of art in the actualization and perfectibility of human life also suggests that the aesthetic can be instrumental to a religious ethic. Certainly, there were occasions when Buber followed Heinrich Graetz and others in rehearsing the conventional argument that Judaism has no tradition of visual art. Even if the post-Emancipation period and the Zionist project promised an efflorescence of Jewish folk or national art, Buber, like other Jewish philosophers, was inclined to Hellenize the visual.62 Buber argues that Judaism is relational, not aesthetic. Its beauty is in relationships, not art.63 Yet Buber is also aware that it has been less a matter of the Second Commandment suppressing art than historico-cultural factors that have deprived Jews of the opportunity to make art.64 In his later work, Buber acknowledges that relation can be perfected by the artist’s transformation of the world from figure to image; from what is seen to what is envisioned.65 Art can be a paradigm for our relation to the world and to persons. For art is the interplay between artist and medium; it is an open encounter that does not bring power but the actualization of the uniqueness of the other. Art is therefore dialogical and, perhaps edging towards the notion that visual images are a token of redemptive presence to the other, a means of overcoming the alienated I-It or subject/object duality. This is, for Buber, ‘the eternal origin of art’, namely, ‘that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a form through him.’ The ‘receptive beholder’ actualizes or brings into being through sight the one who is present before him: ‘The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendour of the confrontation, far more clearly than all the clarity of the experienced world.’66 Buber often uses the verb schauen, a rather stronger term than the English verb ‘to see’ and which makes of sight

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an event in itself. Sight and relation are one moment: ‘as I contemplate [a] tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It.’67 Cohen, Schwarzschild and Buber all ascribe art a significant role in the actualization of just, authentic relation. In particular, for Schwarzschild, the image of the broken, alienated or oppressed body might be a messianic sign that God’s glory is yet to come. In the meantime, the image is shattered or partial because the creative process has not been restored by justice and completed by redemption. When innocent suffering is vindicated, redemption will be a visual spectacle of exaltation visible from one end of the earth to another. Thus Isaiah 66:18: ‘I will gather all nations and tongues and they shall come and see my glory.’ It is then that the world ‘shall see what has not been told them, shall behold what they have never heard’ (v. 15). Idolatrous blindness is the sin of making everything but the powerful subject invisible. An idolatrous culture’s refusal to see and acknowledge God’s image in the other – especially when that other is old, disabled or otherwise ‘imperfect’ – is one that lacks aesthetic sensibility. The end recalls and resolves the beginning, so that in a moment of eschatological reversal, the messianic spectacle is one in which all creation is illuminated by divine, not human, glory. What is revealed to sight at the end remembers what was revealed at the beginning, when God created light and rejoiced in what it revealed. God’s first sight of the world as beautiful, matched by the redemptive drive towards tikkun olam, the restoration of the divine image to both God and humanity, demonstrates that art does not only arrest time and thereby thwart the divine purpose; the image can eschatologically conquer time so that what has been loved is not lost forever. Images do not only freeze their object as Rosenzweig, Levinas and others have feared; they invite responsive meditation that allows one to see and revisit the object they have interpreted anew. An undistorted, but not perfected, image of the body anticipates and remembers the original beauty of creation and the eschatological beauty of its restoration. Anything less, or more, would be an act of ingratitude for God’s presentation of beauty as an offering of love for a world just-born.

Chapter 3

What does a Jewish Woman Look Like? Gender and Images of Jews in Art

Since the early 1980s feminist theorists have been sharply critical of the patriarchal fetishization of the written text, regarding the logocentric ‘reading’ of the world as text as a derogation of the practical, embodied, ‘female’ pleasures and obligations that support relationships in families and communities. At the same time, modern philosophy’s reliance on the visual as the pre-eminent evidence of the real has been challenged on the grounds that an essentially ocular way of knowing narrows the range of human knowledge and feeling and produces oppressively objectifying cultures of surveillance, while ignoring the cultural and textual invisibility of women.1 Feminism has questioned the disembodied objectivity of the male, white, all-powerful knower who is lord of all he surveys and has rejected those texts and that have produced and validated his claims to authority as being more dominant than true. The modern patriarchal association of total knowledge with total power is held responsible for the twentieth-century’s floodlit scopic regimes from whose watchtowers horrors have been monitored but not prevented. Post or late modern feminist epistemology acknowledges that all knowledge is perspectival, contingent, partial and provisional, and it celebrates and includes gender difference in its contruction. Theologically, postmodern theories of knowledge entail a rejection of classical theism’s omnivoyant God. Masculine pretensions to omniscience and omnipotence are rejected as a function of the male God’s omnivoyance: like the male elite who are his regents on earth, the supreme Lord has been understandably, if sometimes crudely, caricatured as sitting in solitary autocratic judgment, looking down from heaven on the world he commands. Just as an omnivoyant, omnipotent theism has been associated with an epistemology that dissects, penetrates and exposes things in order to know them, classical Second Wave feminist criticism of the mid-1970s through to the end of the 1980s associated the pre-eminence of the visual in patriarchal culture with a sexualized aesthetic that assesses female appearance as the mere object of male looking. Patriarchal sexuality, premised on a looking that seemed more expressive of dominance than love, was considered alien to the expression

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of female desire. Luce Irigaray famously insisted that, ‘woman takes pleasure more from touching than looking and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation.’2 In more recent years, feminist criticism has been more cognizant of slippages and continuities within gender roles. No longer strictly dichotomized, gender is considered to be performed rather than essential to either men or to women. Not all women are now considered to be the actual or potential victims of men; inequalities of power are all too real but cannot be drawn along lines of gender alone. Against this background of increasingly nuanced feminist criticism, and illustrated by examples drawn from the work of male Jewish artists in the fi rst half of the twentieth century and feminist Jewish artists in the second half of the twentieth century, this chapter will ask how the visible, that, is bodily, appearance of Jewish women and men is seen, construed and regulated in Judaism. While secular feminism may wish to deconstruct dichotomous accounts of gender, Orthodoxy (despite its technical acceptance of an androgynous ‘third sex’, a mystical theosophy whose God is comprised of male and female elements, and the valorization of certain moral and spiritual virtues associated with femininity), adheres to the divine ordination of clearly demarcated sexual difference within a system controlled by men. I want to suggest that the traditional ideational image of the Jewish people as effectively a congregation of men renders men the natural subject of Jewish art and women ‘the movement at the edge of the frame’. For as Peggy Phelan has recently observed, ‘writing about art has traditionally been concerned with that which is interior to the frame’, and feminist writing about art, focussing on the female experience that lies outside the frame of patriarchal interest, historiography and representation, ‘has tried, with varying degrees of success, to forge a language alert to the movement at the edge of the frame’.3 Phelan’s methodological observation about how feminists write about art, read in the different context of Jewish feminist theology, suggests that Jewish women might have a different aesthetic arising from their positioning as those whose religious vision is partial and who are only partially visible to men: who see and are seen through the actual and figurative aperture of the mehitzah or screen that traditionally divides the sexes during communal worship; whose sacral labour is not that of listening or reading and who is the speaking subject of neither religious text nor word. Yet the question of how women might see ‘Jewishly’ – the gendering of Jewish aesthetics as such – is too large a subject for one chapter of a book. Instead, I will address the gendering of Jewish aesthetics by focussing on the production, or more precisely, the suppression of the female image, arguing that where the appearance of the (male) religious Jew has become, in post-Holocaust western culture particularly, both loosely and precisely speaking iconic – an embodiment and medium of the Jewish sublime; women’s appearance is not only non-iconic, in its affinities to idolatrous

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images of false gods, a women’s phenomenality as a Jew is suppressed or may even be unknowable. It should, of course, be noted from the outset that in some respects Judaism’s representational reluctance has served Jewish women quite well. The Jewish God is not incarnated in the body of a male saviour. Theologically, too, in the first of Genesis’s stories about the creation of humanity, God first reveals God-self to the world by creating the human – male and female – in God’s own image (Gen. 1:27). And because God has no body, even if God’s image in the human is physically imprinted or refracted, it is neither a picture of a man nor of a woman. And if, historically, before the rise of feminism, Jewish women were only rarely the makers of figurative art,4 they have not been Jewish art’s passive, nude objects. That having been said, there seems little doubt that gender distorts the symmetry of Jewish looking. My claim is that when, in cultic terms, men look at women, the interpretative range of their seeing is different to that of the Jewish women looking back at them. When Jewish men see a woman – even an observant woman – they see a figure whose spectacle or phenomenality shares in some important respects the attributes of an idol and therefore it is better not to look at her or represent her at all. Yet when women (and men) look at a Jewish man they see a representative Jew. In other words, the question of the visual in Judaism; the question of what is, in the widest sense, a public Jewish appearance is gender inflected. And to that extent, negotiation with the Second Commandment – with the nature and permissibility of images – is also gender-inflected. The meaning of the Second Commandment is prefaced by the First Commandment to worship no other gods but God: images are problematic not because they are idols, but because they can readily become so if they are wrongly perceived. If made or misused as objects of worship, whether as representations of another god or as the god itself, God will be quasi-sexually jealous and angry: ‘You shall have no others gods besides Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I the Lord your God am an impassioned God . . .’ (Ex. 20:3–5). The purpose of the fi rst part of this chapter is to show that images of women – whether rendered as pictures or as the actual physical object of male vision – are associated with the natural, sexual dispensation of paganism in such a way as to foster religious hostility and anxiety. Images of women are more susceptible to becoming idolatrous than those of men simply because women are considered natural and sexuate in ways that men are not, and without sacral responsibilities to the conduct of law and worship, they are ‘natural’: inherently unclothed by tradition’s priestly costumes that signify not only men’s obedience to Torah but their inhabitation of Torah. Whereas virtuous female bodies are modestly covered and known only to

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their husbands, an image displays itself to its public. If there is something inherently immodest in the publicity of an image, then an image of a woman is doubly so.

Chaos and the spectacle of female embodiment Let us begin in the characteristically Jewish way, with a story: the well-known biblical story of the Golden Calf (in Hebrew Chet ha’Egel – the Sin of the Calf), including its less familiar ending: a peculiarly sadistic episode of mass-killing. In Exodus 32, when Moses does not come down from Sinai, the people lose hope and interest in his leadership. He has been away too long and they abandon his dispensation. Under the leadership of Aaron, they remove their gold jewellery and it is fashioned into the form of a calf. An altar is built before the Golden Calf. Early next day, the people arise and make sacrifices to the idol and then settle down to a feast. They then rise to dance, or in some more ominous translations, to ‘play’ (Ex. 32:1–6). Moses comes down from the mountain in full knowledge of the people’s betrayal. Seeing the people dancing, Moses shatters the stone tablets that have been ‘inscribed by the finger of God’, for what place has the word of divine law in an orgy? But Moses goes further. In his rage, he also burns the Golden Calf and grinds its ashes into a powder that he then scatters upon water. The people are then forced to drink these bitter waters (Ex. 32:20). Their divinely ordained punishment is death: three thousand of the men in the camp are to be killed by Levites, their kin and their neighbours, who by doing so will surely no longer wish to live (Ex. 32:27–28). Just for good measure, God sends a plague upon the survivors, ‘for what they did with the calf that Aaron made’. Nicolas Poussin’s Dance Around the Golden Calf (c. 1633–4) offers a striking commentary on Exodus 32. Here the women dance with the men and, in their abandon, the women’s clothes slip from their shoulders to reveal their backs and breasts. Poussin paints Aaron with one hand pointing to the calf and the other hand pointing to his eyes, suggesting that the great bull, the flowers, the female bodies configure into a visual carnival that we should not look upon since such spectacles of lawless pleasure bring corruption and death.5 Poussin’s interpretation of the story of the Golden Calf is a good illustration of one of gender studies’ foundational observations, namely that religions, especially theistic ones, configure female sexuality and the chaos, amorality and mortality of nature as a vicious circle – in Poussin’s work, literally a circle of vice spiralling into the pit. Dance Around the Golden Calf warns that the sin of idolatry is the cause and the result of surrender to female sexuality. The people are naked: the sons of Aaron have shed the priestly vestments that have only just been bestowed on them as a consecration to God’s service and that were to be sacred heirlooms passed through the Aaron’s male line. Now the

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Figure 1 Nicolas Poussin, Dance Around the Golden Calf (c. 1633–4), oil on canvas, 153.4 ⫻ 211.8 cm, with permission of The National Gallery, London.

people have reverted to nature; they have chosen orgiastic revelry over fidelity to God and Moses. So, warns the narrative, Israel begins its descent into the mayhem and cacophany of mass death. Poussin’s sexualization of idolatry is a visual reiteration of that of the biblical prophets where ‘idolatry is a sin within a system of interpersonal relationships, a sin analogous to those committed with respect to other people, such as betrayal and disloyalty’. In the Hebrew Bible, whose rejection of idolatry is the central theological principle, the relationship between God and Israel is cast as an exclusive marital relationship governed by expectations and rules concerning permitted and forbidden sexual relations. The sinfulness of idolatry is therefore conveyed by the metaphor of adultery. Idolatry is conceived and imaged by the prophets Hosea, Jeremiah and Ezekiel (as in others parts of the Pentateuch) in terms of Israel, the wife of God, violating the marriage by having sexual relations with another man or with a number of men. Extramarital sex is equated with false worship. As in Exodus 34:15–16, to worship other gods is to lust for them. The Hebrew verb for ‘lust’, zanu, means, literally, ‘to have sinful sexual relations’.6 God is then cast as the betrayed husband, torn by conflicting emotions of humiliation, rage, grief and longing for his beloved wife’s return.7

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In Hosea, Israel has treated sexual love as no more than the source and price of material goods. She has spurned God’s provision for her needs, thinking she can do better by prostituting herself for goods supplied by her lovers. Israel has sold herself to the highest bidder. Yet God sustains all and no one and nothing can outbid his power and providence. Therefore Israel will be compelled to return to him, and he will renew their love to be as it was at the very beginning. Even so, the reunion will not take place before she is horribly punished for her infidelity. Rather differently, in Ezekiel 16, God finds Israel when she is an abandoned baby girl lying naked, bleeding and filthy in an open field. He fosters her with great care and tenderness and when she grows into a beautiful woman, he falls in love with her and marries her. Yet she ungratefully exploits her fame and beauty and uses the magnificent gifts he has bestowed upon her to attract other men to have sex with her and to engage in violent and orgiastic rituals. So insatiable is Israel’s lust for anyone but her husband that she will even pay for sex or spurn her fee. Ezekial figures Israel’s political and devotional infidelity to the covenant pornographically as the spectacle (degrading to both participant and witness) of a woman having public indiscriminate sex. On platforms set up at crossroads and in public squares, he rages, ‘You spread your legs to every passerby’ (Ezek. 16:23–25).8 Where once, years before, God had tenderly covered her abject nakedness with his robe and, as she grew up, adorned her with the embroidered silks, and linens, rings, bracelets, nose-ring, earrings and crown that were the tokens of his love (Ezek. 16:10–12), now, in her desire for other men/gods Israel removes her finery and displays herself for all to see. In the very act of showing herself, she ceases to be his and becomes the property of all men. Fornicating with phallic images she has had cast from the gold and silver God had bestowed upon her (16:17) she places herself under the dominion of other religious dispensations, possessed by other gods. Numerous feminist biblical commentators and theologians have critiqued the evident misogyny of the prophetic marital trope in its conception and expression. And it must be asked of Ezekiel’s account in particular, whether God is actually morally implicated as merely the first to exploit the sexuality of Israel – a vulnerable girl. Perhaps it was precisely by the exercise of his own lust, by his own objectifying adornment of her body, that he himself turned her into an object of public desire. But without rehearsing familiar and entirely justified feminist criticism of prophetic misogyny in the Hebrew Bible, it is necessary to emphasize here that it is not female sexuality as such, but the public spectacle of female sexuality that is interpreted by the prophets as the invitation to idolatry and the act of idolatry. The Bible offers ample evidence of women’s being suggestible to idolatry. In Genesis 31:19, Rachel is clearly so attached to her father’s teraphim or small household idols, probably in the form of goddess figurines, that she steals them from him when she leaves with Jacob. When Laban comes looking for

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the images, Rachel hides them in a cushion and sits on them, pretending to be menstruating, safe in the knowledge that no one would risk defilement by looking underneath her. (Unfortunately, her quick-thinking was to justify patriarchal doubts about the religious probity of women: after Rachel, a man need only look under women’s clothes and there will remain the old, impure, natural pagan dispensation, merely hidden from view.) Broadly speaking, the Bible regards women who are the foreign wives of Israelites as a particularly baleful religious influence (Ex. 34:16), Solomon’s gradual slide into the paganism of his many foreign wives being a case in point (I Kg. 11:1–8). The Bible’s rebuke to women for baking cakes in the image of the Canaanite Queen of Heaven, pouring libations to her (Jer. 7:18, 44:19) and practising other such pagan rites has, down the centuries, provided further evidence that women prefer a ‘low’ syncretism to ‘high’ monotheism. While these women’s religious shortcomings are regarded as symptomatic of the spiritual corruption against which Israel must be vigilant, it would nonetheless be inaccurate to say that Jewish tradition regards all Jewish women as more prone to idolatry than men. After all, rabbinic tradition generally apportions blame primarily to the men, not the women, for the golden calf debacle. Women did not offer their gold jewellery to the casting of the calf and were later more willing than men to contribute valuable materials and skills to the building of the Tabernacle that was a sign that Israel had atoned for the sin of the calf.9 The problem is more ontological than historical. The classical rabbinic construction of the female body defines women as essentially physical and sexual – her body lacks the ontological complexity of the male body.10 Anticipating the Greek philosophical dualism that was to become pervasive in Jewish philosophy, the female is matter to the male soul or form.11 An important consequence of this essential materiality is that women are a visual phenomenon in a way that men, as essentially spirit, are not. This is not to re-state the more general point that female physicality is congenitally profane in relation to the theistic sacred. Rather, it is to say that because matter is, a priori, the visible, and seeing occasions desire for attractive material things, the visual, material presence that is female embodiment (indeed women can be little more than body) must be regulated or hidden. In the category of flesh (gashmiut) a woman’s form is an essentially and necessarily spectated entity. Without ruach (it is men who are categorized in terms of spirit – ruhniut) ‘woman’ is dark or opaque; not quite or fully a person. Her being an essentially sexual object of sexual desire lends her the properties of an idol: she represents the dis-location of religious attention from its proper spiritual object – the living God – to one that brings death. In being the material object of the male gaze a woman shares some of what is morally and spiritually objectionable about idols. Both are objects of a need that grants them a power they do not morally or ontologically deserve: beautified by cosmetics and finery, they are natural or crafted surfaces without agency. Actual women, or at

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least virtuous ones, are, of course, not idols but are loved wives and mothers, daughters and sisters. But ontologically or generically, they draw men’s attention away from God’s presence, especially in worship, towards the finitude of nature. In any sharply dualistic distinction between spirit and flesh (and not all Jewish discourse does make such a distinction) there is a danger that matter will make itself attractive to spirit. If women are construed as, essentially, an appeal to the senses, especially sight, then they pose a pollutant threat to the spirit that extends beyond the sexual into the onto-theological. If the tradition regards idolatry as ‘the natural state of man’12 and women are natural in ways that men are not, then the lure of the female body is also the lure of the natural state: a reversion to paganism. The gods of the land, nature itself, must be subdued into an instrument of God’s will and promise. Israel’s conquest of the land is also the conquest of its own sexuality. In the heated relational terms of the prophets, the sight of a woman tempts Israel into a betrayal of love – a turning away from the eternity of God to the finitude of nature. (The connection between iconophobia and gynophobia suggests that traditional Judaism has more ascetic and dualistic view of female sexuality than a number of semi-popular contemporary Orthodox readings of its sexual theology would admit.)13 A significant instance of how the gendering of ontological difference situates women in the sphere of natural things is that Jewish status passes through the mothers because she is the visible bearer of the child, whereas the father is an abstracted or spiritualized inference. As Lyotard puts it in his article ‘Figure Foreclosed’, ‘The father is a voice not a figure. He is not initially situated in the visible world.’ ‘Here we have something quite Jewish: a blatant overestimation of the father, the position of his invisibility, and his relationship with the word.’14 Knowledge of God and a sense of God’s presence require not looking or watching, but hearing alone. God is not situated in the visible world as a natural object, but nor, in some important respects, are men because both ontologically and by historical invitation, men embody the world of the spirit. As we shall see, the male embodiment of spirit is not a contradiction in terms. It is what permits the representation of male religious Jews in art: their religious dress and activity situates them in the visible world but also signal that the male body is not a fully natural object. An image of a male Jew is therefore, in fact, not properly an image. For the appearance of a male Jew points beyond itself to what cannot be imaged, namely spirit. And in so far as the image of an observant man is a visible material object there is no risk that it can be worshipped because it shows a man already worshipping the only thing that can be worshipped: the one true God. A woman, however, is visibly situated in the world as a natural object of natural desire and this lends her body affinities to idols that may be said to capture the problem and essence of her otherness; her affinity to the miscegenatory chaos that historians of religion generally regard as the symbolic and moral essence of the female problematic. In

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Judaism, idolatry is the paradigmatic sin of sins and therefore the first cause of any reversion to the social and cosmic chaos of a world unordered by Torah. In The Power of Images, David Freedberg notes, very much in passing, that there is parallel to be drawn between idols and ‘the dangerous and seductive effects ascribed to women’.15 This is because women are believed ‘to embody the essence of the arousal of the senses; as a result they distract from the higher functions of the mind and impede its upward strivings’.16 Elaborating on Freedberg, men may be susceptible to women’s charms in the same way as they are quasi-sexually susceptible to the seductions of idolatry. But unlike men, women are not sexually seduced by idols (that would assume an ontological differentiation between themselves as subjects and idols as objects). Their attraction to idols is rather a deficiency of taste and education, manifest in their putative love of adornment.17 Patriarchal theism regards women, children and the illiterate as more susceptible than the male elite to the ‘base and easy charms’ of images. Women (and poor and ill-educated men) are easily seduced by vulgar, gaudy, cheap beauty, while mature, educated male beholders are offended by it.18 Both rabbinic Judaism and patristic Christianity fuse intellectual and social elitism with sexism in their polemics against idolatry. According to Tertullian, women dressed in bright colours exert a gaudy appeal to those for whom God is not Word; to those who are foreigners to the mentality and discipline of the ascetic. The real truth is in words and books. The poor and the illiterate, especially, but not only, women, need devotional images that all too easily become idols. But the faith of the elite is that of pure reason and spirit and therefore does not or should not require images.19 In Jewish discourse, while male appearance may be material, its materiality is permeable to and vitalized by ruach. Female appearance, however, is a necessary or a priori function of its own gashmiut or fleshly materiality. An attractive appearance is a peculiarly feminine form of power that is not necessarily indicative of moral goodness because it is either merely natural or, worse, it is a work of artifice that simulates the natural. An attractive female appearance wields an amoral, natural power over men because it elicits their desire not only for sexual gratification but also for finitude, which imposes no transcendental demand. That is why looking at women can be hazardous to men’s moral and spiritual resolve (as in BT Sanhedrin 75a). The visuality of the female form, especially when decorated and paraded before men, is an agent of chaos because, like the sexual or natural spectacle of paganism, it threatens men’s fidelity to that ordered legitimate relationship to which they are already covenanted. The association of female display with religious promiscuity and death surely drives the rhetorical hyperbole of the rabbinical opinion that it is ‘better to walk behind a lion than a woman’ (and better to walk behind a woman than an idol) (Eruvin 18b) for walking behind a woman would permit a man to look freely at the woman without her being aware of it or endeavouring to avoid

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his gaze. The rabbis also invested the sight of female flesh, perhaps more than the flesh itself, with impurity, and the rabbinic midrash on Numbers 31:50 warns that anyone who gazes at the little finger of a woman, it is as if he were gazing at the filthy place (makom ha-toref ).20 Such views are not foreign to modern Jewish thought either. This figuration of the female as a quasi-anal conduit into darkness is, I think, what Levinas is getting at, when, he defi nes the eroticism of the feminine as the ‘dark abyss’21 – a swallowing up of light, death’s blindness: the suffocation and total loss of a grave without end.22 While the prohibition of idolatry is fully defensible on a number of religioethical grounds, it is problematic when it is located in a misogynistic sexualization of the female body as an agent of adulteration: the adulteration of relationships between men and women and between God and Israel. This view of femaleness as an agent of adulteration has, in large part, prompted Second Wave Jewish and Christian feminism’s prophetic call for the tradition’s affi rmation of the full humanity of women. Moreover, the Second Commandment is patriarchal not when it fears and grieves a betrayal of God’s trust, but in so far as it is a means of eliminating any divine or human competition to God who, under the logic of monotheism, can have no rivals. Patriarchal fear of idols, as opposed to their moral and spiritual rejection, precipitates acts of violent iconoclasm or erasure in which all rival images of the gods must be made to disappear. In the Bible, whatever beautiful things visually mark the presence of the gods and summon the disorder of festive assembly – the gods’ pillars, altars, poles or trees – must be mocked, torn down, smashed and destroyed (Ex. 34:13–14). In other words, iconoclasm can indiscriminately destroy the natural at the same time as it destroys religious untruth. Again, it hardly needs to be said that there are very good philosophical, ethical and theological reasons to prevent visual incitements to worship. And no Jewish theology, however radical, can advocate the direct representation of God in a natural form and still call itself Jewish. But there are less laudable patriarchal reasons for removing God from the sphere of the visual and for the rabbis permitting only the word to reveal God in an infinity of words. Patriarchal reasons for prohibiting images of God can seem more ideological than religious when they sacralize patriarchy’s own hierarchy of the seeing over the seen and make God pre-eminent over both. Under patriarchy, God must be withdrawn from the visual because to see God and then to represent God would be to confine God to the blind, abject state of that which is seen but cannot see. God cannot be imaged as that would render him a finite and knowable object; his image might even be less splendid or handsome than that of other gods. No one can see God and live (though, in the biblical text, glimpses might be caught of his back). Theologically, this is because he is pure creative energy but it may also be because seeing (through) something is a form of demystification. ( Just as at the end of the film The Wizard of Oz there

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is the overwhelming disappointment of seeing that the great wizard is just a little old man hiding behind a flimsy wall with no more than a few buttons and levers as the instruments of his will.) To be the patriarchal Lord, God must be omnipotent, omniscient and free. The patriarchal God must therefore be modelled as omnivoyant: seeing and therefore knowing and controlling all, but seen by none. Yet if God’s omnivoyance is a logical function of his role as Creator, Lord and Judge, Judaism itself is or has become theologically indifferent to the visual. To that extent, feminist criticism of western philosophy’s disembodied, ocularcentric epistemologies and of western aesthetics’ voyeuristic objectifying gaze cannot be comprehensively applied to Jewish culture. For in Jewish culture, severance from the visual is, in my view, central to a patriarchal bid for freedom from the heteronomy of nature: embodiment, desire and death. A Jewish repudiation or denigration of the visual in favour of the auditory word read or heard as text is a bid for the moral freedom of men from the powerful demands of their own embodiment, captive, as it is, to the sexual lure of female embodiment. And since it is a defining characteristic of patriarchal culture that it looks at or watches women as a sexual performance, Jewish women can hardly avoid an association of some sort with idols. If looking at the image of a Jewish woman arouses desire then either the man or the image must be controlled. Religious law does, of course, socialize and regulate male desire, but the Jewish patriarchal sexualization of female embodiment as a natural or pagan spectacle does more to control the female image that awakens desire than it does to control the male viewer. The female spectacle is controlled by ‘dis-appearing’ it.

The hiding of the female image in Jewish religious culture Laura Mulvey’s classic theory of the viewer has shaped feminist theorization of the visual. Mulvey’s original argument, from her own perspective as a film theorist, was that the male, active, knowing gaze is directed in appreciation or indifference onto the passive female object of the gaze. A woman is reified as a mere thing or scene but is not herself the looking subject. The spectator is fundamentally masculine in the optical geometry of patriarchal culture. It is quite some time since Mulvey first articulated her argument and inevitably her binary opposition between the male viewer and his female object has been challenged. Feminist theorists, including Mulvey herself, have more recently elucidated a field or multiplicity of gazes in complex interrelation with one another, including women enjoying looking at other women, or women identifying or empathizing with the women who are the object of her gaze rather than reifying them.23 Even so, women continue to be simply looked at as a more or less successfully decorative spectacle to a far greater degree than men,

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who are still generally evaluated more in terms of their status rather than their looks. Orthodox Judaism may seem to further complicate Mulvey’s classic account of patriarchal visual geometry as situating the female as the passive object of the male gaze. For on the one hand the Jewish woman is not supposed to be the object of the male Jewish gaze. But on the other hand, the hiding of women from the male gaze presupposes that she is an object of the male gaze, but should not be. Reversing the customary gendered order of viewer and viewed, it is men, as the religious actors, who should and do constitute the public spectacle of Judaism, not the women. Should women constitute a public spectacle on their own account, it is an occasion of communal shame. In Jewish communities, sexual segregation intensified from the end of the third century of the common era and the laws of sexual segregation in worship and other social situations are still observed to varying degrees in Orthodox communities. Sexual segregation ensures that women are hidden from sight (therefore disabling their own vision) behind the mehitzah – the wall, gauze curtain, screen or balcony rail – that separates women from men in Orthodox synagogues. At Ultra-Orthodox public social occasions, the mehitzah also prevents the mingling of men and women or men seeing women dance at festive events such as weddings. (If Jews have disappeared through dispersal and assimilation, murderous persecution, and their own proclivity towards abstraction, how much more, then, have Jewish women against whose vision and visibility has the mehitzah been erected.) So Judaism does not so much disprove Mulvey’s theory as reverse it. It is men who are the (contingent, not necessary) objects of the female gaze. Depending on the height, angle and density of the mehitzah, the male Jew, as religious actor, becomes the object of the female gaze from behind the mehitzah. If women have traditionally watched or glimpsed the public religious spectacle through the mehitzah, then Judaism may be far more of a visual phenomenon for women than it is for men since it is traditionally men who are the potential or actual actors within the congregational spectacle rather than its audience. It is they who are dressed for the religious occasion, not women, whose costume, being secular, is not a costume at all. For most of Jewish history women have listened to, or overheard, the male conversation that constitutes Torah. The Shema – the foundational prayer of Judaism – bids Israel to hear, that is, to obey the precepts of monotheism. But listening, a definitively Jewish posture of openness to revelation and humility before God, is already a female virtue and a definitively female experience of Judaism. Until very recently, women’s voices were not heard in prayer, homiletics, textual interpretation or halakhic judgment. Although Orthodox women now study selected aspects of Torah in unprecedented numbers and sometimes to very advanced levels, it remains the custom that women do not cantillate or interpret Torah with or for men, and Torah remains a series of texts in

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which women are not speaking subjects. It is not that women have no role in Judaism’s sacral economy, but theirs is a domestic one in which the transmission of tradition is through the induction of young children into Jewishness. In so far as Judaism is a religion of the word and text, a woman is not an interlocutor with Israel (speech passing from one to the other as equals) nor is she God’s allocutor (the one who is addressed). Just as when Sarah, eavesdropping at the entrance to the tent (Gen. 18:10) overhears the conversation between God and Abraham and when women, kept at some distance from the holy mountain (Ex. 19:15), might at best have overheard snatches of the conversation between God and Moses on Sinai carried on the desert wind, Orthodox women watch and hear Judaism through a barrier to the senses whose symbolic power extends beyond the sphere of worship and into the possibility of their image-ination; the possibility of their being visibly permeable to ruach. There is a complex intrication between the religious invisibility and inaudibility of women in Jewish tradition. Women are bound by the laws of kol isha where to hear women sing or audibly pray is, significantly, considered ervah (nakedness) because it is a lure to sin. Without any liturgical function, the female voice is not an instrument of devotion; it is an essentially immodest secular vehicle of light-minded gossip or sexual temptation (BT Berakhot 24a). Just as idols are mute things, lacking either receptive or communicative functions, women too are unable to transmit a tradition. Of course, women are not to be crudely equated with idols but as gashmiut – flesh – they too are mute and non-transmissive of truth. Jewish aesthetics – how Jews see and hear Judaism – is, then, profoundly gendered. Orthodoxy, for example, rejects choirs on the grounds that worship punctuated by singing would become no more than a virtuoso performance in which the sense of active participation is lost. 24 But in rejecting the performative dimension of worship, Orthodoxy forgets that for women, even those contemporary Orthodox women who have high levels of Jewish and secular education, congregational worship, from the gallery, is already theatre. To a degree dependent on the angle and density of the mehitzah, the men cannot usually see the women as well as the women can see them. But that does not matter. It is more or less irrelevant whether the sight of men at prayer distracts women from their devotion or not; it is only female performance – both visual and auditory that is a halakhic problem. When the late Menachem Schneerson, the spiritual leader of the Lubavitch Hasidim (Chabad), appeared in his shul in New York, women strove to get a mere glimpse of him. In a crowded shul and up in the women’s section, he was not easy to see. As one woman told the ethnographer Stephanie Wellen Levine, ‘ “If ya wanna see, ya gotta push.” I tried, lamely, stunned to be getting a lesson in assertiveness from a middle-aged Hasidic woman. “Harder,” she admonished, and I fell into the rhythm of the women and girls surrounding

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Judaism and the Visual Image me. Clawing my way to the front, I carved a tiny niche for myself by the window offering a view, far below, of the men’s section of this Hasidic synagogue. I glimpsed the group’s religious leader, the Rebbe: the goal of this shoving game.’ When the Rebbe died, ‘there was no longer a reason to gaze at the men’s section’, most of the women recited the service quietly to themselves, without seeing the public ritual going on below.25

While the sight of the Rebbe was a matter of some spiritual excitement among the women, the female spectacle constitutes a sexual distraction (it is one of the reasons why women do not have a public role in worship). But women’s own religious experience in synagogue is of little or no legal concern. Exempt from most time-bound prayer, women are not usually, in any case, obligated to attend. The physical mehitzah, which leaves women the incidental spectators of the public religious spectacle, is just one manifestation of the spiritual mehitzah that hides the female image from view. More basic to the suppression of female appearance are the laws and customs of tznius (modesty or privacy). Of course tznius is meta-gendered in so far as it is not only concerned with the hemline of women’s skirts or the thickness of their tights, but is a general virtue encompassing humility as a proper spiritual and behavioural demeanour for men as well as women (see Micah 6:8). Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men in particular also observe modesty of dress and do not wear shorts or short-sleeved shirts in public. Yet the prescriptive range of tznius is far wider for women and girls than for men and boys. The Shulchan ’Aruch expects girls to observe tznius from the age of three years and a day. Tznius encompasses female sanctity of behaviour as well as demeanour and modesty of dress. Women and girls should not draw attention to themselves (especially their bodies) by their appearance, demeanour or voice. The virtuous woman is essentially private in her manner and activity, not public (as in Psalm 45:14, where ‘the glory of the daughter of the king lies within’).26 But female segregation from men extends beyond places of worship and education. For Haredi Jews, the purity of Israel is in large part preserved by women’s separation from non-familial men and boys in the community.27 Female Tznius effects a peculiarly female redemption: it is the way that women liberate the imprisoned sparks of the divine from the profane and so hasten the coming of the Messiah. More immediately, women’s reputations can be tarnished by even the most minor infringements of tznius. Even if, among themselves, Lubavitch girls are relatively uninhibited, it remains the case that for women, modesty or ‘privacy is the epitome of holiness’.28 It would be an exaggeration to say that tznius makes women disappear. Orthodoxy does not exclude women from the secular public sphere and Jewish women are not removed from view by seclusion or veiling (though, historically, Jewish diasporas in the Islamic world have differed slightly in this regard to those within Christendom). Even among the Orthodox, some women

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negotiate the conflicting dictates of fashion and modesty more punctiliously than others. Only Haredi married women cover their own hair at all times in public and around the house, and although their (secular) mode of dress is irreproachably modest, their wrists, shins, ankles, neck and face remain visible. It is undeniable, then, that even the most observant women are a visible presence in the community, even if not a widely photographed one.29 Yet even the most confident Jewish identity may not help a woman to negotiate the question of what a female Jewish religious appearance should be. As Shuly Rubin Schwartz’s study of the Rebbetzin in America reports, for a rabbi’s wife to be too modish is to be frivolous; to be indifferent to style labels her as dowdy. She should dress smartly, but never compromise her spiritual standing in the community by excessive attention to dress. 30 So too, even with a religious dress-code dictated by tznius, ultra-Orthodox women have no clear religio-aesthetic ideal to conform to. This means that not even ultra-Orthodox women are immune to the wider cultural pressure on women to become a desirable surface. Wellen Levine finds that young hasidic women combine a depth of mystical piety and religious commitment with a far from indifferent attitude to their appearance. In the Bais Rivka girls’ school in Crown Heights, an institution without mirrors, the girls resent the rule that shirts have to be tucked in as this makes large stomachs more noticeable. By the time girls enter the search for a marriage partner, many have developed a heightened interest in designer clothes, make-up and weight reduction. (Occasionally hasidic girls develop eating disorders.) Levine reports that all the girls know that Crown Heights boys place beauty ‘high on their list of priorities for a wife’.31 But these religious women are not in search for a standardized secular beauty that would alienate them from their Jewishness: ‘Many of them are beautiful, but in a way that acknowledges the neshama, the Jewish soul.’32 This seems significant: it is ultra-Orthodox women who seem, alone of all groups of Jewish women, to explicitly seek to inscribe a spiritual tradition into their faces. They aspire to an image that is disclosive of what they refer to, idiomatically, as ‘the neshama’. But perhaps an acknowledgment of ‘the neshama’ as the spiritual and historical anchor of a woman’s face – a mere nod to its Jewishness – is not quite enough. For tznius renders the privacy or modesty of Jewish women as an opacity of being that precludes knowing what a Jewish woman actually looks like. Tznius is central to the construction of female materiality as that which cannot be revealed as an image to men because, as a type of moral pit or darkness, it is not a normative image of God. Femaleness should therefore not be given a visible image lest it be mistaken for an idol. Tznius begins as a moral category, but ends as an ontological one. Tznius indicates the need to hide the sexuate female body from public view. Yet the laws concerning female modesty are therefore more than just a means to limit the attraction of female sexuality. Because the problem of the idol epitomizes the problem of the visual image in Judaism, the laws and customs of female modesty are at the same

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time a function of the regulation and denigration of idolatry, the sin of all sins. Where tznius corrects an ontological flaw or lack in women, namely that they, like idols, are an essentially visual, material lure, it prescribes a form of female hiddenness or partial visibility. Female holiness requires female invisibility. An image of a holy woman is an image of an absence; it is self-erasing. What is perhaps surprising is that the self-erasing nature of the female Jewish image extends from the public spaces of Orthodox Judaism (as part of the regulation of idolatry) into the public, secularized spaces of modern Jewish culture. I have so far suggested that there is a link to be made between modesty – the hiding of the female form – and the preservation of monotheism. Men must turn away from sight of a woman because looking at women can cause licentiousness or marital infidelity, just as the image of a false god causes us to turn away from God, often to engage in forms of worship considered orgiastic or licentious. The prophetic warning is that if men do not turn their faces away from idols, but continue to lust after them, then God will turn his face from them (hester panim) and the people will not flourish. This Jewish tendency to place powerful things out of sight extends into theological discourse from the biblical period to the post-Holocaust era where the hiddenness of God has been a recurrent theme. (Like a virtuous woman, God keeps himself out of sight, unfigurable, inferred or modest.) It is tempting to suggest that, in the end, men, women and God cannot meet one another’s eyes. When the fear of idolatry overwhelms the development of aesthetic sensibility, revelation can only occur when God hides our face in the crevice of a rock as he passes by (Ex. 33:21–23); when God’s back is turned – that is, in a moment of breaking or caesura in the visual relation between God and the world. But that, perhaps, is another matter.

Sacral images of Jewish men So far we have considered what Jewish men see, or cannot see, when they look at Jewish women. But when women look at men, whose Jewish phenomenality is not suppressed or erased by tznius, the men are not viewed as desirable or duplicitous surfaces but as agents or actors of Jewish tradition. This asymmetry has persisted into the modern period where men remain the paradigmatic object of Jewish art as much as they are the paradigmatic image of Judaism. Since modern technology allowed the mass production of the image and art for art’s own sake became an element of modern Jewish culture, the male Jewish face has been widely reproduced in rabbinic portraiture and figurative paintings. From the nineteenth century onwards, the male (usually Ashkenazic) Jew, looking recognizably Jewish, whether by virtue of his garb or his sublimely Jewish face, has been a permissible object of looking and of two-dimensional undistorted representation. 33 Isidor Kaufmann’s Man With Fur Hat (c. 1910) is a classic example of the genre.

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Figure 2 Isidor Kaufmann, Man With Fur Hat (c. 1910), oil on panel, 41 ⫻ 31 cm, with permission of The Jewish Museum, New York.

In the intentionally Jewish figurative art that is consumed as much by religious Jews as secular, the male Jew at prayer; the male dancing Jew are all types that are produced over and over again to the point of cliché. Richard Cohen suggests that these ‘Jewish icons’, as he calls them, are a symptom of modern Jewish nostalgia for a lost world of piety.34 The representation of a male Jew in religious dress invests him with the collective power of tradition, but it also renders him, far more precisely than Cohen might suppose, a Jewish icon. For what I am arguing here is that the image of God in the human really only becomes imaginable as a male image. Like icons in the Christian Orthodox tradition, these images are not depictions of God but are translucent to the image of God in the human, here, normatively, a Jewish male. Precisely contrary to the idol, these images are paintable and are bought by Jews because they define the Jewish posture in relation to God and properly hypostasize or summarize the appearance of Jewish worship. This is especially so if imaged, as the photographer Roman Vishniac was to do so incomparably well, wearing the picturesquely hasidic garb of streimel (fur hat) and black coat, set against a pure white background of snow. In Vishniac’s images in his published collection A Vanished World,35 religious dress illuminates even the least distinguished

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male face with the light of divine kavod or neshamah, the soulfully Jewish expression. Vishniac’s cast of village fools, street vendors, porters and other Jewish men are no less translucent to the holy than are the eminent scholars. Once Moses begged God, ‘Oh let me behold Your presence!’ God refuses him that – ‘you cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live’ (Ex. 33:18–20). But it is as if God gives Israel the glory of its men to behold instead. These icons are, then, more than a glimpse onto the past. They are normative evocations of male Jewish piety which thereby obviate any concern that the Second Commandment will have been infringed by their representation. There is no need to enforce the Second Commandment or mutilate the image because the Orthodox male figure cannot become an idol. Of course not: according to the First Commandment, the repudiation of idols and the worship of God alone is what purifies and sanctifies a man and makes him a Jew.36 The posture of study and worship and the garments he wears signal that the image of a Jewish man is not an idol, but is that of a religious subject – a Jew – in a priestly line. Rosenzweig, on priestly dress, is right that ‘there is no garment that preserves itself as strictly as the cultic one.’ ‘Dress integrates man into human society’, but ‘the priestly function is the fi rst which can only be performed in a particular costume.’ The priest’s body, first that of cultic Judaism and then Christianity, ‘dispenses with the expression of his personality and dresses according to the rule of the space which unites him with others’. 37 In contrast to the modern racist sexual admiration for the exotic ‘Jewess’,38 Jewish men, especially Hasidim in their impressively antiquated sombre dress, are spiritualized by their otherness, not merely exoticized by it. Ever since Rembrandt painted pictures of Jesus and other biblical figures using the Sepahardi and Ashkenazi Jewish faces he saw in the streets of seventeenthcentury Amsterdam, the iconic beauty of the male Jew in art reminds us that the male Jew is not only an object of gross antisemitic caricature of the sort favoured by cartoonists in the newspapers of the far-right. In modern Jewish figurative art, the male Jew dressed for prayer is the embodiment of positive Jewish difference. As the representative of an ancient tradition, the male Jew in Jewish art and often in the Christian imagination too, can be a romantic figure backlit by patient suffering whose depiction is therefore not wholly unrelated to that of Christ. In this sense, the male Jewish face, Christ’s visual, if not doctrinal, descendent, is twice-sacralized, that is, by Christians as well as by Jews themselves. For Christians who cherish the Jewish roots of their faith, the male Jewish appearance is very far from demonic; it is spiritualized in so far as it bears a family resemblance to that of the Jew Jesus. Bayard Taylor, an American travel writer of the mid-nineteenth century visiting Jerusalem, reports an encounter that illustrates Christianity’s occasional vision of the male Jewish face as an icon of Christ’s: As I set out to walk through the bazaars, I encountered a native Jew, whose face will haunt me for the rest of my life . . . [his eyes] beamed with an

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expression of divine love and divine sorrow, such as I never saw before in a human face . . . As the dusk gathered in the deep streets, I could see nothing but the ineffable sweetness and benignity of that countenance, and my friend was not a little astonished, if not shocked, when I said to him, with the earnestness of belief, on my return: ‘I have just seen Christ.’39 In contrast to so much of the western aesthetic tradition, it is the image of the male Jew, not the young Jewish girl or woman,40 which can appeal to Christian sensibilities and that is Jewish art’s object of fascination. The mystery, majesty and sheer attraction of his piety and holiness continues to make what Rudolf Otto would call a ‘numinous impression’. In this, he transcends his antisemitic vilification and becomes the noble subject and object of a religious form of romantic love. But these are not images of male beauty as such. If the male image were merely beautiful it might attest in some general sense to the glory of God’s creation, but it would not, on that account alone, be holy. It is immaterial whether the face of the man is beautiful or handsome; it is the numinous impression of the face that counts. As in Isidor Kaufmann’s exquisite Man With Fur Hat (c. 1910), the male Jewish appearance does not draw our attention away from the divine but concentrates that attention precisely by our devout attention to the numinous spectacle of his own person. And as in Jacob Kramer’s Day of Atonement (1919), wrapped in his talit or prayer shawl, the male Jew is rapt/wrapped in his love of God. The female form, already obscured behind the mehitzah, is outside his line of vision. The glorious tselem or image of God in humanity is beheld, though not directly seen, in the male Jew as a work of divine art. A necessarily brief and selective survey of Jewish art from the late nineteenth century to the immediate post-Holocaust period confirms that the iconic religious Jew is inherently and more or less exclusively male (and to that extent is himself in danger of becoming an idol). Isidor Kaufman’s Portrait of the Rabbi of Nadvorno (c. 1910); Marc Chagall’s, Untitled (Old Man with Beard, 1931); The Praying Jew (1914); The Rabbi with the Etrog (1914); Lesser Ury’s Jew in Prayer Shawl (1931) and Hermann Struck’s Polish Jew (1906) are just a small sample of the genre. Or again, Seymour Lipton’s carved figure Prophet (1942) is another masculine essentialization of the Jew, this time as a biblical prophet whose prayer shawl, as in so many other artists’ rendition of the male Jew, becomes part of his very body so that the very activity of love and obedience to God define his bodily agency. David Bomberg’s Hear, O Israel (1955) is so numinous an image of the male Jew that it is virtually a theophany: a burning bush in its own right. Isidor Kaufmann’s The Rabbi’s Visit (c. 1886) and Lazar Krestin’s The Transmission of the Jewish Tradition (1904) are just two examples of a subgenre of male Jewish images that visualize the transmissibility of Judaism as a relationship of love and presence between grandfathers and grandsons and elderly rabbis and receptive young boys. Mark Gertler’s Rabbi and his

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Figure 3 David Bomberg, Hear, O Israel (1955), oil on canvas, 91.4 ⫻ 71.1 cm, courtesy of the Jewish Museum, New York.

Grandchild (1913), an image of an elderly rabbi with his granddaughter, disrupts this iconography, but it is notable that the girl seems embarrassed by her grandfather’s touch. He is not studying with or teaching her but appears to be pointing out her physical virtues as a prospective bride. That flow of spirit that makes male bodies a conduit of tradition does not pass between them. Later, genocide was to more than accelerate the modern threat to the transmissibility of Judaism. Painting in the 1940s, Hyman Bloom and Max Weber, who painted rabbis, hasidim and male characters from the Bible, used the male Jewish image, often a dancing male body, to memorialize and revitalize a religious culture that was disappearing in America and being obliterated in Europe.41 The symbol of Jewish religious continuity is the Jewish male. This is also true of Emmanuel Mané-Katz’s Bendiction (1942), where an old rabbi raises his arms in blessing seven young boys who embody the future of Judaism.42 Again, masculinity hypostasizes Jewish religious survival.

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Figure 4 Mark Gertler, Rabbi and his Grandchild (1913), oil on canvas, 50.8 ⫻ 45.9 cm, with permission of Luke Gertler and The Southampton City Art Gallery.

If privacy or tznius is the epitome of female holiness, we are prevented from the outset from knowing and seeing what female holiness looks like. Yet male Jewish holiness is manifest, dressed and figurable in his appearance. Just as the beauty of ceremonial art in (male) sacred spaces is permissible as an extrinsic signal of the holiness of the object it adorns, so too the austere monochrome beauty of the male Jew at his studies or at worship is an extrinsic symbol of male holiness. It is notable that sheitels (wigs) and other ultra-Orthodox female head-coverings are socio-sexual signs of modesty before men, though male Jewish head-covering signals their proper fear of God and humility in the majesty of his presence. While kavod, the Jewish sublime, can be figured in the image of a man, there is no positive visual signifier to distinguish the image or form of a Jewish woman from the profane idol. If the Second Commandment discourages the imaging of men then, a forteriori, it discourages that of women. According to the most conservative interpretations of the Second Commandment, it is prohibited to make images of men or women. But it seems to me that the laws concerning female modesty and the essentially secular nature of even observant Jewish women’s appearance render the image of the Jewish woman multipally prohibited. This may be why the Jewish woman was so rarely painted or drawn by Jewish artists until the late twentieth century when, theorized and encouraged by a predominantly secular women’s

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movement, it was Jewish women, not men, who undertook their own visual representation. However, as we shall see, Jewish women’s self-representation has usually been that of the private individual, not a congregational representation of women as Israel.

Images of Jewish women in twentieth-century Jewish art The visual marginality of women in traditional Jewish religious life is reproduced in modern Jewish art, most of it by male artists, where there are very few non-incidental representations of women. Portraits of Jewish women are comparatively rare and seem to be typified by either their pious anonymity or their secularity. I can offer just a selection of examples here. In an untitled portrait, Portrait of a Polish Jewess with Sterntichel (a lace headdress worn low over the brow) painted by an anonymous artist in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Jewish woman stares amiably, if wearily, into the middle distance. She is modestly dressed in black, but sits unoccupied. Her headgear is the focus of the painting, not her face, and the lace seems to be painted more in appreciation of its decorative qualities than its religious signification.43 Isidor Kaufmann’s Friday Evening (c. 1920) is one of the only well-known pictures of a Jewish woman (in other realist paintings, such as Maurycy Gottlieb’s Yom Kippur (1878), women are visually incidental, tucked away as little more than local colour in the devotional wings of the congregational scene). Kaufmann’s unfinished Friday Evening is by now an almost canonical representation of an observant woman. But the visual idiom of the woman’s observance is oddly un-Jewish: her hands are neatly folded, she is contemplative, asexual: her face is blank: as empty of expression as the wine cup on the table beside her. The room is empty, the light reflected from the white walls and tablecloth is cold and white and there is no food on the Sabbath table. A prayer book lies open and she is passively waiting for the men to return from prayer. Only then will she come to life. In one of her rare attempts to represent Jewish subject matter, Lily Delissa Joseph’s early-twentieth-century Self Portrait with Candles (undated), like Kaufmann’s Friday Evening, has an air of vacancy; of a religious image inadequately supported by its own iconography.44 Although Joseph’s painting locates herself within the sacred time of Shabbat, her facial expression is uncertain and unfocused. This is also true of one of Felix Nussbaum’s last paintings, Threesome (1944). Here Nussbaum depicts himself, his son and his wife Felka Platek, herself an accomplished artist, in hiding from the Nazis in Brussels shortly before they were deported to their death in Auschwitz in 1944. Nussbaum paints himself wrapped in the consolation and splendour of a large prayer shawl; his son is or has been reading. Both of these are instant Jewish signifiers. Nussbaum’s arms are raised in a gesture that could be one of

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Figure 5 Isidor Kaufmann, Friday Evening (c. 1920), oil on canvas, 72.4 ⫻ 90.1 cm, with permission of The Jewish Museum, New York.

priestly blessing or protest. But Felka just stares listlessly out of the window. She is wearing a brown cardigan. Likewise, in the German expressionist Ludwig Meidner’s Old Jewish Woman (1937–8), the woman’s clothes are secular: she is not ennobled or changed by her religion,45 her sagging body is bowed and undignified. She too, like Felka in Nussbaum’s Threesome, is on the way out. Even if, in modern Judaism, the image of a woman is hardly to be shunned for its affinities with false images or idols, the female image remains essentially secular or relatively profane (that is, ordinary in relation to the specialness of the holy). The essential profanity of the Jewish woman’s image is powerfully apparent in Roman Vishniac’s poignant photographic portrait of Jewish central and eastern Europe of the late 1930s, a series of images captured before that world disappeared. Vishniac photographs the porter Nat Gutman’s wife in Warsaw, 1938.46 It is a remarkably fine portrait but, significantly, Vishniac says in his commentary that he cannot remember her name. His sole comment on the portrait is that she was only twenty-six years old when it was taken, implying that what was primarily interesting about her is a fault in her appearance: she is prematurely aged, presumably by poverty. The face looms without material context from the darkness in the traditionally iconic manner but she seems

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to be humouring him; she is impatient for him to finish. The portrait is of the moment alone. But compare the portrait Vishniac takes of a young Jewish man that is the last image of his collection. It is an after-image: a representation of the death of European Jewry and of its eternal life. Almost a face without a face, it is a pure distillation of the neshamah – the Jewish soul. But that sublime face, barely illuminated and almost overwhelmed by darkness, by its own ghost, is, and could only be, the face of a young Orthodox man.47 During and just after the Holocaust, Jewish artists could use the indeterminacy or absence of the Jewish female body (rather than the face) as a visual biological trope for the collective loss of Jewish life. The image of the Jewish woman’s body becomes, or stands in for, the collective Jewish corpse, both polluting and polluted – not the eternity of the Jewish spirit. Jacques Lipchitz’s fi fty-inch bronze, Mother and Child (1941–2), based on sketches made in Paris in 1939–40, is a female body in the form of no more than a torso, without arms or legs. The female body is just a defenceless petition, the adult woman’s flesh indistinguishable from that of her child. Mordecai Ardon’s Sarah (1947), mourning for a slain holocaustal Isaac, is faceless. She wears a red dress, her head abstracted into the symbol of a crescent moon. His Girl No. 109336 (1950) is also highly generalized: ‘the deeply shadowed face lacks the individuality found in most portraits of inmates, and instead relies on the creation of an expressive mood of sorrow and haunting memories.’48 It is as if the Jewess can be a trope for visceral grief: ‘the ghost of pogroms past’ – a phrase the novelist Howard Jacobson uses to describe the dismal appearance of a character’s Jewish wife – but not an actual Jew engaged in Judaism. It is not uncoincidental that photographic images of female survivors in the death and concentration camps after liberation are what Barbie Zelizer terms ‘overgendered’. The images function acontextually as symbols of atrocity while also restoring normalcy by representing women engaged in ‘normal’ female activities such as washing and cooking, despite the piles of corpses around them. Even after genocide, these women conform to social expectations about their vulnerability, domesticity and nurturance.49 In neither photography nor art is there a visual idiom by which the Jewish woman, especially the holocaustal woman, can be accommodated into the covenantal Jewish congregation. In Jean Fautrier’s Sarah – Hostage (1942) and The Jewess (1945) the Jewish female body has no female signifiers at all, it is just a residue of spiritless matter. The former is a decaying torso; the latter – without its title – would be incomprehensible. These are semi-abstract pictures of women, but as such, the images are doubly abstracted, doubly distorted, doubly difficult to recognize as Jews. Women can readily hypostasize the dead body of European Jewry because they are already ‘ just’ body, without the vitality or activity of spirit. In a significant number of instances, the Jewish woman in Holocaust and post-Holocaust art becomes ever more difficult to recognize as Jewish.

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My point is further illustrated in a well-known fictional study of Jewish art: Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev. Asher Lev repeatedly, if surreptitiously, paints and draws his hasidic father at prayer, with his red beard visible beneath ‘the white sanctity’ of his prayer shawl. Although his father’s observation of the Second Commandment compels him to reject his son’s art, his image is nonetheless taken up into the great narrative of Jewish history (in one instance Lev paints his father in a Yom Kippur service commemorating the slaughter of the ten great sages by the Romans). 50 Yet when it comes to painting his mother, no image can express her embodiment as a Jewish woman. Before he fi nally paints her in the infamous Brooklyn Crucifixion, Lev was, he says, ‘having trouble with her face’. He could only represent her by grey smudges made from her own cigarette ash. It seems almost inevitable that ash, of all things, is the medium that renders his mother’s appearance into art. For ash is no more than a residue of the death that punished Israel’s worship of idols, and the substance to which the idols themselves were reduced to after the iconoclastic rage of their destruction. Above all, ash or dust is a metonym for human finitude; for final disappearance. Where men’s piety and the garments of their piety substantiate their presence, women do not wear Judaism and therefore tend to disappear into the background. Lev says his severely depressed mother (even her post-Holocaust Judenschmerz is privatized as a psychiatric illness) ‘seemed drained of substance, dry skin and brittle bones surrounding empty space’. 51 He simply cannot draw her and finally resorts to a Christian iconography of suffering, and she, a woman of irreproachable Jewish piety, becomes a visual apostate from her own tradition – a Jewish Christa. She is painted as an individual woman in a flat in Brooklyn, not as a Jew whose identity is taken up in and by the meta-spatial assembly of Israel. Her suffering is wholly domesticated; privatized to the point of removal from the theatre of Jewish history and left stranded in another tradition altogether.52 The holy is not a thing or quantity that can be represented or looked at much as one might look at any object. But we have seen (and Richard Cohen has also demonstrated this in a different context) that there are, loosely speaking, Jewish icons. I have suggested that Jewish icons are inherently male. In men the tselem or divine trace is at least signalled towards in the male Jewish face, especially where (or perhaps because) that face is partially obscured by the brim of a streimel or other wide-brimmed hat, or in the folds of a prayer shawl worn over the head. The sublimity of the male Jewish face has its materiality partially obscured – not by modesty – but by the dark glory that makes the human image translucent to God. If a woman is categorized ontologically as gashmiut – materiality – then it becomes difficult, if not self-contradictory, to sacralize her image. Perhaps the modern figuration of women as Jews, as representatives of a holy nation and a kingdom of priests, is not so much impoverished as next to impossible. In

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archetypal terms at least, we do not and cannot know what a Jewish woman looks like. It is little wonder that Zionist iconographers failed in their attempt to introduce into popular Jewish visual culture a generic female figurehead (akin to Germania or Britannia) who would usher the people from their wretched European past to a blessed future in Palestine. She struck no chord in the Jewish imagination and her image is not found beyond 1914. 53 I noted earlier that there might be several feminist reasons for cautiously welcoming Jewish artists’ inattention to the female body. But if Jewish female appearance cannot wear the garb of holiness or adopt the postures of worship how do we know, in a religious sense, what a Jewish woman looks like? How do we recognize her image – a visual lack – as Jewish? Only a practised eye can recognize an ultra-Orthodox woman, especially if she is unaccompanied by a man. Even then she can only be recognized negatively by the modesty of her dress and by her wig or head-covering. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women are seen precisely in not being seen or in being partially seen, that is, covered up. The more observant the woman, the less visible she is as a Jewish actor, even if, uncontestably, the tradition intends the Jewish wife and mother to be a sanctificatory presence in the privacy of her own home.

Feminism and the representation of Jewish women in art From the closing years of the 1960s onwards, the Women’s Movement made an increasingly forceful and creative bid for women’s cultural and political visibility. Jewish women worked alongside non-Jewish women to overcome patriarchal theistic religions’ association of female silence and invisibility with virtue. The Women in Black movement, for example, began in Israel in 1988 when Jewish and Palestinian women mobilized for peace after the beginning of the first Palestinian Intifada. They were later followed by women all over the world who, protesting the ‘disappearance’ of their loved ones and other abuses of human rights, would stage similar regular, silent vigils on the streets of their cities. There have also been highly performative bids for the visuality of Jewish women in worship as public – that is, visible – religious agents. Since 1989, and despite violently hostile reactions from Haredi worshippers and legislative attacks from Haredi political parties, the Women of the Wall group have conducted a public campaign for the right to pray as observant women at the Kotel or Western Wall in Jerusalem. And in liberal places of worship, Jewish feminists, enjoying equal rights of religious participation, have tried, as it were, to dress women as active, worshipping Jews. Colourful prayer shawls and embroidered kippot (skull caps), as well as new ceremonial artefacts such as Hariette Estel Berman’s Seder plate of 2000 and Janet Dash’s Miriam’s Cup of the same date, have been designed in ways that celebrate female historical and spiritual difference by their distinctive uses of materials and subject matter.

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Jewish women artists, most of them with varying allegiances to feminism, have also sought to remedy their own visual lack. A concern to make images of women that are both politically and emotionally expressive dates from the early twentieth century. The Holocaust destroyed the lives of millions of individuals, but it is rarely observed that at the same time whole generations of Jewish women were killed at a critical moment in the history of women. The ‘new Jewish woman’ had begun to emerge in art, thought and literature in the first decades of the twentieth century and Jewish feminists, in pre-Holocaust Germany particularly, were poised to make a significant contribution to the women’s movement.54 But even during the Holocaust, some women artists were determined to record the labour and relationships that continued to dignify women’s lives, even when the latter were broken or ending. At a later period of the Holocaust, when drawing materials were occasionally available and the rules prohibiting making any written or visual record of the camp were breaking down in the face of the allied advance, Halina Olumucki drew women in Auschwitz (as in her pencil on tracing paper drawing, Women in Birkenau, 1945). Maria Hiszpanska-Neumann recorded women’s experience in Ravensbrück (In the Barracks After Work, 1945) and much earlier in the Holocaust, Lili Rilik-Andrieux had produced pen and ink drawings in Gurs such as Three Women Leaning Over a Stove (1940). Nonetheless, the Holocaust, killing three-quarters of European Jewry, also destroyed a nascent Jewish feminist culture that was not to emerge again until the mid-1970s. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, Second Wave Jewish feminist artists regrouped to counter patriarchal prejudices against women artists and the internal prejudices of the male-dominated cultural Jewish establishment against Jewish women artists.55 For even by the late 1980s women had still not been fully recognized by the Jewish art establishment. Of the 133 artists exhibited in Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20 th Century Art, as catalogued in Avram Kampf’s 1990 book of the same name, only eleven of the artists were women. This may indicate that what Jewish women artists represent as Jewish life was not perceived as representative of the ‘Jewish experience’ of the title of the exhibition, which is normatively male experience. However, over the last thirty years or so, the work of (more or less secular) Jewish women artists and sculptors – Rothenberg, Chicago, Zeldis, Spero, Hesse, Nevelson and others too numerous to mention here – have explored the representation of female embodiment in ways grounded in their own sexual and maternal experience as well as that of their mothers and foremothers. Although it is beyond the scope of the present chapter to review the wealth of contemporary art by Jewish women, self-identified as feminist, Jewish or otherwise, it is clear that the ‘problem’ of female Jewish appearance has not been ignored. The late Hannah Wilke, for example, reproduced her own image in numerous self-portraits and portraits of her mother. But her refusal of female appearance as that of sex object is articulated in terms that are perhaps more political

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than inherently Jewish. Female self-hatred is, for Wilke, not only a function of religious ideology, it is also, and perhaps more so, one of capitalism which turns the ‘pride, power and pleasure’ of female sexuality into a commodity. 56 Despite an almost narcissistic preoccupation with her own naked body, the meaning of her appearance was not a question to which Wilke could or ever did find a Jewish answer. Jewish religious culture is more directly engaged in Deborah Kass’s warholesque Jewish Jackie series of 1992 which uses images of Barbra Streisand to critique the ways in which Jewish women, in conformity with gentile ideals of feminine beauty, too often seek to de-judaize their faces by cosmetic surgery on their noses or, like Yentl, can only find their voice in religious drag. Cary Leibowitz has also disrupted the iconography of the male Jew at prayer with his 4 Yarmulkes (1992) where the kippah or skull-cap becomes a canvas on which to project gay or post-Holocaust identities. By the end of the 1980s, a number of Jewish women artists had turned their attention to women’s experience in the Holocaust. 57 Those born just after the Holocaust in Britain and the United States began to represent their response to the Holocaust, often through a visual exploration of their relationships with their mothers, some of whom were survivors. Marlene Rolfe’s Family (1990) and Julie Held’s Dying Woman (1988–90) as well as Barbara Loftus’ Removing the Porcelain III and IV (1994), depicting the theft of her mother’s family’s porcelain collection by the Nazis in 1938, are all notable Anglo-Jewish artistic studies of the ways in which maternal history and embodiment grounds contemporary Jewish women’s heritage and identity.58 A preoccupation with the Jewish maternal body is also evident in Jewish feminist art in the twenty-first century. The Antea Gallery in Jerusalem, a space for women artists run by the feminist multicultural organization, Kol Ha-Isha, has mounted a number of important exhibitions including Annette Kleinfeld Lissaüer’s Stuffed in 2006–7. In this exhibition, Lissaüer explored her relationship with her mother and grandmother, showing that their relationship with their bodies also shaped their relationship to Judaism. After her mother’s death, Lissaüer found her mother’s possessions to be a highly evocative collection of female objects. One of her mother’s cookbooks had travelled all the way from Leipzig to Guatemala when the family had fled the Nazis in 1939. Lissaüer, both treasuring and repudiating these objects, turned her mother’s underwear and her cookbooks into art.59 The Kochbuch Series (assemblage and mixed media, 2000–6) and The Girdle Series (assemblage and mixed media, 1997–2006) revealed the invisible structures of largely invisible lives.60 Lissaüer took the private female spaces of the kitchen cupboard and the underwear drawer out into the public space of art, though it is telling that all she was able to exhibit to public view was what had ordered, shaped and regulated the Jewish female body, not the face or body itself. In The Girdle Series of 1997–2006, two assemblages, The Forces of Nature and Full in the Right Places, used Lissaüer’s mother’s girdles to emblematize the oppressive disciplinary

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structures imposed upon bourgeois European Jewish women. Social correctness held and constrained the body like a corset or girdle, stuffi ng women into a cultural and religious regime that distorted their creativity. And now the girdles had turned into the female skeletal remains they resembled: the women’s bodies were gone; in a public sense, they were never entirely there. Similarly, the cookbook Lissaüer found was also a diary of sorts, recording her grandmother and mother’s lives. It contained a somewhat cryptic and arcane record of the German-Jewish culinary practices and utensils of the period and a methodical record of her mother’s growth and nutrition. Lissaüer found this text ambiguous in so far as its implicit valorization of food promised expansion and abundance, yet it was also a book of rules; a female book of ‘law’ for the kitchen. Lissaüer’s foremothers’ lives could be memorialized by little more than by what had governed them. It is undeniable, then, that over the last several decades Jewish women artists have been able to express the meanings of their own identity and embodiment. But they have not done so, in my view, in such a way that would help answer the religious question of the relation of the image of God to a women’s appearance as a Jew. To my knowledge, Jewish women’s contemporary engagement with the problem of Jewish female appearance has been largely outside the theological framework of Jewish tradition. Certainly, many Jewish women artists will have been practically allied with, or at least sympathetic to, the feminist spirituality movement that emerged from within the wider and more secular women’s movement. But little contemporary Jewish women’s art has tried to answer the theological question of the relation of the image of God to a woman’s bodily appearance as a Jew. Admittedly, Jewish women artists have explored their visual identity and embodiment and domestic space in ways that express feminist spirituality, and sometimes in Jewish religious terms as well. Rachel Garfield (b. 1963), for example, a London-based artist of Orthodox background, has produced work such as Birthright (1995–6) that explores the female space around the female body and its relation to arenas of ritual and spirituality that are owned by men. But again, in Birthright the question of actual Jewish female bodily appearance is evaded; it is the mehitzah or lace curtain at a window, that which ‘dis-appears’ women, that is imaged instead. Very differently, the American artist Nancy Spero (b. 1926) has used text and photography to produce a Jewish feminist visual historiography, including that of the Holocaust. Despite her use of traumatic photographic images of female holocaustal suffering, Spero envisions female embodiment as free agency, undefined and liberated from the male gaze. And yet her negotiation with the experiences and meanings of the female body is all too often expressed in pagan rather than intrinsically Jewish motifs, notably the Celtic pagan Goddess of fertility and destruction. While Sheela-Na-Gig offers a wonderfully exuberant image of female generativity, she is also, in form and patriarchal perception, little more than a gaping vulva; another tunnel into darkness.

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Of course it is impossible, and probably unfair, to generalize from merely illustrative examples without supplying a comprehensive survey of all Jewish women’s art to date. Moreover, any interpretation of pictures is likely to be yet more subjective than that of verbally elaborated literary texts and feminist interpretation is as diverse as any other. This chapter is written in the hope that its readers will accept its basic premise while at the same time supplying further evidence and counter-evidence of its validity from the visual art that they themselves have made or are acquainted with. Nonetheless, it would appear common for Jewish women artists who are interested in Judaism as distinct from Jewish culture, to modify and critique the tradition’s masculine bibliocentrism without doing much to supplant it with actual instantiated images of Jewish women. Between 1997 and 2002, for example, ninety Jewish women artists staged an exhibition of one hundred ‘bookworks’ curated by Judith A. Hoffman entitled ‘Women of the Book’. These works claimed equality with the masculine reader by at once reclaiming the text and criticizing its claim to be the sole or primary medium of the transmission of Jewish experience. The bookworks redefined Torah as not only the sum of biblical and rabbinic tradition, but as the whole body of knowledge that different communities of Jews live by, including the communities of women.61 In that respect, the exhibition summarized the objectives of the Jewish feminist movement to date. Yet the bookworks’ studies of family, ritual, festivals, memory and the Holocaust, were, in their format, loyal to the bibliocentric tradition of Judaism. (As was Helene Aylon’s Liberation of G-d (1990–6), which highlights in pink those sections of the Pentateuch in which God is rendered in patriarchal terms.) The feminist subversion of masculine bibliocentrism through art only goes so far as to make a bid for the visuality of the text as itself an artefact that could narrate women’s lives as their own Torah, but the female body remains theologically mute. One of the few women artists who have sought to articulate a visual theology through her images of Jewish women’s embodiment is the London-based artist Abigail Cohen (b. 1972). Her interest in the female nude is in terms of ‘the complex dynamic of sacred and profane typical of Jewish conceptions of the female body’. It was when looking at a photograph of a female nude bending down to light candles that Cohen noticed how the form of the women’s body shaped itself into that of the Hebrew letter shin – an especially holy letter since it is the first letter of Shaddai – one of the names of God – and of the Shekhinah. Out of this vision of the female body came Cohen’s Psalm triptych, a series of large paintings that meditates on the relationship between female sexuality and spirituality, asking: ‘Where does the spirit stand in relation to the body? Can a Jewish woman be seen to embrace both?’ The Psalm triptych attempts to speak in ‘the visual language of Judaism’, establishing in the form of the naked stooping woman a ‘sublime creative dialogue’ between spirit and flesh, heaven and earth. The paintings are also Cohen’s ‘own form of self-portraiture, representing [her] hybrid identity as Jew, woman and artist’.62

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Figure 6 Abigail Cohen, Psalm 1 (1995), oil on plaster on board, 244 ⫻ 152 cm, with kind permission of the artist.

Yet even here, in Psalm 1 (1995), the female body forms a letter. It remains a sign written by a male scribe in texts written by and principally for men. The woman’s face is not visible; a sacred letter stands in for her because she has no sacral form of her own. It is interesting that although (or perhaps because) a naked woman had been painted in the form of a sacred letter, the paintings, which were due to be hung in the hall of a London synagogue, were fi nally rejected by the rabbi as too ‘immodest’ for a place of worship.63 I have begun, and only just begun, to ask how the visual image of the Jew (and thereby the image or tselem of God imprinted on the human) is gendered in Judaism and have suggested that gynophobia and iconophobia are mutually reinforcing and have social and theological effects that have not been attended to. I have suggested that while female bodies – whether of observant or non-religious Jewish women – share significant properties and consequences with idols or dangerous images, the imaging or appearance of pious Jewish men is not only non-idolatrous but, despite the Second Commandment, is repeatedly painted and photographed into Jewish culture and identity, even that of ultra-Orthodox Jewry. Of course it is not only the female Jewish body that keeps disappearing. The Jewish tendency to hide even God may be a function of exile and persecution; hiding things that are endangered or dangerous defines the scopic regime of the holy. But whereas the holiness of Jewish men

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and their devotional lives is revealed and remembered on canvas as well as in books, Jewish women’s spirituality is tainted by its association with pagan sexuality and therefore leaves no permissible image, or even trace. Jewish women’s spirituality leaves no form so that the representation of women’s embodied memory – ‘this is what I was’, and their imagination – ‘this is who I will be’, is doubly prohibited under the terms of the Second Commandment. Levinas’s anti-image of woman as a ‘dark abyss’ becomes less a pit that men fall into than a collective inability to imagine her. I am left wondering how one might inscribe the tradition into a Jewish woman’s face and body. How might her face be lit in such a way as to bear the melancholy trace of Jewish history, the passing shadow of a God both hidden and encountered in that elusive kavod – the dignity or glory of the divine countenance – that makes a Jewish face Jewish?

Chapter 4

Sublimity and the Representation of the Holocaust in Art

A capacity to see images of the Holocaust not only as historical records of a catastrophe but as revealing something that exceeds the visual bounds of the image has been a characteristic of Jewish responses to Holocaust images since the catastrophe began to attain cultural prominence, some thirty years after the end of the war. It was around that time that Emmanuel Levinas lamented that, ‘For many Jews, the only meaning of sacred history and the Revelation it brings us is to be found in their memories of the stake, the gas chambers . . . . Their experience of the Revelation is transmitted through persecution!’1 In a more moderate tone, Jacob Neusner noted the ironic fact that ‘the Holocaust, which should have demoralized the Jews, made an aimless [post-Holocaust] generation realize it must be true to its Jewishness’.2 The para-religious construction of Jewish identity around the Holocaust was more or less inaugurated by Emil Fackenheim’s pronouncement in 1970 of a somewhat contentless ‘614th Commandment’ that, after the Holocaust, ‘Jews must be Jewish’ so as deny Hitler any posthumous victory. Articulated at a heroic moment in Israeli history and Jewish pride in its military strength, the ‘commandment’ became something of a popular Jewish mantra, even if not everyone who cited it knew much about its theological context or its author. Collective memory of the Holocaust unified and galvanized a generation who had not had to survive it, especially those whose Jewish identity was primarily cultural. Indeed, in Peter Novick’s opinion, the Holocaust has not only become not merely a form of American Jewish civil religion, but within what he refers to as ‘folk Judaism’, it has also become a sacred mystery of considerable spiritual and emotional significance.3

Sublimity and the Holocaust It is as if, in the secular or post-religious as well as practising Jewish imagination (other than that of Haredim, who have very distinctive theological approaches to the Holocaust), Auschwitz has become the locus of an anti-revelation

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event: the revelation of God’s absence or the dereliction of God; a revelation of the violation of the sanctity of not only the life but the death of the individual. All too commonly in post-Holocaust theology and culture, and for individuals of a temperament to feel it, the Holocaust now constitutes a numinous antirevelation, where the blinding, absence or voiding of God and the sheer scale of human affliction and disappearance has, since the end of the war, become aestheticized as an experience of the sublime. For many contemporary Jews, the experience of travelling through Europe’s Holocaust land- and cityscapes (cheaply and, I think, mistakenly dismissed as ‘Holocaust tourism’) has both shaped and been shaped by this negative aesthetic. Dorota Glowacka, for example, notes how ‘the “place” [of Holocaust atrocity] is an image of absence: it withholds the signs, draws them into itself and even . . . retreats from it.’4 Religious thinkers (most notably the Orthodox rabbi and philosopher Eliezer Berkovits) have suggested that the holocaustal God is present in his very absence, but that paradox also makes sense in terms of the Jews themselves who are now only present in Europe in the density of their absence. Like so many Jews of my generation, much of my time travelling in Europe has been spent attempting in one quiet residential quarter or another of Budapest, Paris, Warsaw, Bialystok and other European cities to see what has disappeared. At its most dejected, mapping and retracing Jewish presence and disappearance is infused with a negative theology of place and a creeping sense of futility: a sense of looking belatedly in God’s stead, and more than half a century too late. And at times, when the sense of the sublime surpasses all others, it is as if God’s absence may have rendered him little more than one more Holocaust ghost – a historical trace of a God who disappeared or was deported out of the world with European Jewry. Of course, it must be noted from the outset that not everyone looks at or for the Holocaust in the same way. Quite different sympathies, perspectives and situations have produced a set of primary and secondary images of the Holocaust that range from the perpetrators’ documentary photographs and films to those made by the journalists accompanying the liberating Allied forces and the drawings and paintings made by Jews themselves during the Holocaust. There is then a further, still growing, body of secondary, post-Holocaust images produced by artists and cinematographers, some of whom are survivors, over the last sixty years or so. This chapter will not attempt to survey the chronological, political and stylistic range of Holocaust and post-Holocaust images or the critical analysis these have garnered. Rather, it will be concerned with those who, after the Holocaust, look at images of Jewish suffering during it; it is about the theological possibilities of the aesthetic response to images of the Holocaust: that of non-Jews, but also and primarily that of Jews for whom Jewishness is an essentially cultural set of experiences and loyalties and Jews for whom it is also a religious obligation and privilege. Since the religious meaning of an image is produced as much in the viewing as in the making of an image, this chapter

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will seek to elucidate the theological relation between the Holocaust image and the viewer rather than the motives for producing that image, especially as most of the photographic images of the Holocaust were taken by the perpetrators. In short, this chapter is about the affective role of the visual image of the holocaustal face and body – whether of one Jew, several together, or in a crowd – in the accommodation of the Holocaust in Jewish consciousness. Particularly, though not exclusively, for Jews whose identity is not informed by the spirituality of observance, the visual image-ination of the Holocaust can produce a sense of the sublime sufficiently powerful to constitute a religious experience in itself. It is often observed that Auschwitz has become more a site of Jewish pilgrimage more than a museum alone. This is true of a number of other Holocaust sites as well. In Warsaw, several years ago, I was struck by the elation of a young American woman on a Jewish youth tour as she approached a broken section of the former ghetto wall that I had also gone to look at. It was not a majestic sight: this fragment of the wall was hidden behind some apartment buildings and a car-park. Ennobled only by a small plaque, it was partially covered by creeping ivy. But looking up at the wall, the girl turned to her friend and exclaimed, ‘Wow, this is so cool!’ She was, of course, well aware that the wall had been far from ‘cool’ for those who were once held behind it; her excitement was not, I think, merely ghoulish or prurient. Rather, she was awed by the sudden tangibility of the drama of Jewish history from a period close enough to have been that of her grandparents. It was behind that wall that Jews had died or, if still alive in the summer of 1942, had been transported to their death in Treblinka and the ghetto streets and buildings destroyed on Himmler’s orders. But here, finally, something had risen up from the flattened and buried Holocaust landscape of Warsaw. These few crumbling bricks had yielded something to see. As if standing before another of Judaism’s ‘wailing walls’, this young girl’s sense of an encounter with the sublimity of Jewish history was not so dissimilar to my own at a similar age to hers when approaching the Kotel or Western Wall in Jerusalem. Depending on their historical and familial proximity to it, as well as their own aesthetic and spiritual temper, contemporary Jews are commonly inclined to approach the Holocaust as an event both inside and outside the historical continuum. It is felt to be both comprehensible and incomprehensible, instantly recognizable in its representation but also, and ultimately, unrepresentable. It is where knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust ends and its ineffable mystery begins that Peter Novick begins to wonder what ‘talk of the Holocaust would be like in America if a skeptical rationalist like Primo Levi, rather than a religious mystic like Wiesel, had been its principal interpreter?’ Novick finds Elie Wiesel’s view of suffering as ‘a gateway to the sacred’, an abyss of the profane into which the Jew must descend before ascending to the heights of holiness to have been implicit in his mediation of the Holocaust and to have suffused post-Holocaust Jewish consciousness. 5 Although, all over the

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world, the post-Holocaust Jewish religious establishment has properly resisted the incorporation of the Holocaust into daily liturgy or substantive questions of belief and practice, because, or in spite of that, the Holocaust has widely acquired the status of a negative sacred mystery, especially among that ever larger constituency of people who are of an undoubtedly spiritual temperament but who do not define themselves by their religious observance or formal adherence to a positive creed. Of course, Wiesel does not bear sole responsibility for this. American Jews were not the first to construe the Holocaust as an ineffable mystery inaccessible to ordinary historical comprehension. Haredi Jews in the Holocaust were themselves inclined to understand their own suffering and death as participant in the sacred mystery of divine suffering and the unfolding of God’s will. But while their Holocaust theology is relatively little known, post-Holocaust theologies of divine absence and silence during the catastrophe, have attained a broad religio-cultural dominance. This, as well as the testimony of survivors and historians to unspeakable horror and loss, have conveyed so powerful a sense of the voiding of goodness and value as to induce in their readers and listeners a sub or pre-religious aesthetic experience of the sublime. The germ of quasi-religious aesthetization was developing even in the midst of the catastrophe. Zoran Music, a non-Jew who made a number of drawings at Dachau and then re-drew his memories of the camp in the early 1970s, remembers becoming ‘fascinated by the heaps of bodies, because they had a kind of beauty, a tragic beauty’. Music found that his experience of death had, ‘transformed my experience of life. I was only interested in images that were stripped down to their essence’.6 Music’s Holocaust aesthetic instantiates Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous remark that art is the result of ‘having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further’.7 This is an experience known to Christian theology. In Luther’s theology, the hiddenness of God is revealed to the eyes of faith. Revelation comes when you are stripped of everything. There is something about Anfechtung – the spiritual state of being utterly bereft or dispossessed, not only in physical pain – that gives you a particular understanding of the nature of God. As Simone Weil recognized, unbaptized, yet writing more or less from inside the Christian tradition, experience most fully reveals divine love when it is most painful; affliction (malheur) has a revelatory power.8 But it is neither possible nor desirable to generalize about Jewish responses to the catastrophe, which were subjective as well as collectively and historically conditioned. Nor can such responses be scientifically dissected and quantified as if one were simply measuring the aftershock of an earthquake. If, sometimes (not always), contemplation of the Holocaust is akin to, or actually, an experience of the sublime, this aesthetic experience has a cultural and historical context. In the immediate post-war period numerous commentators were moved to a stunned silence in which fine words seemed more than inadequate to the

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enormity. Rational speech about bestial cruelty and the cooption of rational bureaucratic, scientific and legal means in the service of irrational hatreds and purposes seemed an irrelevant category mistake. George Steiner’s 1967 Language and Silence epitomized this protest against speech.9 Gradually, however, and after sharp criticism of Steiner’s book from Saul Friedländer and Sander Gilman, it was recognized that silence also gave inadvertent social permission for ignorance, indifference and forgetting. A transitionary move to speech could be made in the presentation of visual images of the Holocaust in art and in photographs that were both eloquent and silent. But by far the greatest impact on post-Holocaust consciousness has been made by the transformation of the Holocaust into a form of literary and cinematic entertainment, albeit one that is usually characterized by its aspiration to pedagogic and moral seriousness. The Holocaust has become an object of aesthetic consumption. The viewer becomes a sympathetic voyeur watching what is, in effect, an adventure in survival, witnessing from a safe distance an epic seizure in the history of the (in)human. Memory of pre-Holocaust Jewish life recedes and finally gives way to knowledge of its destruction alone and to the uncanny sensation of its disappearance. Despite the beginning of a contemporary revival of Jewish life in central and eastern Europe, for the generation of Jews growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Holocaust was not all that long past, but lacked the extensive historiographical commentary it has accrued today, Jewishness often was more or less identical with a preoccupation with the Holocaust. Especially for those young people without direct familial contact with survivors prepared to discuss what had happened to them, it was difficult to resist the impression, fuelled by popular novels such as Leon Uris’s Mila 18 (1961) and QB VII (1973), and films including John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976) and Franklin J. Shaffner’s The Boys from Brazil (1978), that the Holocaust was almost the stuff of thrillers, gripping as well as unbearably sad. In 1982, Yosef Yerushalmi noted that the image of the Holocaust had been shaped less by historians than by the novel. Contemporary Jews, he wrote, ‘seem to await a new, metahistorical myth, for which the novel provides at least a temporary surrogate’.10 By the mid-1980s Saul Friedländer had expressed his unease with the romanticism fuelling the aesthetization of the Holocaust. That Nazism itself had attracted mass adherence less through ideological theory than in its capacity to hold the popular imagination with a heady mix of phantasm, pageantry and grand opera, suggested to Friedländer that we should be cautious lest new discourses on Nazism also develop at the level of what he termed ‘kitsch’. For even in post-Holocaust art that is profoundly antipathetic to Nazism, Friedländer detected a combination of fear and a sort of yearning that rehearses Nazism’s own themes of quasi-eroticicized nothingness, radical freedom, death and annhilation.11 Films ranging from Luchino Visconti’s The Dammed (1969) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), to George

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Steiner’s novel later staged as a play The Portage to San Cristóbal of A. H. (1981), were gradually replacing grief and realism by the kitsch or frisson that was characteristic of Nazism itself. Too many representations of the Holocaust were culpable of continuing to produce spectacles of ‘voluptuous anguish and ravishing images, images one would like to see going on forever.’12 Friedländer sensed that in the post-Holocaust sublime a limit had been overstepped and, in danger of absolving the actual horrors of history, we too were beginning to come under the spell of the Nazis’ own fascination, almost love, of death: no ordinary death, but an ecstatic performance: ‘a ritualised, stylised, and aestheticized death’.13 In Europe and the United States, Saul Friedländer’s warning of a moral slippage between the spectacle of the Holocaust and its representation has rarely been heeded. The spectation of the Holocaust continues to share some of the qualities and effects of the sublime. It exerts a dreadful fascination to artists, cinematographers and novelists because it is, in fact, boundlessly dreadful. The sheer pace, scale and depth of the horror make it hard for either artist or viewer not to succumb to a mood of what Friedländer calls ‘apocalyptic reverie’.14 The closing scenes of Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist (2003), based on the concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoir of survival in Warsaw, typify the transformation of the Holocaust from abjection to beauty by means of a musical grand finale that is shot through (almost literally) with a strong sense of the sublime. Szpilman, starving and exhausted, is in hiding at the end of the war in a bombed building in the ruins of Warsaw. Alone, it is as if he were the last Jew left in the world. He is found by a German officer, Wilm Hosenfeld, who redeems this one Jew – Szpilman – from death: he allows him to remain hidden in the attic and brings him food there. It becomes clear to Hosenfeld that Szpilman is a great artist and when Szpilman, with emaciated, frozen fingers, begins to play the piano for Hosenfeld, not only Szpilman’s loss, but the suffering of the whole Jewish people is, for a moment at least, summoned, glorified and resolved. It is not Hosenfeld’s saving of Szpilman’s life that redeems the human. It is the beauty of the music that casts the great cloak of the sublime over the bowed collective shoulders of Jewish abjection. Redemption from evil is signalled, or perhaps consists in, the redemption of beauty from the forces of destruction. The survival of beauty in the smoking ruins of what was once a glorious city is a symbol and function of the survival of goodness. In this film at least, which is composed of a series of visually traumatic tableaux, all is not lost: beauty has triumphed. Beauty is that which transcends the consuming fire of hatred and also lies buried in the ruins of bombed cities, in the human rubble of one broken Jewish body; one emaciated face. (Cynically, one might point out that this is not the suffering face of Szpilman, who endured the cataclysm, but the gauntly beautiful face of Adrien Brody, the actor who played him.)

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A popular post-Holocaust cultural impression of the sublimity of the Holocaust is difficult to locate in a single aesthetic philosophical scheme, but the sublime is a term now generally used to refer to an experience of the radical failure of understanding; when we are confronted with ‘that which is so strange or shockingly “other” that our conceptual framework is unable to encompass it’.15 As an object of contemplation the Holocaust seems, under this general definition, to exemplify the modern sublime. As Omer Bartov writes of the Holocaust, ‘It is the protean nature of the event, its refusal to be tied down to any single meaning and definition that makes it appear so horrifying even at a distance of two generations.’ Utterly unedifying, ‘It is the utter senselessness of it all, the total and complete emptiness in which this hell on earth unfolded, that leaves us breathless, bereft of the power of thought and imagination.’16 The Holocaust exceeds and paralyzes representation on a number of different counts: its vastly complex logistical and administrative processes; the moral compromise of numberless European citizens complicit to varying degrees with the Nazi genocide; the depthless pain of the victims and the destruction and erasure of millennia of European Jewish life. Together, these elements form what Kant called a ‘negative presentation’ – a paradoxical presentation of nothing – a historical abstraction. The emotional agitation of witness through seeing or watching Holocaust images of the perpetration and effects of radical evil can elicit a sense of intense foreboding and terror, mixed with an involuntary frisson of excitement. This is an aesthetic experience in a tradition running from Kant, through Schiller, Hegel and Nietzche, where the sublime occasions a defeat of the imagination and the failure of reason to comprehend a moment whose infinity dwarfs everything around it. The very failure of reason opens the individual to the transcendental possibility.17 Post-Holocaust art, especially cinema, which offers epic visual possibilities, can yield a sensation of history akin to Kant’s account of the sublime as a fearful impression commonly derived from nature’s volcanic, thunderous, mighty destructions; from an oceanic scale in nature that exceeds any impression produced by human or cultural phenomena.18 The ‘mystery’ of the Holocaust: a failure to fully comprehend that it happened and how it could happen produces a sensation similar to that of the sublime because it cannot attain the level of a rational concept in the realm of cognitive judgment. So while the discrete historical spectacles of the Holocaust were not beautiful, represented in the unity of a post-Holocaust work of art, they may become sublime, for sublimity is not the property of history but a perception or judgment, perhaps involuntary, that reflects western philosophical and artistic sensibilities. For example, Kant’s account of ‘radical evil’ in the Grundlegung can be read as approximating that inversion of the sublime that characterized the Nazi genocide as not merely a transgression of limits, but a denial of limits.19 While Kant and the Romantic philosophers writing at the

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end of the eighteenth century described the sublime in terms of its enobling capacity to annihilate the self, and the self’s triumph over such annihilation (in his later writings Kant linked the development of moral autonomy and personhood to the experience of the sublime), it was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the idea and possibility of the sublime would accrue racial and cultural connotations and repercussions. Nazism, with its ‘politics of terror and transcendence’, limited access to the aesthetics of the sublime to Aryan or non-degenerate racial types,20 but Hitler and his propagandists exploited its psychological impact to the full. Hitler’s aesthetic sensibilities as a frustrated artist shaped his political will and effectively promoted his cause in Germany.21 On marches and at rallies, the Nazis’ choreographed displays of unlimited power were precisely orchestrated to induce a strong sense of the sublime. In this they were largely successful, though the actual and immediate material effects of their rule on those they targeted for destruction were merely those of squalor and degradation.

Sublimity in post-Holocaust theology and art A theology of absence, informed, in my view, by a powerful sense of the sublime has been a feature of Holocaust and post-Holocaust Jewish religious thought across most of the denominational spectrum. This is not at all to equate the aesthetics of Nazi propaganda with those of post-Holocaust theology. It is to note that a visually impressive spectacle is, in itself, like beauty, morally indifferent, even if its interpretative context is not. In the post-Holocaust era, Jewish theologies have commonly defended God’s apparent non-intervention in the Holocaust through the closely related metaphors of silence, self-hiding or turning away. Orthodox and Reform Jews have more often than not understood God’s non-interventionary hiding of his face (hester panim) as a prerequisite to the modern exercise of human free-will, as well as, more traditionally, a constituent element of the mystery of divine personality. In one post-Holocaust theological text after another, God either chose, or was otherwise compelled, to turn his face and so avert his eyes from the agony and dereliction of the Holocaust.22 During the Holocaust this God effectively dis-appeared; his failure to reveal himself through acts of redemptive intervention was because he was, as it were, hidden from view and could not see, that is, witness and judge, the acts of the perpetrators and the suffering of their victims. And though Berkovits and other religious thinkers of his period saw the establishment of the State of Israel as a sign of God’s providential presence to Israel, that God has never, or not yet, quite returned. As George Steiner has observed, in the post-Holocaust ‘recession of God’, otherness has withdrawn from the incarnate, leaving only ‘an emptiness which echoes still with the vibration of departure’.23

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Although the hiding of God’s face is a recurrent biblical motif connoting both the mystery of God’s will and his punishment for sin – as when the biblical Job asks God ‘Why do you hide your face, and treat me like an enemy?’(13:24), 24 post-Holocaust theologies of absence are predominantly continuous with classical Jewish philosophy’s negative theology which, despite an authoritative counter-tradition of biblical and rabbinic anthropomorphism, refuses the positive predication of attributes that help us to conceive of God as a personal presence. The notion and exercise of God’s will is gradually emptied of substantive content. This abstracted, unknowable God, subordinated to modern theodical uses of the free-will defence, is left unable to disclose his face/presence and so becomes prone to unaccountable silences, disappearance or hiddenness. In post-Holocaust modernity, unredeemed catastrophe and theologies of hiddenness, compounded by the intra-religious decline of theological realism, have too often left God a ghost-God, passing into history with those communities that devoted their lives to his Torah. A consequence of this modernist tendency towards theological abstraction is that the visual dimension of knowing the Holocaust is increasingly shaped by a negative aesthetic of divine unrepresentability: God becomes ‘an absolute absence’; a cosmic departure, a deafening silence in the engulfing darkness. In a post-Holocaust era, theologies of the hiddenness of God suggest that he was powerless to stop the extermination of European Jewry because he did not or could not see it. Because God was blinded, Europe fell into total darkness and because Europe lay in darkness, God could not see Jewry’s predicament. It is as if God’s holocaustal hiddenness is a form of tzimzum, recalling his withdrawal from the world at the first shattering trauma of creation.25 God has once more contracted in pain into God-self, just as he does in the rabbinic midrash (Eicha, Rabbah: Intro. 24) at the destruction of the Temple. There, God rejects the offer of the angel Metratron to weep on his behalf and, asking to be left in peace to mourn, retreats to weep in private. (The story derives from Jeremiah 13:17 where God says that if the people do not heed him, he will weep in concealment. See also BT Hagigah 5b.) God knows that he must retreat to a place for weeping where not even the angels can follow. He must not inflict his suffering on the world as its weight and depth would destroy it in the blink of an eye.26 A complex intrication of personalist myth, supra-personal philosophy and historical actuality leaves God withdrawn into his grief, leaving an absence whose empty space is filled by the spectacle of Auschwitz.27 Whereas an over-emphasis on the hiding of God tends towards inducing a sensation of the airless vacuum of the sublime, a corrective focus on God’s presence to suffering in the Holocaust would produce a spectacle of pathos: a more compassionate sense of the ‘beauty’ of holiness held deep within the profanity and brokenness of the Holocaust and which justifies its accommodation in a theological scheme that itself holds within it the promise of its own mending. But while some Haredi commentators urged Jewry to remember

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that God was present to the suffering of those who suffered vicariously on his behalf, Ismar Schorsch in 1981, then head of the (Conservative) Jewish Theological Seminary, declined, in more modern fashion, to learn any theological lesson from the Holocaust. In denying the Holocaust any capacity to illuminate Jewish knowledge of God, he used a metaphor that itself manifests a strong sense of the Holocaust as sublime. Schorsch described the catastrophe as a theological ‘black hole’, a ‘collapsed star’ whose darkness is so dense that it cannot emit ‘even a single ray of light’.28 Even if most Jews have not made a close study of the post-Holocaust theological corpus, its striking and recurrent tropes of divine absence or hiddenness have had no small cultural role to play in accounting for and responding to the catastrophe. The perception of the Holocaust as an anti-revelation of sublime absence pervades not only theology but also post-Holocaust art. Artists’ interpretation of the Holocaust through the sense of the sublime became prevalent in Europe and America soon after the end of the war. The Jewish abstract expressionist art of the late 1940s and 1950s was, arguably, an attempt to represent the anti-revelation of the Holocaust through the very absence of representation. As differently exemplified in the work of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, the holocaustal reversal of common values had necessitated a non-realist or non-factual, abstract approach to art.29 Here, aniconic interpretations of the Second Commandment; modern western aesthetic philosophy, and the historical trauma of Jewish disappearance together defeat representation. Twentieth-century Jewish repudiation of the visual image – whether Mark Rothko’s veiling of the void by layers of paint within which no material object can be found, 30 or Barnett Newman’s depopulated primal colour fields – renew the ancient trope of divine withdrawal and the abstraction of the figure from the image. Jewish art’s (perhaps vestigially religious) inclination to abstraction had been intensified during the twentieth century by the Holocaust, which cast into question ‘the bond between pain and beauty, suffering and pleasure’, that had ‘[given] birth to aesthetics in the first place’.31 In the twentieth century, European Jews not only courted abstraction; they were themselves abstracted from the visual environment, their lives, like an abstract painting, were now only topography and trace; perhaps only the marks left behind where a mezuzah was once nailed to a doorpost. A visual reticence, at once reverent and horrified, is reflected in art of the period. During the 1940s, Giacometti’s sculpted figures, diminished to no more than a centimetre long, all but vanish along with Jewish life in Europe. After the war, his first large figurative sculptures commemorated the friable skeletal figures of the survivors photographed after the liberation of the death and concentration camps.32 Or again, Morris Lewis’ 1951 series of paintings Charred Journal are anti-representations of blackness, trace and disappearance. His untitled abstract with a large white Jewish star appearing through the gritty

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black surface reveals that glimmer of light in the brooding, turbulent darkness that has long typified the evocation of the sublime. From the 1960s through to the early 1990s artists such as Bedrich Fritta (a former inmate of Terezín) Elza Pollak (a former inmate of Auschwitz) and Jószef Szajna (a former inmate of Auschwitz and Buchenwald) continued to attempt the impossible: to produce an image of absence. Images of smoke, empty suitcases; piles of shoes, relics of one kind of another, have been used to evoke the presence of Jewish absence as well as the absence of Jewish presence.33 Cognate works include Robert Morris’s lead relief of a hand-print, Disappearing Places (Tarnopol) (1988), redolent of the nail marks left by the victims as they died, clawing the concrete walls of the gas chambers in their agony and desperation to escape. Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half hour documentary film Shoah (1985) is unique in representing the Holocaust without any visual footage or dramatic recreation of the Holocaust and in commanding the viewer’s attention without deploying the customary musical triggers to emotion. In Lanzmann’s film about mass death, everyone whose image appears is alive. Although each witness seems to have more returned from another place, than to belong there in the present, Lanzmann films the living face of the survivor as a talking photographic close-up of history. Here is the Holocaust image: the naked, Levinasian face. There is no hiding from the unflinching eye of the camera. The camera is unmoved but both perpetrators and victims reveal truth in the half-smile, the spasm of remembered pain: the muscular shifts and contractions that open and close their faces to the truth; that make us look because they are looking at us. This may be the closest we get to an inter-subjective encounter with the victims and can see, or think we see, the passing of history across the moving lineaments of a face once more before it disappears. In Lanzmann’s very attempt to abjure the sublime he makes ample room for its double negatives. It is a film so it must be watched, but Lanzmann is faithful to a post-Holocaust reading of the Second Commandment in so far as he actually gives the viewer nothing of the Holocaust to see. The artist Samuel Bak, a Holocaust survivor, may appear to take a figurative approach to the representation of the Holocaust, yet he uses figurative images of Jews precisely to observe their absence. No longer there, the painted figures are just after-images or ghosts painted from memory. Bak is untypical in his theological idiom and interrogation of his subject. He engages the question of God’s hiding during the Holocaust perhaps more directly than any other Jewish artist. It is tempting to suggest that this owes much to his childhood experience, when he and his mother survived the Vilna ghetto hidden in a convent. The rest of his family were murdered. God’s hiddenness had left his family to their fate, while Bak was saved by his own capacity to hide. Bak’s paradoxically figurative theology of absence also arises from his rejection of modernism after the early 1960s, seeing it as a suppression of Holocaust

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memory and an evasion of the theological questions of raised by the Holocaust which could not, for him, be adequately addressed through abstraction. Instead Bak’s paintings, which convey a sense of the uncanny rather than, strictly, the sublime, depict the locked, derelict landscape of a post-Holocaust Jewish life in which God has not been found; to which God has not returned and, like us, cannot return. There is no way back in. With a haunting sense of the arbitrary, absurd and inexplicable nature of the catastrophe, Judaism has, for Bak, become an unplayable game whose rules have been lost. Bak’s landscape is littered with the detritus of lost Jewish culture; his art is a series of theological questions without answers.34 Bak’s Untitled (tryptich, 1978) depicts an abandoned shtetl, the tablets of the commandments lie broken and illegible, sunk to the bottom of a fetid pool. Jewish presence in absence is signalled by what is left behind: a torn star is left lying on the ground. Although a set of new tablets lie ready for the inscription of the commandments, there is no one to observe them and they have taken on the form and function of gravestones. Petrified, their remains have sedimented into rock or stone. In this and other paintings, particularly The Hidden Question (1992), theology has become geology. In Bak’s painting Pardes (1995), ironically, the Hebrew word for Paradise, the Tablets of the Law form an enclosure reminiscent of a walled and sealed ghetto or cemetery: again the Law has taken the form of abandoned, desecrated grave stones, fallen onto their backs into the earth. In Pardes and other paintings, Bak’s use of symbols such as keys and ladders suggest that God is not essentially inaccessible but history has left him so. The ladder in Pardes is now abandoned and left on the wrong side of the wall for anyone to use it; the tree of life has been sealed into a tomb-like corridor in which it cannot grow, a labyrinth has nothing left to find at its centre. In The Hidden Question (1992), a great key, cut in the form of God’s name, is rusted and broken, almost fossilized into the rock that holds it fast. While the late Stephen Feinstein interpreted the persistence of theological reference in Bak’s work as the faint suggestion of hope of tikkun,35 I cannot but read Bak’s post-Holocaust landscape as an after-place in which the corrosion of recent history has bitten too deep for the retrieval or restoration of meaning. As in The Hidden Question, the key no longer fits the lock and never will. It is notable that until the 1980s, Israeli artists, living in a new country that was putting its energies into protecting its future rather than brooding on its past, generally avoided professional association with the Holocaust. Artists preoccupied by the Holocaust (Yosl Bergner, Samuel Bak and a few others) were isolated and marginalized by the Israeli art establishment. Anguished figurative representation of the Holocaust was at odds with the new state’s cultural ideology: its purist modernist aesthetic, and the left-wing progressivist temper of Zionist art history. Images of the destruction of European Jewry were too sharp a reminder of Jewish victimization in a diaspora upon which the new Jewish nation did not wish to dwell. It was to be Israel’s next generation, often

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the children of survivors, who were more inclined to confront the Holocaust. Yet despite a marked increase in the production of post-Holocaust art during the 1990s led by artists such as Yocheved Weinfeld, images of the Holocaust have never been a defining element of Israeli art.36 Outside Israel, the aesthetization of the Holocaust continued apace during the closing three decades of the twentieth century. Few doubt that the actual degradations, sadism and agonies of the Holocaust are an incursion into absolute loss and terror more or less unrepresentable as visual art, and ought to be unwatchable. Yet we have seen that it is precisely in contemplation of the magnitude of its apocalyptic devastation, the fathomless depths of its pathos and its occasional shafts of moral light, that the Holocaust has induced a tendency towards aniconism – a disabling of the figurative imagination – that is difficult for significant numbers of artists, theologians and their viewers and readers to resist.

Critical resistance to the aesthetization of the Holocaust In characteristically magisterial style, Levinas once wrote, ‘I shall refrain from turning the Passion of Passions into a spectacle’.37 Likewise, Claude Lanzmann, as if invoking the Second Commandment, regarded the catastrophe as morally and ethically unrepresentable. The Holocaust must be protected from visual ‘transgression’ by a ‘circle of flames’. We must not be permitted the jouissance or pleasurably cathartic release of tears by watching agony. Lanzmann says that if he had found footage of the gas chambers in operation he would not only have refrained from showing it, he would have destroyed it.38 Critics have paid careful attention to such comments during recent years which have seen an expansion of Holocaust scholarship from purely historiographical studies into those that examine its representation in art, literature, cinema, memorials and survivor memoirs.39 Growing awareness of the issues attending representation of the Holocaust, as distinct from those of the historiography of its periods and geographies, has informed cultural critics’ objections to what they regard as self-congratulatory and often amnesiac political uses of the Holocaust. The United States, in particular, is accused of using the Holocaust to differentiate ideologically between the American, New World, way of life as a safe and prosperous haven for the stranger in flight and the Old World, European, way of death.40 An essential element in this process of holocaustal accommodation in American cultural values and socio-political projects has been the aesthetization of the Holocaust. It is now a commonplace of Holocaust Studies that the mediation of the Holocaust has become increasingly Americanized through the funding of sophisticated Holocaust museums and high-budget films such as Schindler’s List and The Pianist. Although the Holocaust period itself

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produced a considerable body of art within as well as outside Nazi-occupied Europe,41 the aesthetization of the Holocaust – that is, its becoming an object of feeling and visualization rather than first-hand experience – is an inevitably post-Holocaust project that has gradually developed with the accumulation of a sufficient weight of reflection and cultural accommodation and representation. Despite philosophical claims that the Holocaust is unrepresentable, and despite the textual orientation of traditional Jewish culture, the Holocaust has nonetheless produced an extensive and growing visual culture. Holocaust memorials, cinema, paintings and installations are now embedded in European and American cultural life. Holocaust-related artefacts, victims’ possessions and original Nazi photographs, films and bureaucratic documentation are widely exhibited in museums built at Holocaust sites and in prominent locations in cities around the world. Yet despite the visual and affective prominence of the Holocaust in contemporary culture, Holocaust Studies is almost unanimous in its criticism of the sacralization of Holocaust memory, especially where it transforms the Holocaust into an object of aesthetic experience, whether of the sublime or the holy. This is regarded as being a betrayal of the particular historical experience of the victims. ‘Moving’ experiences of the Holocaust are considered to be no more than the emotional indulgence of the Holocaust ‘consumer’ or ‘tourist’. Art, which rarely consoled the victims, should not be used to relieve the burden of historical witness. (Nor, it is often argued, should the notably unedifying events of the Holocaust be used simplistically to foster tolerance and teach good citizenship to children.) It has become customary to open commentaries on the aesthetization of the Holocaust on a critical note, citing Theodor Adorno who, addressing nonJewish west German artists and writers, said in an essay of 1949 that: ‘Even the most extreme consciousness of the catastrophe threatens to degenerate into drivel. . . . to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.’42 In fact, Adorno’s maxim has lost its original philosophical context, namely a critique of enlightenment positivism and industrialization. The essay it appeared in was not about the Holocaust and he was expressing the view, in somewhat heated language, that to capture Auschwitz in a line or two of poetry is a presumptious subsumption of Auschwitz’s particular reality into a poet’s conceit.43 Adorno later modified his claim to the point of retraction, remarking on one occasion that ‘It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.’44 And although much quoted, Adorno’s interdiction has far less often been observed. While many would agree with Elie Wiesel that the death camps revealed the negative pole of creation: they were a defeat of civilization and, ultimately, a defeat of art,45 most of the architects, novelists, poets, artists, fi lm directors and writers, including Wiesel himself, whose work engages or refers to the Holocaust have precisely sought to express their responses to the catastrophe through art’s

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negotiation between fact and imagination; the disclosure of horror and its suggestion.46 Critics grant an interpretative and expressive function to art, but, even so, insist that the agonies of the Holocaust also exceed the bounds of visual representation and signal a historical and moral rupture that cannot be mended by art. They are also acutely aware of the dangers of trite, delusive Holocaust art, which is worse than no art at all. In his essays on the representation of the Holocaust in art, Berel Lang warns that in order to avoid the egregious misrepresentation of the Holocaust in literature and the visual arts there must be moral and historical constraints on its representation. The Holocaust breaches the normal conventions of representation so that the comedic and the beautiful (even if these were sometimes elements in Holocaust experience itself) should be excluded or secondary to the artist’s commitment to the truth of what occurred. Even when subjected to the criteria of moral and historical truth, it remains, for Lang, a matter of judgment whether any representation can begin to do justice to the moral enormity and historical complexity of the event.47 Lang does not deny that art might convey knowledge or truth about the Holocaust, but the effect of a work of Holocaust art must be considered, especially if its exercise of an artist’s imagination can invite Holocaust deniers to claim that the Holocaust is a largely imagined phenomenon. Only the constraints of close historical reference can preserve the historical reality of the Holocaust from sliding into an artistic idea. The beautification of the Holocaust, or even its becoming a mere object of aesthetic judgment, is a historical distortion and further violates the dead by a trivialization of their suffering. Post-Holocaust art should aspire to historical authenticity and ethical deference to the memory of the victim whose suffering must not suffer degeneration into cliché.48 Both Berel Lang and Lawrence Langer require that historical actuality functions as the primary ‘controlling frame’ for artistically responsible representations of the Holocaust.49 Lawrence Langer, however, is the more emphatic in his insistence that the Holocaust should not be betrayed by artistic reordering. In the Holocaust realm of ‘choiceless choice’, 50 redeeming stories ‘feed the legends on which the myths of civilizations have been built’. Langer insists that most survivors’ stories ‘nurture not ethical insight but confusion, doubt, and moral uncertainty’. For this reason, ‘we must learn to suspect the effect as well as the intent of bracing pieties like “redeeming” and “salvation” when they are used to shape our understanding of the ordeal of former victims of Nazi oppression.’51 Despite Langer’s evident admiration for Samuel Bak’s work, it is oral testimony, not art, which, above all, tells the truth since it ‘resists the organizing impulse of moral theory and art’. The narration of the Holocaust as story – even when told in the memoirs of survivors themselves – can dignify the anguish of humiliation and abjection with self-deceptive reassurances of order, sequence and agency.52 Langer insists that ethical and aesthetic

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discourse is alien to the narration of an experienced or authentically remembered Auschwitz. When the moral or aesthetic dimension ‘intrudes’ upon any survivor account ‘we risk forgetting where we are’. When victims remember their ordeal authentically, memory is grounded in ‘its own historical reality, and nothing more’. Langer appears to ignore the testimony of Orthodox survivors for whom sacred and profane history may be mutually informing and argues that when survivors remember authentically and without aesthetic mediation they ‘cannot link their near destruction to a transcendent or redemptive future’.53 Whereas Berel Lang sees the Holocaust as having become ‘an event as close to the sacred, after all, as anything in the secular world is likely to be’, 54 Langer regards it as precisely the most profane. Art, to use Langer’s phrase, does not dispose what history first proposes. There is no clear linear moral and historical progression from the Holocaust to art.55 Ruth Kluger, a Viennese survivor of Auschwitz, Teresienstadt and GrossRosen, offers a terse summary of Auschwitz that corroborates Langer’s view: ‘In Auschwitz I stood in rows of five and was thirsty and was afraid of dying. That’s it, that’s all, that’s the sum of it.’56 Kluger insists that ‘no great poetry was composed in the concentration camps. If it were not so, one might entertain the idea that the camps were good for something, that they were, for example, a kind of catharsis, producing fine art. In fact they weren’t good for anything.’57 Kluger’s irascible memoir refuses to sanctify those who were murdered. She knows, for example, that her aunt died an agonising death in the gas chambers but, quite humanly, still cannot forgive that aunt’s relatively minor transgressions against her own childhood dignity: ‘I know of her death in my mind. But my childish resentments are more deeply ingrained, where the mind doesn’t reach.’58 Survivors did and do not now merely spectate the Holocaust. The Holocaust was and remains far too immediate to be aestheticized. The hour-by-hour struggle to survive did not lend itself to an objective and comprehensive vision of the Holocaust, because its victims were in the process of dying (even when they happened, after all, to survive); because they had no concept of the Holocaust, which was not a term in wide scholarly currency until the 1980s, and because they were humiliated by the sight of their own abject spectacle.59 As Gerardus van der Leeuw noted in another context, ‘type and symbol maintain a distance. And without distance life is neither beautiful nor holy.’60 Unlike works of art, actual lives were terminated suddenly and without the clarity of meaning and form that may become discernible as a life draws towards its natural close. As Kluger writes of her father who did not survive: ‘Everything to do with him is unfinished; nothing was ever resolved.’61 While artistic representation of the Holocaust that is both historically and affectively responsible seems important on any number of counts, critics are right to find primarily aesthetic responses to the Holocaust problematic in so far as there is no necessary connection between the repeated and often a-contextual representation of the Holocaust in images and a constructive

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spiritual or ethical response to their appeal. Washed back to us on the grey tide of the post-Holocaust years, such images may induce in some a numb despair that dissipates into indifference. After all, the act of looking is not inherently ethical. Even the compassionate onlooker to another’s suffering can objectify the other as a passive victim and in doing so, rob her of agency all over again. Indeed, feminist philosophers’ criticism of western philosophical occularcentrism have claimed that ‘looking at’ people and things is a primary factor in the patriarchal alienation of the powerful, unimplicated, untouched subject and the passive object of view.62 Moreover, seeing what one is reluctant to see can turn empathy into disgust. Exhibitions of photographs can therefore be historically informative but in the very nature of a display, ‘do not always bring the viewer to look, to really see, nor can they be counted on to create empathetic bonds between the contemporary subject and the person from the unimaginable past’.63 Whoever makes images of the Holocaust, and for whatever reasons, cannot determine the viewer’s actual response to those images. The curators of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have become well aware that the reproduction of Holocaust images can have unintended consequences. Shortly after opening, the museum tried to establish existential links between the visitor and the victim; between single individuals and the overwhelming numbers of anonymous dead. At the entrance to the museum the visitor was invited to take a reprinted identity card with a photograph of a Holocaust victim, as well as some information about his or her life and fate. The age and gender of the victim were approximately matched by a computer to that of the visitor. The system was not intended to yield ownership of the victim to the visitor but rather to produce a bond of sorts. The visitor would hold the identity card in his hand or pocket for the duration of the visit, and taking it home with him afterwards. In the event, however, too many of these cards were simply thrown away in bins outside the museum like a spent ticket. This attempt to synthesize relation through the reproduction of identities in images had later to be modified. Looking at images of the Holocaust is not necessarily morally educative. No one should make a mere spectacle of Jewish suffering (as happened, say, on the streets of Germany and Austria in the late 1930s when crowds gathered to gawp and laugh at the Nazis’ gross public humiliation of affluent and respected members of the community). And it is more than arguable that photographic images of atrocity and degradation should, like their objects, rest in the peace of darkness. Not all victims, probably very few, would want their humiliation or death to be spectated. As Orthodox Jews recently reminded the curators of Israel’s Holocaust national museum, Yad Vashem, one should refrain from showing in books or exhibitions images of Jewish corpses or Jews being killed, especially those of women stripped of their clothes.64 Curators now at least hesitate before doing so. Even the pitying stare can perpetuate the violent intrusion into someone’s life that took place more than half a century before.

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To take but one example, one of a set of photographs of the Lepajya massacre in Latvia taken by SS Oberscharführer Strott shows a group of Jewish women and their daughters standing huddled together in their underwear awaiting execution in the freezing Baltic wind on 15 December 1941. These women have been identified as those of the Epstein family. The ten-year-old Sorella Epstein is taking shelter behind her mother Rosa’s legs. On the one hand, the picture records the last moments of these women’s lives, ‘shot before they [were] shot’.65 Robbed of their human dignity as well as their lives, it is doubtful that the Epstein family would want to have been remembered by this image, not taken at home, or school or at a picnic, but standing forever in view of their killers in their underclothes. On the other hand, this image of three generations of Jewish women linking arms and looking their killers in the face lives on in the viewer’s consciousness; its interpretation is undetermined and can unfold in an open future – a different forever – within the history of Jewish women. But leaving such images to the uncertain fate of their interpretation is a risk. For reasons such as these, cultural critics may not regard visual images of the Holocaust as a self-evidently beneficent medium of memory. The moral ambiguity of looking and seeing is further illustrated in a letter an Austrian woman wrote to Mauthausen police station on 27 September 1941, complaining that her apartment overlooked the area where Mauthausen concentration camp’s executions took place and the sight of the killings was beginning to make her ill and depressed. She politely requested that they either stop the killings or carry out the executions elsewhere, where she could not see them.66 Her letter was at once a brave moral protest and a mere note of complaint. The letter demonstrated that she was hardly indifferent to the sight of suffering. But, perhaps merely squeamish, she was also prepared to accept the fact of executions so long as they were not in her line of vision; as long as they did not spoil the view. Moreover, no image is unmediated and uninterpreted, even as it is made. Andrea Liss reminds us that documentary photographs of the Holocaust should not be used to make artistic and political points without acknowledgment of their original purpose and source.67 The Nazis assembled an extensive visual record of party activity and mass murder in (often orchestrated) still photographs and documentary film footage that was used as propaganda for public consumption or kept in closed archival files. These are the images of the Holocaust that we usually see. They are a ‘tainted’ record seen through the trained, dispassionate, objectifying eye of the perpetrator from inside a genocidal environment that was generally closed to the eyes of the outside world.68 ‘Insider’ photographs such as those taken by the Jewish resistance groups in the death and concentration camps or by Mendel Grossman who took covert photographs of conditions in the Lódz´ ghetto from its establishment in 1940 until his deportation to the labour camp where he died in 1945, are extremely

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rare.69 Also untypical were those of Herbert (Heinz) Jost, a German soldier who took over a hundred photographs in the Warsaw ghetto on a day off – his birthday – in 1941. It is still not known why he took them and why they were not shown until 1980s, but it seems likely they were taken as a way of witnessing to an enormity he wished to protest. But the vast majority of photographs taken by German soldiers stationed in the camps and ghettos were images that (re)captured the images of profoundly traumatized people who did not choose or consent to be photographed. Even after liberation, in camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald and Belsen photographs were taken in journalistic ‘action-shot’ style, again with the photographers’ own national, cultural and moral propagandistic interests to the fore.70 With these interpretative ambiguities in mind, the now notorious exhibition Mirroring Evil, mounted by Norman Kleeblatt of the Jewish Museum in New York in 2002, attempted to destabilize the notion that post-Holocaust art is a morally innocent Jewish catharsis. It refused any redemptive function to Holocaust art and chose not to privilege Jewish memory or identify with the witness and victim alone. Controversially, the exhibition included deliberately ambiguous artistic images, including those representing the subjectivity of the perpetrator. The exhibition further explored the role of irreverence in the representation of horror and questioned who might be authorized to represent the Holocaust and why.71

Testimony and the Holocaust image While critics are properly alert to the problems attending representation of the Holocaust in art, it should be remembered that during the Holocaust there were also artists who, hardly from a safe distance, saw and represented the suffering other. In the camps and ghettos, artists found that by drawing they gained the momentary relief of objective distance from the horror. The act of seeing momentarily transformed them from object-victims to subject-artists whose creative imagination, and therefore whose humanity, was restored to them. Drawing was a form of spiritual self-preservation from the ferocious dehumanization of the Nazi assault; an act of resistance. Glenn Sujo has elucidated the link that existed for the artists working in the camps and ghettos between 1939 and 1945 ‘between seeing (and by extension, drawing) and survival, or continuity (when physical survival was no longer attainable)’.72 The act of making an image was deemed a definitively human moral and spiritual obligation upon the artist as witness. She or he drew not merely to express their own and others’ anguish, but out of a sense of responsibility to history. Much of the extant documentary art dates from early 1944 onwards, as the allies advanced and surveillance and certain restrictions eased. But even before 1944, at considerable risk to the artist’s own life, artists such as those of Terezín

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(Teresienstadt) used art as the medium of a bitter political critique that links their work with that of Kollwitz, Dix, Grosz and Beckmann. Several Holocaust artists lost their lives as a direct result of their clandestine witness.73 Even during the Holocaust, testimonial art may have conformed to certain Jewish aesthetic sensibilities. The Holocaust, for example, produced no Jewish Goya: scenes of mass violence are not the traditional subject of Jewish art and Jewish artists in the Holocaust generally refrained from depictions of gross atrocity and mass death. Although non-Jewish artists such as Zoran Music drew mass death at Dachau in pen and ink drawings such as Corpses in Coffins (1945) and in Buchenwald, Corrado Cagli drew images such as Lying Corpses (1945), most post-Holocaust Jewish artists have refrained from transmuting memories of mounds of corpses into art. It is possible that this visual reticence defers to the Second Commandment. If the Torah objects to a portrait as a thing without the spirit of life, and therefore with affinities to an idol, then a portrait of an unwashed, unburied corpse is an absolute and violation of the Second Commandment, being in Schwarzschild’s words, ‘dead to the second power’.74 (Though, conversely, if the commandment applies only to images of instantiated spirit, it may not be applicable to images of the Holocaust’s dead, precisely because they are dead.) Deuteronomy 21:23 prohibits leaving the body of a hanged man overnight hanging from a tree. Whatever the moral standing of the person, their corpse should not be exposed to profane view, and especially so when, as in the Holocaust, the Jew is victim, not perpetrator. Some Jewish artists, however, appear to violate traditional sensibilities in their representations of the Holocaust. George Segal’s The Holocaust (1982–3) uses plaster casts of live models to represent corpses lying on the ground (ensuring that their exposed genitals were covered in underpants to avoid further indecent exposure of the dead, if at one remove).75 Gerhart Frankel’s The Yellow Sandpit (1964) and Man, Woman and Child (1964) and Hyman Bloom’s Dissolving (1974) all assume that holocaustal death can and should be imaged. There have also been highly problematic images of the gas chamber, in which a macabrely sensuous tangle of bodies (particularly tending towards a pornographic impression when they are female bodies) can be seen in Wiktor Siminski’s drawing In the Gas Chambers (1944). Maryan S. Maryan’s Auschwitz Crematorium (1949) seems also orgiastically sensuous; as does, to some degree, Lea Grundig’s less aestheticized drawing, The Sacrifice (1945). All of these, according to Ziva Amishai-Maisels, deter empathetic response: ‘The result is a picture in which the level of pain is so high that the spectator is repulsed.’76 Most Jewish artists during the Holocaust experienced the moral imperative to witness by drawing as a compulsion to document extreme deprivation and dejection of spirit; tangled heaps of corpses were already sensed to be beyond the limits of decent and useful representation. The sheer misery depicted in Henri Pieck’s drawing, Jews Before the Car (1945), of a group of Jews harnessed to a cart they are pulling through the rain and Maurycy Bromberg’s similar,

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Five Jews in One Yoke (no date), is palpable. Holocaust artists wanted, if not God, then humanity to see the Jewish predicament. Although Primo Levi’s testimony suggests that few inmates had the will, strength or means to represent their own abjection, Glenn Sujo has demonstrated that the victims perceived the imaging of their suffering to be of the highest importance. The rest of humanity needed to see and judge the enormity. For the sake of justice, not pity, they wanted to their suffering represented in images that, bearing historical and moral witness, would live on after their death. As a woman inmate in Auschwitz told the artist Halina Olumucki who drew images of the Holocaust in the Warsaw ghetto, Majdanek and Auschwitz (in the latter with no more than a stub of pencil on some grease-proof paper), ‘We want to be among the living, at least on paper.’77 Drawing as an act of historical and moral witness drove Olumicki’s will to survive. She was not alone. Drawing was ‘an act of reckoning’, ‘restoring a glimmer of hope and dignity for themselves and for their fellow inmates’. Violette Rougier-Lecoq drew some of the women’s experiences at Ravensbrück from memory, after the war, convinced of the exigency of art as testimony: ‘We were terribly afraid that nobody in the world would notice a thing: us, the struggle, the dead . . . that this wall was so huge that nothing, no message about us, would ever make it out.’78 And now, as Sujo notes, those drawings ‘restore a link between the living and the dead and draw us into the space of the victim and the persecuted, reminding us of our responsibility to them. Through them we become conscious bearers of the truth and will in time be required to testify to humanity’s crimes in our own voices.’79 That artists felt obligated to make visual evidence obligates us to look at it. Even decades after the Holocaust, the obligation to witness and thereby demand justice, is passed on to other artists for whom making images of the Holocaust not only preserves memory but also intimates ‘an alternative, visionary reality’.80

Revelation and the pathos of the holocaustal image But these drawings are also more than a deposition of evidence. That three quarters of European Jewry were made to disappear, ethically entails a restoration of the figured. In the re-presentation of presence is an invitation to a theology of hope. For a theologian, the Holocaust does not deter the aesthetization of Judaism and of the epic history of the Jews, but requires it. Not only as an act of resistance to erasure, but because the entire scheme of creation and redemption has an aesthetic dimension – a condition of revealability – in which all Jewish history can, finally, be imagined. Moreover, as will be argued in the next chapter, theological responses to the Holocaust can be offered in, or interpreted through, art, in ways that avoid recourse to a sub-religious romantic aesthetic of sublimity. Through a conviction of the holiness of their object,

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and in love of their object, the sublime or abyssal numinous impression of the destruction can be taken up into an ethico-redemptive scheme illuminated by divine pathos. Because revelation, as a disclosure of God’s presence into history, is an inherently aesthetic category and moment, images of the Holocaust are no more than torn fragments of a larger picture than that which can be visible in and through secular historiography. Finally, the fetid claustrophobia of the freight wagons, barrack blocks and gas chambers, gives way to the infinitely open conceptual space of a redemptive scheme. Theology becomes possible when the knowing of the Holocaust, its terror faced without aesthetic reprieve, is nonetheless taken into a transcendental space that is too far away for ordinary sight, but remains close enough to its traditional religious schematization within the continuum of creation, revelation and redemption to reimagine in hope. The imaginative contemplation of the Holocaust that produces art (and theology, in this study, is classed as a form of religious art) takes the degrading spectacle of the Holocaust up into a transcendental narrative or cosmic patterning that absorbs and sublates chaos and the fragmentation of foreshortened, broken, stories into a single unified story of the relation between God, world and humanity. This unified story does not overwhelm that of the individual but makes it, precisely and in fact, a story, imaged as well as written, whose pathos makes it the object of a judgment that it is finally, in the completion of its meaning not sublime, but beautiful. It is my opinion that far from trivializing or domesticating the Holocaust, the aesthetization of the Holocaust can be a means of its accommodation in Jewish religio-historical consciousness. It would be more authentically Jewish, however, if this were not by means of the customary sense of the sublime. For the sublime is a para-religious aesthetic impression deriving from the terror and exaltation of the numinous impression. The sense of the sublime can be created by unleashing that which is taboo onto that which is consecrated. The sense of the holy, however, is saturated by the ethical,81 or in more affective terms, by love. To represent the Holocaust in images necessarily introduces an aesthetic dimension into people’s knowledge of the Holocaust. This aesthetic dimension should never make the Holocaust beautiful to watch. Rather, it is that the aesthetization of suffering by its repeated re-enactment can constitute a quasiliturgical process of accommodation within the arc of Jewish history’s interpretative frame. This aesthetization does not constitute a cowardly or romantic infidelity to the historical agonies of the Holocaust but is a response to the moral and spiritual obligation their representation entails. From a theological perspective, the aesthetization of the Holocaust as a visual spectacle repeatedly re-enacted in art, cinema, photography and installations should not merely yield the interesting sensation of the sublime – of some sub-moral turbulence

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at the dark heart of European civilization – but should make it an object of what Christians have called ‘devout beholding’. This Christian term describes the religious experience of looking at a visual image in a way that places it inside a redemptive theology of inter-human and divine-human relation; that holds the image up to the light by which it becomes translucent to God. Even ‘tainted’ images of the Holocaust made by the perpetrators can be looked at in ways that move the beholder to compassion: a form of vicarious participation to the point of substitution that seeks to distribute or carry the burden of the suffering other through an exercise of the imagination. This is not only a Christian obligation; responsive viewing also furthers the religious duty of collective Jewish remembering: zakhor. That Jews have, in fact, meditated on the Holocaust through a form of devout beholding might explain the widespread literary and artistic use of the Christian crucifi xion motif (a phenomenon explored in the next chapter of this book) to represent the Holocaust before, during and after the war. Whereas to hide one’s eyes is to spare oneself the pain of knowing, to look into, rather than at, images of the Holocaust, is a means of taking some vicarious token of the pain from the other and into oneself. Through sight, the image becomes a medium of atonement in so far as it brings us and ‘them’ back together, face to face, across space and time. Through an aesthetic zakhor we can shoulder some of their burden of suffering and reinstate their presence to Israel, an assembly of all Jews, living and dead, before God. Especially through the lens of theological texts that predicate suffering to God and that regard compassion for God as well as humanity as an ethical imperative, beholding the Holocaust as art can become a religious act of substitution: a quasi-divine act of disinterested and concentrated attention to the suffering other which is born of the will to justice, truth and, above all, love. It is not that the Holocaust is so ugly that it is beautiful or that it is so profane that it is sacred. Rather, it is the phenomenon of reverent looking; the spectacle of responsive spectation that is, in a supra-material sense, beautiful. It is not the holocaustal suffering itself nor the material images of it that are holy, but the viewer’s moral and spiritual reception of the images. Suffering is not itself redemptive; redemption or mending (tikkun) occurs in the moment of the viewer’s will to redeem or take back the agonized moment into the care and sanctuary of his or her own moment. The holiness of still or moving images of the Holocaust, then, is primarily in the response of the viewer to the image, in the quasi-familial recognition that passes from one person made in the image of God to another: a re-call to and of love. The exercise of the Holocaust imagination is not only an event in the history of art, but also an event in the history of its schematic reception. That is, the incorporation of its images into one’s own moral, spiritual or religious scheme is not so much a second-rate historiographical or cognitive attempt

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to imagine what it was like to be in the Holocaust, as to make an image of the Holocaust that reveals a transmissive meaning in and through the image beheld. Although images of the Holocaust emerge from and recede into darkness, the re-presentation of the human(e) in and after Auschwitz will then begin to correct post-Holocaust theologies of absence where Auschwitz comes to be represented only by the pit: the swallowing of light.

Chapter 5

Towards a Theology of the Holocaust Image

Michael Wyschogrod once wrote, ‘I do not think that a voice can be extracted from the Holocaust which will speak to believer and non-believer alike.’1 This is one of those rare statements that is hardly possible to contest. It might be supplemented, however, by adding, that the believer and the non-believer will also not see the same Holocaust. Although one of the root meanings of the Greek historien is to see or to recognize, Holocaust Studies has been dominated by secular historians and social and cultural theorists, usually with little knowledge of, or interest in, theology and who therefore do not see what religious people see when they look at the Holocaust images that are used to illustrate the historiography of the Holocaust. Too often, commentators further fail to recognize that the representation of the Holocaust may refer to Jewish religious belief as well as cultural identity. Religious belief frames the Holocaust in ways that correlate its photographed or painted scenes not only with a body of historical knowledge, but also with the existing content of the religious imagination. Of course, exhibitions and other visual commemorations of the Holocaust have never been entirely oblivious to the religious dimension of the catastrophe, especially when hosted by Jewish cultural institutions. The recent exhibition, Sacred Image, Sacred Text: Art of the Holocaust mounted at the Klutzick National Jewish Museum in Washington in 1993 is a case in point. But on the whole, Holocaust Studies has assumed, with Lawrence Langer, Berel Lang and others that the representation of the Holocaust in creative art should, finally, defer to historiography. It is obvious that any work of art or theology should always take the utmost pains to ensure the historical accuracy of any of its factual claims (such as where and when an event occurred and who bore direct responsibility for its occurring). Yet, for religious Jews, the dispensation of revelation is never subordinate to that of history. History is mediated through religious witness. As Abraham Joshua Heschel claimed in another context, ‘The essence of Jewish religious thinking does not lie in entertaining a concept of God but in the ability to articulate a memory of moments of illumination by His presence. Israel is not a people of definers but a people of witnesses: “Ye are My witnesses” (Isaiah 43:10).’2 Ever since Sinai – the emblem and origin of the existential unity of the Jewish people – Jewish history has

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already transcended temporal and spatial difference. As Arthur Cohen put it, all Israel is a ‘real presence’ in the death camps, just as it was at Sinai: ‘the death camps account my presence really, even if not literally: hence my obligation to hear the witnesses as though I were a witness, to be with the witnesses as though I were a witness.’3 The actuality of the past, present and future of Israel (itself a meta-historical body of people) is substantively and methodologically schematized by sui generis religious categories, principal of which is kedushah, holiness. In this sense, Rosenzweig was right that the Jews are a people outside history. From the very beginning, during the Holocaust itself, a conceptualization of the events sharply differentiated by the exercise of religious meta-narrative was particularly apparent in Ultra-Orthodox rabbi-theologians’ capacity to ‘see’ God’s suffering in Jewry’s. While post-Holocaust modern Jewish thought draws heavily upon the trope of divine hiddenness (hester panim) if not to explain the Holocaust, then at least to justify or account for God’s failure to intervene, ultraOrthodox or Haredi thought during, and for some years after the Holocaust, more often perceived God as a participant in the apocalyptic drama. God was suffering in and with those who had not turned away from him and he gave them the strength for repentance (teshuvah) that would usher in the messianic age. It may seem harsh to require those in extremis to practise repentance. But rabbinical Judaism, it should be remembered, regards teshuvah as the proper response to personal suffering (BT Ber. 5a) and it is this that allows the subject a degree of dignity and control over the meaning of his or her own experience. Whatever the merits of conjoining repentance and suffering, there is here a significant lack of focus on divine absence, indeed it is us who must turn to God, to be present to God, in his pain. Many rabbis of the period deploy the biblical and rabbinic trope of God’s weeping with all Jews: God shares in our affliction (Is. 63:9); a lion in Jerusalem, ‘God roars, howling over his city’ (Jer. 25:30). To take but one example, the Piazesner Rebbe, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, to whose writings we shall return towards the end of the present chapter, wrote sermons in the Warsaw ghetto that sought to comprehend God’s unlimited suffering and submerge human suffering in its depths as if tears were being shed into the sea. In the moment of human presence to God’s infinite pain, all finite human pain, with the ego itself, would be dissolved into the being of God. God’s pain is so overwhelming, so oceanic, that he must absent himself from the world lest the world drown in his tears. Human pain is insignificant by comparison, therefore it must be understood only in due proportion to God’s pain. Shapiro’s son was killed in 1939 and his daughter at Teblinka in 1942 (he himself was to be shot in the Tawniki labour camp near Lublin in 1943); he knew whereof he spoke. In substitutionary love of God, human pain is put aside in a superhuman act of the concentrated religious will.4 Similarly, Yehezkel Sarna, in an address in Hebrew to the Keneset Yisrael Yeshivah in Jerusalem in 1944, argued that God is present in the midst of the

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catastrophe. God weeps in the Holocaust as he once sat on his overturned throne weeping for the destruction of the First Temple. God’s weeping summons us to give way to grief, for what transpires below is a revelation of what transpires above. To transcend one’s own physical and psychic pain and touch God’s is to lose one’s own suffering in God’s and be consoled. 5 In other words, perception of the presence of God, suffering with Israel, configures the events into a cosmic drama, the pathos of whose spectacle transcends its own chaos and terror. In the light of such theologies of presence, when Lang asks in parenthetical passing comment, ‘Does anyone now require a moving experience of the Holocaust?’,6 the answer must be that they do and they should, not least because a traditional Jewish response is one that may experience not only grief for the human, but also for God. Moreover, the representation of the Holocaust in religiously affective images has continued to this day. The late Stephen Feinstein was one of the few historians to have focused on the theological motivation and content of some contemporary representations of the Holocaust. He examined the work of ‘a group of international artists whose work can be connected to post-Holocaust narrative theology and to the search for the absent and present God of history’. All of these artists’ work addresses ‘fundamental theological questions that were asked by victims of the Holocaust, and that have continued to be asked ever since by both Jews and Christians’.7 Feinstein elucidates theological themes in the work of five artists: Alice Lok Cahana, Audrey Flack, Anselm Kiefer, Samuel Bak and Arie Galles, all of whose work is marked by differing concepts of God, the use of biblical or rabbinic texts and a broadly ‘midrashic’ approach to Holocaust art. None of these artists, he writes, ‘gives up on the questions of redemption or the existence of God. But all seem to ask, one way or another, about God’s absence’.8 But to question the absence of God is also to assume the possibility of God’s presence; Feinstein’s analysis largely ignores the further possibility that God’s presence to suffering might also be manifest in Holocaust art, or that it might be affirmed from the witness of art. In this chapter, I pursue a discussion initiated at the end of the previous one, arguing that images of the Holocaust can, in fact, perform redemptive, or para-redemptive functions not merely for their viewers but for the human. In bearing witness, artistic images of the Holocaust, or differently, photographic images of the Holocaust found and shown as judge and witness of evil (rather than as the evidence for racial subordination that they were made for) have an ultimately eschatological role as a plea for the exercise of divine justice, or are at the very least an anticipation or prayer for such. Perhaps that is why, for Anthony Julius, no aesthetic considerations are relevant to Holocaust art: it is necessarily figurative and ‘subordinate to the Jewish duty to bear witness. Holocaust art is . . . a specially charged kind of art of witness.’9 In the previous chapter I discussed Jewish critics’ understandable unease at the degree to which the Holocaust defines contemporary Jewish identity. In a

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1998 survey of American Jewish opinion, Holocaust remembrance ranked top of all activities related to Jewish identity, including synagogue attendance.10 American Jewish college students commonly wear yellow stars on their lapels on Holocaust Remembrance Day and Bar and Batmitzvah boys and girls are twinned with young victims of the Holocaust who did not live to have a ceremony of their own. Cynical commentators have interpreted such rituals as an inflation or dramatization of the self, observing that from the late 1980s Jewish identity was being ‘anchored in the agony of European Jewry, certification as (vicarious) victims could be claimed, with all the moral privilege accompanying such certification’.11 Marianne Hirsch, however, offers a more nuanced and sensitive reading of second-generational ‘postmemory’ (that is, ‘the response of the second generation to the trauma of the first’). Hirsch rejects the notion that the second generation’s willing exposure to an ‘endless repetition’ of Holocaust images is a paralyzing ‘re-traumatization, as it often is for survivors of trauma’. She finds it to be ‘a mostly helpful vehicle of working through a traumatic past’; ‘part of an intergenerational effort at reconstitution and repair’. Seeing these images over and over again can ‘reconstitute a viewing relationship that cannot be repaired, but that can perhaps be reenvisioned in ways that do not negate the rupture at its source’.12 It is Hirsch’s observation that informs the theology of image presented here, one that is predicated not so much on repeated ‘exposure’ to Holocaust images as a quasi-ritual re-viewing of Holocaust images that both belongs to a process of tikkun or repair, while mourning the rupture they will always, or cannot be made not to, represent.

Photographs of the Holocaust resurrected to light Hirsch’s argument is a redemptive one of sorts, even if framed in terms of a psychotherapeutic strategy. Put in stronger theological terms, in the ‘ritual’ viewing of images of the Holocaust, whatever their provenance, there is a reincorporation of the holocaustal body from the pit into the congregation of Israel. The absolute aloneness of the victims’ suffering is overcome by its recall into the collective body of Israel which allows it to transcend its own historicity. In viewing images of the Holocaust, that act of ‘being with the witnesses’, at the ontological level Arthur Cohen has enjoined, is not effected quasi- genetically by virtue of being Jewish, but by compassionate love. Love of the suffering other, including love of the suffering God, imposes an obligation not only to hear the testimony of the witness, but to see the catastrophe through their eyes; through their image or after-face. An appeal to the aesthetic dimension of Holocaust memory is therefore not at all an appeal to mere sensation but is a means by which to fulfil the Deuteronomic arch-commandment to love (6:4–5). In the trans-temporality of the Sinai-event, Jewish love becomes crossgenerational and commands a love of those we never knew and are not related

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to our immediate families. Responsive viewing of images of the Holocaust can be a performative function of the cross-temporal and cross-spatial ontological connection inaugurated at Sinai, a connection encompassed by God’s commandment to love. Dismissed by some critics as self-dramatizing, the evidence of an emotional identification of contemporary Jewry with Jews who died in the Holocaust suggests that most Jews do, in fact, respond to images of the Holocaust in such a way as to consolidate a relationship between themselves and the victims of Nazism constituted by the fact of common Jewishness itself. Berel Lang once remarked: ‘It seems obvious that artists would – should – hardly think of the ideal of beauty in addressing the subject of the Holocaust.’13 Yet it is not obvious because beauty is not only attributable to things that are visually pleasing. Beauty is also an attribute of moral obligation, of devotion to the other, whether in accordance with a humanistic or theistic ethic. When Abraham Joshua Heschel rejects the grand Kantian account of the sublime he does so in the conviction that where the sublime signals towards an ineffable mystery, it is as a form of beauty that makes a ‘silent allusion of things to a meaning greater than themselves’. Beauty can be found in acts of goodness and the sense of wonder at the small and apparently insignificant as well as the great. (In Genesis 28:18, 22, the simple stone on which Jacob rests his head for the night was to become the pillar of God’s house.)14 Similarly, when people are moved by representations of the Holocaust it may be the work’s ability to capture the small or incidental personal detail that has moved them, not its capacity to induce a sub-ethical ‘apocalyptic reverie’. Theirs might be what Vivian Petraka has described as performative, ‘active spectatorship’, not just the passive viewing of pre-narrated Holocaust exhibits.15 In theological terms, it is resurrective love that is the aesthetic dynamic of ‘active spectatorship’. Actively spectated, images of the Holocaust can be an induction into a peculiarly religious sensation of empathetic compassion to the point of identification and substitution, in a word, love. This is not a private passion between two individuals but a disinterested love commanded in the Torah: the love of God (Deut. 6:5); the love of neighbour (Lev. 19:18) and the love of the stranger (Deut. 10:19). All Jewish love is encompassed by the religioethical imperative of love between Israel and God, and it is one that does not end in death. On the contrary, we are resurrected by and into love. Perhaps it is this kind of love of the holocaustal other that moves artists to make images of the Holocaust and curators to exhibit art and photographs of Holocaust Jews. This is the kind of substitutionary love that looks at images through the vicarious suffering of witness. Through the periodic ritual display of Holocaust images, a collective expression of love gives over those images of abjection to their incorporation into the sanctified Jewish body, Israel. The film director Steven Spielberg has been criticized for representing Holocaust survivors in a ‘meretricious’ Hollywood style by ensuring that the

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interviews recorded for his archive of survivor testimonies are led in a ‘redemptive’ direction: wherever possible, the testimonies end with the survivor being joined and surrounded by his or her family.16 Theologically, however, this is hardly meretricious. It is a means of restoring the quorum of sinaiatic assembly whose microcosm is the Jewish family. Similarly, Holocaust survivors recording their testimony on film often close their testimony by holding up photographs of their murdered relatives towards the end of their testimony. The photograph is visual evidence of their relatives’ former and post-mortem existence and it witnesses to the truth of their own narrative. And more than that, the image is a means of restoring its absent object to presence, to activity in the light and life of public view. Seen in the mirror of the beholder, the human image of the divine image is returned to the world. In the moment of holding up their image the holocaustal dead are no longer lost to us, to Israel. In the moment that each image of the Holocaust is seen, an image of the divine and of the human made in God’s image has been salvaged from the premature death of genocidal erasure and forgetting. In their images, the dead and the broken are carried, literally and metaphorically, into the light. Many years after the Holocaust, when the late Rabbi Hugo Gryn returned with his daughter Naomi to Berhavo, the town of his pre-Holocaust childhood, they asked those they met if they had any photographs that included members of the Gryn family before deportation. One evening, a woman handed Naomi a picture of the 1942–3 class of Berahavo’s Jewish Elementary School. She passed it to her father: ‘the colour drained from his face. Pointing to one of the children, he gasped, “That’s Gabi in the back row.” [His brother, who died in Auschwitz.] It was as if his brother had found a way to say hello.’17 True, numberless Jews died in the Holocaust of whom no visual legacy remains and with no one left on earth who would remember them or be able recognize them from a photograph. But spiritually attentive looking at just one image can be a labour of collective re-presentation on behalf of all those faces who were never photographed or for whom no photograph survives, and whose faces will never be seen again. In the image’s restoration or tikkun to light, there is a form of redemption from death, returning and presenting that desecrated image, purified by light, to God, in whom that image belongs. In the Lurianic mystical imaginary that typically funded hasidic thought during the Holocaust, divine goodness and light have been primordially imprisoned in darkness. Since human evil is systemically present in the world, God too is imprisoned everywhere. Wherever there is darkness God can be found there, even in the deepest pit. It may be this sense of hiddenness – one of hidden presence in the world, not of willed absence from the world – that pushes us to peer into the darkness in search of a God whose face can be retrieved by disclosure into the light. The divine spark of light, the divine image, is left imprisoned in darkness when innocent suffering is not witnessed and judged.

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That is death absolutely. Yet gathering darkness – forgetting – lifts in the showing and seeing of an image of a holocaustal face that both illuminates and is illuminated by the divine spark captured in its eyes. The presentation of an image of disappearance to sight is to restore sight to God and God to the insight of faith. The lifting of an image from darkness into light participates in the liturgical cycle in which death is countermanded by the resurrection that in its re-presentation of the dead to life vanquishes forgetting. Resurrection is a lifting up, but not an exhumation, from the darkness of the pit to the light of (eternal) life.18 Citing Adorno’s notion that, ‘Hope clings . . . to the transfigured body’, Schwarzschild insists that resurrection is not a natural or ethical law but a function of God’s power, mercy and grace.19 That is why Arie Galles could write of the Holocaust images he created: ‘What is real to me is Ezekiel and dry bones coming together in Zion.’20 When images of Holocaust Jews are raised up in our midst they are re-presented as members of the visible assembly or congregation of Israel.21 Aharon Gluska’s photographic paintings, some of which are hung up on walls, others of which are displayed on the floor as if the faces are looking up from opened graves, also restore presence by revealing that the victims may have been hidden by death and time but have been there all the time; have never gone away. In the 1990s, Gluska, the son of a survivor, produced a series of portraits of Auschwitz inmates entitled Reframing and Reclaiming (1996). In each of the portraits, he took a numbered photograph of a former inmate and enlarged it to about five foot high. He then attached the image to a canvas upon which he applied hundreds of layers of dark pigment. After doing so, he slowly wiped away the pigment as if tenderly washing the face of Auschwitz: of what Terence des Pres would call its holocaustal ‘excremental assault’. Then, refusing the numbers given to each face by the Nazis, he used the resources at Yad Vashem to restore a name and identity to each face. The names were then attached to plaques made by Gluska and placed at the base of each portrait.22 The eyes of Gluska’s images had been blinded by Auschwitz. The black paint of Auschwitz had left the eyes unable to penetrate the darkness. But Gluska’s purification of the holocaustal face by wiping brought each face back from the pit into the light. There is an infinite tenderness in this act of wiping. It is not only a wiping akin to the respectful washing of a corpse, but also a restorative wiping that cleans a work of divine art from the damage of its own history. Resurrected from the pit and back in the light, the fi lth has been wiped from the victims’ eyes and they can see what is good about the world – the tov that God pronounced the world to be in Genesis 1 – once more. In restoring their subjectivity through restoring their sight, it is now the victims who are looking out at us, not us at them. Hermann Cohen, following Maimonides, rejects any idea that an encounter with divine presence is immediate. It is from love, and especially pity for

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Figure 7 Aharon Gluska, Jacob Dykierman, from the works titled Man and Name in the Framing and Reframing series (1996), archival photo, paint and gel, 203.2 ⫻ 137.1 cm, with permission of The Museum of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

the suffering, poverty-stricken other, that we infer God’s compassionate love. Through that love alone can we comprehend God’s love for us. The loss of the ego in such pity is what renders the other not other but neighbour. For Cohen this pity is not an aesthetic impulse but a Kantian moral imperative.23 In this respect, I differ with Cohen (and Levinas). The ethical imperative is at the same time an aesthetic impulse in that one is moved to ethical action in the moment of looking at the suffering other in identificatory, substitutionary love, even when all that remains is their image captured and printed on a piece of paper or card. It is when one turns to look at another so as to meet the pain

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in their eyes that one can begin to comprehend the movement of God’s presence towards the suffering other, towards the darkness, driven by the force of his own suffering love. In a sense, photographic images of the Holocaust, lacking the allusive reverence of Holocaust images made by artists, could be counted as idolatrous on several counts and therefore proscribed by the Second Commandment. Taken by the perpetrators, they might be proscribed because they were propagandistic projections of what is loathsome onto the human face, or if they are coldly documentary, they were images of instantiated spirit taken without love or compassion. If seen by those who, as it were, cannot or will not see them, then they are images that should be kept hidden from profane sight. But for those who seek the subject of the holocaustal image in love, the image should be held up to the light. Loving the other through compassionate beholding renews the imprint of God’s kiss that blew into us the spirit of life. Precisely such resurrective love, expressed as a labour of re-presentation, informed Ann Weiss’ compilation of her book The Last Album, not uncoincidentally subtitled Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The book consists of part of a collection of around 2,400 photographs found in 1945 that had been taken on arrival from the possessions of Jews transported into Auschwitz. These particular images came to Auschwitz in 1943 with the liquidation and deportation of the Bendin ghetto and were smuggled out of ‘Canada’ (the camp’s repository of the deportees’ possessions) by inmates at great risk to their life. Had these photographs not been redeemed they would have been sent to a separate crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau for burning the treasured photographs, letters and drawings its victims had brought with them into the camp. Weiss rescued these pictures of the victims as they were in life, not death, and which had already been rescued by Jews, because they were ‘the very photos they [the dead] chose for their own remembering’. They were these Jews’ last images of home, reminders of their humanity; that they were or had once been loved.24 Weiss published these photographs not merely to augment the historical record but because they were images made out of love. On her first visit to research the cache of images, she found an image of a young boy holding a celebratory cone of sweets to mark the event of his first day of school. Weiss remembers, ‘I could not bear to have this child’s face covered in darkness again. It was this child’s portrait that first compelled me to bring these photographs to light.’25 Similarly, the artist Shimon Attie has used beams of light to project photographic images of Jews living in the Jewish quarter of Berlin in the 1930s back, if only for a moment, onto the buildings they once inhabited.26 In one sense, Attie’s conjuring tricks, ‘photographs of photographs of photographs’,27 restore the images of Jews back into life only to remove them all over again; blink and they are gone. The sheer transience of the images’ revelation to sight makes it uncertain whether they resurrect German Jewry or, because they are just

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projected images, and not actually there at all, merely compound their irretrievable disappearance and forgetting. People reappear only as a ray of light to be extinguished and vanish all over again. A fleeting visual recollection of Jewish life is not a reprieve from its death, which is, definitively, the state of having gone. And yet, that something is and can be depicted; that something is there, on film, to be seen here in this place afterwards is proleptical of tikkun, which can be translated not only as a redemptive mending but as a restoration of what was there before. The continuity of Jewish life outlasts its violent interruption. Seeing the dead even just once more in photographs and films of them taken before and during the Holocaust is a moment of re-population, literally a re-membering: raising and re-assembling the dry bones so that they are here, not there, with the unidentified dead. That enough of a face has survived for it to be re-made and returned to the world of visible things continues to make its life narrateable and prayable. The fi fty-four foot high chimney-like Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, with its 1,032 photographs of the murdered former inhabitants of the small shtetl of Eishyshok, now in Lithuania, is an important case in point.28

Holocaust images as petitionary prayers The Holocaust’s familiar visual signifiers (images of barbed wire; the railway tracks leading into Auschwitz; the striped fabric garments worn by prisoners and so forth) had been dismissed by some as ‘stale and sanctimonious’ as early as the mid-1970s.29 The repetitious nature of these images-turned-symbols was felt to numb emotion rather than awaken it. If images so rapidly exhausted response it would seem preferable to avoid them altogether. Certainly, there has been some justification for thinking that the repeated use of certain saturated visual and auditory motifs (barking SS dogs, shouting soldiers, crying babies, the hiss of steam engines and the screeching wheels of the trains) indicates that the energies of the post-Holocaust artistic imagination are flagging and that visual historiography and its soundtrack are degenerating into cliché. But the emotional accommodation of the Holocaust may be precisely dependent on repetition: on not seeing once and forgetting, but seeing at significant and regular intervals. Religious art is inherently and necessarily reiterative. The Christian tradition has produced numberless images of its gospel narrative because the very reproduction and showing of the same establishes and recites a visual canon. Similarly, display of the closed photographic canon of Holocaust images can become a ritual of quasi-liturgical or prayerful remembering: a visually reiterative liturgical hymn. Irving Greenberg, one of the religious leaders who played a central role in making the Holocaust central to American-Jewish identity, once called for the incorporation of the Holocaust

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into the ritual cycle, with the eating of the ‘rotten bread of Auschwitz’ at Pesach as the ‘new’ bread of affliction.30 His proposal was not widely adopted. But the ritual and liturgical impetus of the catastrophe may be manifest in less literal fashion in the making and beholding of a Holocaust image which can constitute a silent visual prayer in the tradition of Aaron. Confronted with the death of his sons Nadab and Abihu by fire at the hand of God and by a rather less than persuasive theological explanation of their death from Moses, the text tells us: ‘And Aaron was silent’ (Lev. 10:3. See also Lamentations 3:28). For Rosenzweig, it is the silent liturgical gesture that above all signals the unity and fellowship of the community before God. The performative gestures of liturgy, in contradistinction to the operations of reason alone, are constituent elements of an authentically Jewish approach to redemption.31 In Yudit Kornberg Greenberg’s interpretation, Rosenzweig’s theology of redemption is not driven by historical events, nor is it premised upon a traditionally Jewish scheme driven by law or grand messianic and national hopes. Rather, redemption is the fulfilment of yearnings for the perfection or fullness of life achieved experientially in the aesthetics of worship: when the transcendent or Other irrupts into immanent experience.32 So too ‘active spectatorship’ of Holocaust images can be understood within the aesthetics of worship. Here, it becomes an act of wordless, even inchoate, petitionary prayer for the repose of the dead, for God’s judgment upon sin and for the messianic coming of something far better than before; for the coming of love. Identification with the imaged subject’s affliction can mean joining your own voice to theirs in the supplicatory appeal to God: ‘Out of the depths I call you, O Lord, O Lord, listen to my cry’ (Ps. 130:1). Arthur Cohen, in post-Holocaust biblical idiom, reminds us: ‘Not forever, God promises; not for eternity shall the people be tormented; but in the right time, God will ransom them from their brokenness and heal their disconsolation.’33 The act of seeing Holocaust images that petition on behalf of their object for their eternal peace is not a self-projective seeing by which one can only interpret the image by imagining its predicament as one’s own. It is a singular call to divine and human justice that the face be seen and thereby redeemed from the forgetting that hides the sins of the perpetrator in the deep folds of time. Prayer is an act of service at the very heart of post-biblical Judaism. That an image can be offered and received as a petitionary or intercessionary prayer for justice and peace (even where the viewer would not wish to use the terminologies of personal or quorate prayer) is not unknown to post-Holocaust Jewish art, much of which uses the text of prayers and biblical verses as elements of the figuration of meaning. Among numerous possible examples might be the Israeli artist Moshe Gershuni’s Justice Shall Walk Before Him (1988) which incorporates words from the Psalms recited at Jewish funerals. Herzl Kashetsky’s series of paintings A Prayer for the Dead (1996) exemplifies the rendering of an image into an act of silent worship. He felt unable to throw away

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Judaism and the Visual Image Figure 8 Arie Galles, Fourteen Stations / Hey Yud Dalet Suite: Station #5 Bergen-Belsen (2001), charcoal and white conté on arches, 115.5 ⫻ 182.8 cm, with kind permission of the artist.

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the paint-smeared rags he used to wipe his brushes in painting his photorealist diptych Mass Grave, Bergen Belsen (1995–6). He therefore chose to mount these rags, like relics, in a subsequent piece – a work whose reticence and obliquity is arguably far more Jewish in character than his more literal diptych. Arie Galles has made meticulously detailed charcoal (ash) drawings of aerial photographic views of the sites of the death camps. In his Artist’s Statement he describes his series Fourteen Stations / Hey Yud Dalet Suite: Station #5 BergenBelsen (2001) as his ‘Kaddish for all Shoah victims’. Offered as ‘icons for compassion and remembrance’, the words of the Kaddish, a prayer of thanksgiving recited in memory of the dead, are embedded, though only occasionally visible, in fourteen pieces within each of the fourteen images. In Fourteen Stations, Galles offers us an omnivoyant God’s-eye-view of the camp, suggesting that if God witnessed the site of atrocity, it was from so high up in the transcendental safety of the heavens that the victims of Nazism were left effectively alone and stranded in a creation that had become a death camp in his absence. Humanity is left down on earth, but seen from so far above, has become as invisible to God as God is to us. And it is humanity, present to suffering as its immediate witness, who must say Kaddish, who must pray, looking straight into the face of pain.

Devout beholding of images of the Holocaust Mieke Bal has theorized visual art as a narrative told from several agents’ point of view. An image is not a mere object of the gaze. The image is, rather, a complex and shifting interactive narrative field in which different viewers interact, namely, the painter, the painter’s object and the object as interpreted by the viewer. There is no single viewpoint, no polar dichotomy of seeing subject and viewed object.34 Discussing how to read art arranged on the walls of a museum, Bal also understands the placing and juxtaposition of images in museums to be discursive: it is a form of speech act in which the viewer is told ‘look at this’. There are paralinguistic ‘communicative possibilities’ when art is put on display. The ‘expository agent’ – the space and the curator together – structures the display like a narrator in a literary text, addressing the viewer and explaining the syntactical sequence of images.35 Bal’s interest in the viewer’s interpretative relationship with the image is of considerable importance if one is to use images of the Holocaust as a theological resource, and more, if one wishes to use certain works of art as contributions to the extant corpus of Holocaust and post-Holocaust theology. At the very least, Bal’s account of the paralinguistic ‘communicative possibilities’ of exhibiting images raises the possibility of an ethically and theologically transformative Holocaust aesthetic. Dorota Glowacka makes a further significant contribution to any Jewish attempt to behold the Holocaust ethically through

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art. She proposes a Levinasian aesthetic – ‘ethically informed artistic practice, “art for the other” ’, in which the desire to produce a likeness of the other already presupposes ethical responsibility. Writing of Kashetsky’s and other post-Holocaust artists’ spiritual engagement with the suffering other, Glowacka argues that Holocaust art marks a break with traditional aesthetics in which the viewer traditionally stands back and makes a judgment of taste and quality regarding the image before them. Here, in the search for the disappearing trace of Jewish presence we are brought into ‘crushing’ proximity with the other. This art is an act of witness, not mere representation: ‘it is this palpable breathlessness of Holocaust literature and art, the heavy stamp it leaves on those who choose to respond, that marks it as a unique challenge to what Levinas condemns as the hold of representation over ethics in the West.’36 Holocaust art presents a non-violent, non-idolatrous aesthetic which is ‘grounded in an ethically informed artistic practice, “art for the other,” in which the desire to produce a likeness of the Other already presupposes ethical responsibility.’37 In other words, properly shown, an image of the Holocaust should not leave its viewer untouched, merely staring at the predicament of one more of its victims. Christian aesthetics can be used to develop Bal and Glowacka’s related insights into a responsive theological aesthetic. There is a medieval Christian devotional tradition of ‘devout beholding’, ‘even unto tears’ of images of divine/ human suffering that leads, through depthless compassion, to ever greater love of God. Devout beholding appears to have been abused as a means of earning pardon for sin and the practice died out in Protestant circles after the Reformation. But practised with spiritual integrity, devout beholding was not a passive, detached, observation but a transformatory way of looking at an image of Christ’s redemptive suffering that was tantamount to its indelible impression or imprinting on the soul. Witnessing to Christ’s suffering, indeed, sharing in it through compassion, was a proper means to the forgiveness of sins.38 In Catholic spirituality, silent meditation on the Passion of Christ allows the subject to experience ever greater compassion through imagining in ‘remorseless detail’ the torments of Christ’s Passion, as in Pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditations on the Life of Christ: ‘Look at him well, as He goes along, bowed down by the Cross and gasping aloud; feel as much compassion as you can . . . with your whole mind imagine yourself as present.’39 Through prayerful looking at a sacred image, an ontological communion with Christ is achieved that allows one to die with and therefore rise with Christ. In late medieval Latin treatises on the Passion the connection between the one who beholds visual images of the suffering Christ and Christ himself is effected through meditation on the physical degradation of Christ’s suffering body. Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi exemplifies this graphic visualization of suffering as a means of identificatory knowing. Christ is pictured as almost divested of his human form ‘because [his] face was as miserably transformed and disfigured as if he had been a leprous man, because the foul snot and the filthy

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yellow spit lay baked and dried upon his holy face, and his sacred red blood had thickly overflowed his face . . .’40 Most Jews, and not a few contemporary Christians, regard excessive preoccupation with the bodily torments of Christ as a macabre remnant of medieval Catholic asceticism and prefer to devote their religious energies to the constructive, practical interpretation of textual revelation for the betterment of living communities. Yet there is little doubt that Jews have meditated on their own suffering through an iconography of sacrificial bodily suffering that owes much to Christian aesthetic tradition. Peter Novick has been struck by the increasingly Christian nature of the sacralization of Jewish suffering in Holocaust museums and commemorative activity.41 It is common for visitors to follow a path lined with images that takes them through a series of darkened rooms whose design is as conducive to meditation as it is to education. The recently completed Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center, for example, conforms to this pattern. Like a sacred place set aside from ordinary or profane time the visitor is returned to the illud tempus of 1933–45 by means of repeated and reverent exposure to images. The museum leads the visitor along a via dolorosa of sorts that allows her to retrace the steps of pre-war Hungarian Jews towards their death in 1944 by means of a trail of illuminated photographic images and objects displayed in suspended caskets that pierce the semi- darkness. Finally, the visitor finds herself in the empty and unused former synagogue onto which the museum has been built. The museum has walked her into Jewish disappearance; her journey ends by arriving at their departure.42 Here, a form of devout beholding, namely, the summoning or restoration of a spiritual connection through active meditative sight, has been solicited from the viewer through the exhibition of images of holocaustal suffering in a manner more traditionally associated with images of the bodily torment of Christ. Although, as we shall see, Jewish artists have used Christian iconography – the twelve stations of the cross that map Jesus’ agonized passage from his condemnation to death by Pilate to his death on Golgotha, or the spectacle of the crucifi xion itself – to convey their sense that the Holocaust was a cosmic as well as human crisis, it should be emphasized that images of the Holocaust do not function in the same way as Christian icons. Juan de Juní’s Lamentation over the Body of Christ (1541–5) is, for example, a carefully posed, stylized composition of grief ordered for meditative contemplation. Or while some of Mark Rothko’s untitled groupings of figures painted between 1942 and 1943 may be interpreted as recalling the genre of the Pietà, devout beholding of the Holocaust as if it were a tableau posed for the purposes of religious instruction is morally and epistemologically impossible in so far as historically and interpretatively, the Holocaust does not lie still as a single composed object of vision. It was a twelve-year event that constantly shifts according to the interpreter’s vantage point: the location, period, religious, gendered and political perspective of study. Even those still photographs of holocaustal scenes that,

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with time and familiarity, have been indelibly imprinted on our consciousness, are not properly tableaux at all. The still photographs showing deportees being marched with their suitcases towards the railway stations or the milling crowds disgorged from trains onto the ramp at Auschwitz are not configured like the tableau vivant composed by a group of dramatic performers who would briefly strike a silent motionless pose at the end of a scene for an applauding audience. They are pictures of death happening. It is for that reason, not because they are religious art, that images of the Holocaust are usually looked at in an absorptive meditative silence, imprinted on the personal and collective visual memory by repeated sight. (Compare the novelist Marek Halter’s coinage of the term ‘Torah memory’ in which theologically and historically decisive moments for the Jewish people are held in his protagonists’ memory by the quasi-photographic visual imprint of witness.)43 Devout beholding of Holocaust images keeps watch or vigil over beloved remains. For those that ‘see’ God in or through the human, devout beholding stands guard over the integrity of the divine image in the particular person and in the universal human as represented in their photographs and their possessions. In the act of devout beholding, the divine image is reconsecrated and so kept safe from the holocaustal erasure that is interpreted and reversed through knowing the indestructibility of the divine image as divine: ‘They shall perish, but You shall endure’ (Ps. 102:27).

The Holocaust figured as a Jewish Passion As a student of both Holocaust theology and Jewish aesthetics, I have been led to wonder whether post-Holocaust theologies of divine hiddenness during the Holocaust are theologies of absence continuous with the traditional Jewish aesthetic of God’s unrepresentability, or indeed the unrepresentability of whatever is holy or set apart to God. It seems as if the aesthetic consequence of stock assertions of divine absence during the Holocaust (which, if repeated often enough, start to seem self-evidently true) is a sense of the Holocaust as a sacred visual vacuum that voided the presence not only of Jews, but their God. As we saw in the previous chapter, accessible to a popular culture, the anti-redemptive shelving of the question of God’s role in the Holocaust has left a yawning void in the historical relationship of God and the world that, by its nature, cannot be imaged. But not all artistic representations of the Holocaust have succumbed to that sense of the obliterative absence of the good which induces a sub-religious, sub-ethical aesthetic of evil as a modality of the sublime. While the sublime, furnace-like, forces the viewer to stand far back from the heat and glare, there are those whose Holocaust aesthetic has drawn upon a Christian iconography to evoke the pathos of the Holocaust. A surprising number of Jewish artists

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have, in my reading at least, used the image of the cross as a way for the viewer to draw near to God’s suffering just as the cross draws God near to human suffering. Using Bal’s theory of viewing as a hermeneutical circle, not a simple donation of the artist’s intention to the recipient viewer, some images (those made by painters rather than the perpetrators’ photographers) use the cross as a symbolic image of the Holocaust to suggest a God who does not hide his face to protect human freedom, whatever its consequences. This is rather a God who reveals his face as a suffering face that has taken the consequences of human freedom upon itself; that suffers because the human is suffering and that suffers because he, God himself, is despised and rejected by the human. It was not until I began writing this book that I began to notice just how common it was for Jewish artists to use the image of the public spectacle of Christ’s Passion – the twelve stations of the cross and the crucifixion – as a Jewish image for Jewish suffering and death before and during the Holocaust, in the decades after the Holocaust, and on into the twenty-first century. The Passion is also a literary motif in novels about the Holocaust by Eli Wiesel, André SchwartzBart, Aharon Appelfeld and others.44 Golgotha was also used as a symbol of the agony of European Jewry by Jewish journalists writing during the Holocaust in both occupied Europe and America. And in theology, while Emil Fackenheim formulated a response to the Holocaust through the squarely Judaic Sinaitic trope, Ignaz Maybaum, in The Face of God After Auschwitz (1965) construed the death of the innocent Jewish people as that of a scapegoat whose atoning death on Auschwitz/Golgotha would purge Europe of its medieval ignorance and violence and so reconcile God and the Gentiles. Jewry is murdered on Golgotha so that others might live.45 Irving Greenberg, in his inter-religious dialogue with Roy Eckardt and Paul van Buren in the 1970s, used Christian motifs such as the cross and resurrection in his own post-Holocaust Jewish covenantal theology to refer to the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel respectively, although for him, like Eckardt, the cross signified the degradation of the human, not its redemption and the resurrection signalled the rehabilitation of the divine image in the human community and the establishment of the State of Israel.46 Around twenty years later, Dan Cohn-Sherbok was to call his history of European antisemitism The Crucified Jew.47 Confusingly, by the end of the war, those with sharply differing perspectives and even complicities were figuring the Holocaust as a Jewish Passion. While the Jewish philosopher Levinas, say, was describing the Holocaust as the ‘Passion of Passions’,48 notable Christians were also referring to the Holocaust as a Jewish Passion. Pope John Paul II was to dub Auschwitz ‘the modern Golgotha’. And during the liberation of the camps, notably in Belsen, photojournalism was making its own contribution to the para-christological interpretation of the Holocaust. A now emblematic photograph – Ecce Homo – taken in Bergen Belsen in 1945, picked out a dead Jew lying in an open mass grave. Unlike the otherwise naked victims in the pit, this Jews’ genitals were

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still modestly covered by his trousers and his outspread arms had assumed the form of a crucified body. More worryingly, even the perpetrators saw the christological connection: Adolf Eichmann’s own description of himself when on trial in Jerusalem as Pontius Pilate effectively rendered his Jewish victims as a collective Christ.49 But it is the use of the cross in Holocaust and post-Holocaust Jewish art that is of particular interest here, where I want to both distinguish between the different historical contexts that produced christological imagery and to find a common theological thread that can draw together their interpretation. The majority of Holocaust Passions were drawn and painted in the late 1930s and early 1940s. By far the best known artistic representations of the Holocaust as a crucifi xion of the Jews is Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion (1938), which was painted after the events of Kristallnacht and depicts an Orthodox Jew on the cross, wearing a talit or prayer shawl as a loincloth, lifted up above the turmoil of the pogrom, and Yellow Crucifixion (1943). Suffice also to mention here his 1941 sketches, The Way to Calvary, where Christ is helped on his way by

Figure 9 Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion (1938), 154.3 ⫻ 139.7 cm, with permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Figure 10 Emmanuel Levy, Crucifixion (1942) oil on canvas, 102.1 ⫻ 80 cm, with permission of The Ben Uri Gallery, London.

fellow Jews, some of whom have already been crucified in the burning village behind them.50 In April 1942, an exhibition of work on the predicament of European Jewry by predominantly Jewish artists was mounted at the Puma Gallery, New York, entitled ‘Modern Christs’ (see Art Digest 16: (15 April 1942), 22. Abraham Rattner produced a number of crucifi xions including Darkness Fell Over the Land (1942), which shows a Jewish Jesus being taken down dead from the cross. The Anglo-Jewish artist, Emmanuel Levy painted Crucifixion in 1942 and the American-Jewish Seymour Lipton was to use the theme in 1943. Between 1958 and 1966, four years before his death, Barnett Newman had painted Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani (1958–66), an austere abstract

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expressionist Holocaust memorial consisting of fourteen monochrome paintings that used Christ’s cry to God on the cross to pose the question of why the Holocaust occurred, why the world forsook European Jewry. 51 In the late twentieth century, 1985, R. B. Kitaj produced his own series of unfinished oils Passion (1940–5), including Landscape/Chamber (1985) and The Painter (Cross and Chimney) (1984–5) whose stations are punctuated by a coffin-like smoking crematory chimney, regarded by Kitaj himself as an equivalent or supplementary symbol for the cross.52 In the 1980s and 1990s, Samuel Bak’s work also made recurrent use of Christian symbols. In Memorial (1985), Bak, who escaped the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto by hiding in a Benedictine convent, juxtaposes his image of the broken tablets of the Commandments with that of a thorn bush that recalls both a tangle of barbed wire and Jesus’ crown of thorns. Bak’s Elegy III, (1997) features the (now iconic) boy photographed in the Warsaw ghetto whose small hands are raised in surrender to the soldiers surrounding him. In Bak’s painting, the boy’s punctured, bleeding hands are nailed to the stone buttress of a ruined crematory chimney.53 This sequence of Holocaust Passions continues into the twenty-first century with Arie Galles’ Fourteen Stations (1993–2002), a series of large charcoal drawings that underscore the connection between the twelve stations of the cross and the railway stations from which Jews were taken to their death. But why, of all possible symbols, do Jewish artists use the cross as an image of Jewish suffering? Surely the apparent equation of Auschwitz and Golgotha is an egregious failure of Jewish art’s imagination that manages to offend the sensibilities of Jews and Christians alike? Why would Jewish artists want to surrender ownership of a Jewish catastrophe to the very community whose religious prejudice and persecution had paved the way for it? Even though the Nazi genocide was not executed under the sign of the cross or in the name of Christ, it would seem at best painfully ironic for Jews to use the cross as a symbol of the Holocaust when the cross was one of its chief, if indirect, causes. And who, actually, is it up on the cross? When Jewish artists looked at suffering Jews, did they see Christ? Or was it that they had taken Jesus down from the cross and put a European Jew up there in his place? After months of looking at these images I am still not sure – perhaps there is a degree of slippage between the two. The customary answer to the question of why the cross has intruded into Holocaust and post-Holocaust art is that it is used a vehicle of protest against the Church, the Allies and God. That is, taking Jesus down off the cross, so to speak, and putting Jewry up in his place could at once accuse the Church of a silent failure of neighbourly love; it could protest the Allies’ political abandonment of European Jewry to their fate, and, possibly, it could protest perhaps the greatest dereliction of all: God’s covenantal failure to intervene on behalf of European Jewry.54 True, European Jewry had much to protest and a theology of

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protest can be traced through Jewish religious thought from the biblical period to the present day. But what I want to suggest here is that the visualization of Jewish suffering in the form of a crucifixion and for most of the twentieth century was not a symptom of an exhausted Jewish theological imagination even if it was the sign of an impoverished religious iconography. Nor, in my view, are all of these Holocaust Passions reducible to visual protest slogans – merely sensationalist posters attacking the failure of the Church to love its Jewish neighbour. Rather, the visual conflation of Auschwitz and Golgotha reflects and evokes a theological response to Jewish suffering as vicarious, necessary suffering – both human and divine – that is entirely traditional and which should be numbered with other Jewish religious responses to the Holocaust. Yet to invoke a Jewish theology of suffering that would make the cross a borrowable iconography is to swim against a strong interpretative tide. Not unexpectedly, historians of Jewish art have offered reductionist, though not necessarily erroneous, explanations for Jewish art’s apparent lapse in taste. Matthew Baigell suggests that dealers operating in the antisemitic environment of the American art market of the mid-1930s–40s had warned Jewish artists that their art would not sell if its appeal were too Jewish or insufficiently universal. Jewish artists may themselves have felt it was politically or ethically appropriate to downplay the Jewish specificity of the unfolding catastrophe. The putatively universal symbol of the cross could instead evoke the existential darkness at the heart of the whole world, not just the Jewish world of the 1940s. Gentile artists of the 1930s had, after all, used the cross to symbolize the fate of all victims of fascism.55 Baigell sees the Jewish use of the cross as no more than a non-redemptive act of witness. Referring to Chagall’s paintings, he claims that Chagall ‘portrayed Jesus not as the Christian Son of God, but as a Jew who suffers and whose suffering does not redeem the world, because the suffering continues after His crucifi xion. His Jesus is one who witnesses history and its acts of hatred’. 56 Similarly, Mark Godfrey says that Chagall’s Christ is an observant Jew and as such a fitting symbol for mass Jewish suffering. But where Christians see suffering abolished or transferred to Christ by his death, Jesus, for Chagall, is not the Messiah but a prophet and a paradigmatically Jewish martyr. Citing Harold Rosenberg and others’ view that the Jesus of these pictures is ‘ just’ a Jewish victim of human violence, Godfrey argues that this Christ’s suffering on the cross is non-atoning and non-redemptive; Jewish suffering goes on unabated all around him. 57 Ziva Amishai- Maisels invaluably catalogues the Holocaust passions, but does not do much to explain their historical or theological origins, merely stating that by using the symbol of the cross, Jewish art could ‘simultaneously address and condemn the Christian world’.58 It is, she thinks, difficult to tell whether these artists blamed the Church for the catastrophe or merely wished to communicate some sense of urgency to the Christian community. Either way, ‘their message was that in killing Jews or

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other innocent victims, Christians were not only betraying Christ’s ideas, but killing Christ himself. Both Jewish and Christian artists united in stressing that Christians have a moral responsibility not to kill Jews. Unfortunately, not many people listened to them, either in Germany or in the West.’59 Elsewhere, Amishai-Maisels is of the view that where the cross is used in early holocaustal art it is as a provocation to the Nazis who considered Jesus to have been of Aryan descent; only after the war was the cross used as a symbol of blame.60 Arguments such as these have been in circulation since the late 1970s when Michael Brown interpreted Chagall’s crucifi xion paintings non-theologically as a bitter critique of Christian Europe. Brown rejects S. L. Schneiderman’s suggestion that Chagall was wavering between the Jewish and Christian faith, and instead finds his passion scenes, ‘heavily ironic’.61 In the ‘bestial’ society that is complicit with Nazism, the Jews suffer the fate of Jesus. They are crucified. It is the Christians who crucify them. In these works [Brown is referring to several literary works as well as Chagall’s paintings] Jesus represents an ideal for human life and death; but his only true followers are Jews. They are the ones who live and die like him. Jews are the true Christians. And ironically, the Christians in the works behave like Jews as the Gospels portray them.62 In Chagall’s The Crucified (1944) it is clear: it is eastern European Jewry, not the Christian Jesus, who has been crucified in the street of a destroyed shtetl. In other words, suffering Jews are ‘Jesus as Christians have claimed to understand him. In the Holocaust, the followers of Jesus destroyed those Jews and thus, their own central myth as well. Jewish paintings depicting the Holocaust as a Passion are therefore calling into question ‘not the possibility of remaining Jewish, but rather the possibility of remaining Christian.’63 But it is impossible to sustain a generalized theory of the compulsion to paint the Holocaust as a Golgotha as an act of protest without periodizing the pictures first. Most of the analysis of the phenomenon refers predominantly to Chagall’s treatment of the theme, but too many other artists who use it do not share the particularities of Chagall’s spirituality, personality or circumstances. In fact, each period of the twentieth century produces a different Jewish perspective both on Christ and on the Holocaust. Different decades produce different reasons for adopting Christian iconography. It is widely and rather vaguely assumed that the image of the crucified Jew was used as at once a symbol of God’s desertion of his people and a symbol of protest at the Allies’ political abandonment. It may also be assumed that these Jewish artists feel a sense of common abandonment with Jesus by God to his tormentors. For example, the Ben Uri Gallery’s notes on its acquisition of the Anglo-Jewish artist Emmanuel Levy’s, Crucifixion (1942) interpret the painting as a protest against the British (that is, also, Christian) failure to intervene on

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behalf of the Jews in Europe. But the gallery’s claim is surely anachronistic. It is arguable that only with the exponential growth of Holocaust historiography from the late 1960s and on through the 1980s, that Jewish artists might have been led to interpreting the holocaustal ‘crucifixion’ principally through a sense of common political abandonment with Christ. Although one cannot rule out an element of protest or a sense of abandonment in the 1940s Jewish crucifi xion pieces, it was from the 1960s that the mood altered as Jews become more widely aware of the restrictive immigration policies that had left Jews stranded and trapped in Nazi Europe. It was from the 1960s onwards that historians began to criticize Roosevelt’s failure to threaten reprisals in 1944 or to bomb the railway lines leading to the death camps.64 Although information about the murder of European Jewry was being printed in newspapers in Britain and America from late 1941, there was still no collective concept or memory of the Holocaust as it was yet to fully unfold. No one could yet have equated Auschwitz and Golgotha. Fear of mass extermination was articulated in the early 1940s but it was not yet an accepted fact. Despite significant events such the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany at the end of October 1938 and Kristallnacht a month later, few, in the early 1940s, among American Jewry at least, would have had a concept of certain Jewish death, of the ‘Final Solution’. Above all, the phrase ‘abandonment of the Jews’ would not have been used between 1938 and around 1942 in accusation against the Allies. Protest on U. S. immigration policy was relatively muted. The Jewish American establishment in particular was reluctant to call upon Congress to open America’s doors to European Jewry for fear of an antisemitic backlash on existing communities. Moreover, images of mass extermination that might fund an iconography of protest were not available until after the war. Even at the end of the war, Jews in the United States were simply grateful to their government for their role in defeating Hitler.65 It was only by the late 1960s that the mood changed and the Holocaust Passions might be more readily associated with protest – by which time it was surely too late for protest. With the publication of studies such as Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (1967); Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies (1981) and then David Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (1984),66 as well as the development of what might be called ‘bystander studies’, Jewish artists would have had the necessary knowledge to question whether the allies were, indirectly, as much the facilitators of the camps as their liberators. By then, christological images could be produced and viewed as a political protest. Crucifixion images by Mauricio Lasansky such as Nazi Drawings No. 18, made between 1962–7 do, in fact, attack the Church for its complicitous silence and at around the same time, Newman asked the question of abandonment of the Jews in his Stations. But a historically informed sense of common abandonment with Christ would

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not have been prevalent before the late 1960s, and by then the representation of the Holocaust as a crucifixion of the Jews was already in decline. This is not to say that these reductionist interpretations of the Holocaust crucifi xions are simply wrong. No one commentator can speak for all Jewish artists as if they were using the iconography of Christ’s passion at the same historical moment and for the same reasons or even for one reason alone. As the artistic use of visual images is not governed by rational argument alone, it is not possible to know precisely why they used it. But it is clearly important to know when they used it, because a concept of the Holocaust as the Holocaust was not possible until some years after it was over. However one interprets these images of the Holocaust, it should not be thought that the Jewish Passions ridicule Christian theology. On the contrary, they just read it in a Jewish way. This apparent raid on the imaginal repertoire of another faith was possible or even inevitable; these para-christological representations of Jewish suffering do not come from nowhere. By the earliest years of the twentieth century Jewish intellectuals had already reclaimed Jesus for their own ethics, history and spirituality. In the mid-nineteenth century Jewish historians Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger had emphasized that it was Paul, not Jesus, who had broken with the Jewish community and in 1905 Julius Wellhausen had already declared an uncomfortable truth that had previously been evaded: that Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian. As Matthew Hoffman has recently demonstrated, Reform Judaism had long re-Judaized Jesus as a way of staking a claim for an integrated place in western civilization. With Jesus as the brother of modern Jewry, not its victim, modern Jewry exonerated itself from the guilt of his crucifi xion and even claimed its moral precedence over Christianity.67 The Yiddish modernism of the 1920s, of which Chagall was very much a part, was also preoccupied by Christian motifs. Chagall saw Christ in the Jewish people but also, in his poetry and in several paintings, as himself. Chagall was not alone in identifying closely with Jesus. Abraham Rattner, in the late 1930s, identified Christ as Everyman and as himself.68 And earlier, in the 1920s, the Zionist artist Reuven Rubin had depicted Jesus as a Zionist pioneer and as a figure for the modern artist, who, like Rubin himself, was alienated from his cultural milieu. Chagall, then, was not alone in situating himself on the permeable boundaries between Jewish and Christian spirituality, though his tendency to do so was more pronounced than others and was particularly well received; his work was installed in both churches and synagogues. The iconography of Orthodox Christian art in the Russia of Chagall’s youth probably influenced his own,69 and he was working at a period of the twentieth century when modern biblical criticism’s liberation of the historical Jesus from the doctrinal overlay of Christian faith had reached a wider audience than that of theological academy alone.70 And in the end, Chagall, born an Orthodox Jew, was buried in the Catholic cemetery at St Paul de Vence in the South of France.

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His Jewish crucifi xions may, then, have been trying to advert to the uneasy historical and spiritual confluence of the Jewish and Christian traditions, as had the nineteenth-century Polish-Jewish painter, Maurycy Gottlieb before him.71 The historical confluence of traditions had produced an aesthetic mood that would account for the use of the cross and the figure of Jesus to symbolize the Jewish predicament well before the Holocaust and not invariably as a vehicle of political protest. Jewish artists, principally Mark Antokolsky and Moses Ezekiel, had both earned the patronage of the nineteenth-century Christian establishment depicting Jesus as a Jew and, in Ezekiel’s case with his 1873 relief Israel, imaging Israel as Christ crucified. Chagall, as early as 1912, had offered in his Golgotha a rebuttal of the old blood-libel, depicting Jesus as a crucified child mourned by his Jewish parents (Chagall then abandoned the theme of crucifi xion for about twenty years). Jakob Steinhardt’s Pietà of 1913 depicts Jesus as an old Jew, beaten to death and dying in the arms of his sorrowing Jewish mother. A considerable body of Jewish-christological imagery and discourse was therefore culturally operative many years before the developing Holocaust prompted other artists’ christological depictions of the Jewish predicament.72 The use of the cross would not have been one of political protest alone. A long-established historical and spiritual affinity with Jesus could, in the crisis of holocaustal suffering and death, take on the character of a theological affinity as well. For as Lawrence Silberstein, Daniel Boyarin, David Biale, Marc Krell and others have recently observed, there are ‘multiple locations in which one identifies Jewishly as a result of cross-cultural encounters with Christianity’. Marginal Jewish and Christian master narratives interact dialectically; without fi xed cultural and epistemological boundaries, their meaning is generated inter-textually rather than in artificial isolation.73 In the complex relation of Judaism and Christianity as a single religious ‘polysystem’, we should expect some convergence in Jewish and Christian notions of a noble death; the two dispensations were, after all, in close relation up to the fourth century.74 That Jews of the Holocaust and post-Holocaust period should (re)appropriate a Christian image of Jewish suffering is therefore unsurprising. This is not a sudden aberration. We have seen that nineteenth-century artists made use of Christian iconography but, so too, artists throughout the twentieth century referred the viewer back to a history of Christian art. Chaim Soutine’s paintings of the carcasses of dead animals, notably Carcass of Beef (1924), were indebted to Rembrandt’s paintings of the sacrificial ox, which was itself a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice; or again, Barnett Newman, who aggressively rejected the label of Jewish artist, was profoundly impressed by Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece (c. 1475–1528). The Christian iconography of suffering, not Jewish tradition, provided an interpretation of the Holocaust that he made his own.75 Newman was not the only abstract expressionist to be moved by Christian iconography; its influence can also be traced in the work of Mark Rothko.76

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Perhaps for emancipated artists in New York and London – Chagall, Newman, Kitaj and others, there seemed to be little or no iconography for public, collective suffering whose scale struck a cosmic rather than purely historical register, other than that of the cross. This is why Chaim Potok’s fictional Asher Lev, whose artistic career in New York climaxes not much later than Chagall’s, claims that he had to paint his suffering mother as a crucified Jewish woman. Lev says there was ‘no aesthetic mould’ in his own cultural or biblical tradition into which he could ‘pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment’.77 The Jewish iconographic alternatives were unsatisfactory. Jacques Lipschitz’s bronze sculpture Prayer (1943) depicts an old tortured Jew reciting the prayer of expiation as he swings the traditional scapegoat-rooster around his head before Yom Kippur, which while it is a traditionally Jewish motif for sacrificial, atoning suffering, is hardly sufficient to the unfolding catastrophe. The Jew looks more dead than the rooster and the lamb held inside the Jew’s open abdomen is surely only another innocent victim waiting to be born.78 And although it was sometimes deployed in art of the period, the motif of the Akedah – the abortive sacrifice of Isaac – was of little use: in mid-twentieth-century Europe God had not stayed his hand; there was no substitute ram caught in the dry brush. It is only because Isaac lives that God’s command can be protested at the same time as affirming faith in his providence. Auschwitz seemed situated on Golgotha, not Mount Moriah. I have suggested that reductionist explanations of the Holocaust crucifixions are not entirely compelling; they lack theological nuance: these pictures speak about suffering in an authentically Jewish voice. Although I would not presume to a general theory of the Jewish use of Christian iconography, indeed this chapter has differentiated its historical situations and motives, it seems important to say that many of these figurations of the Holocaust seem to express a common theology of suffering that has properly Jewish antecedents with which some artists, the Jews they depicted, and the Jews who have viewed the pictures, were and are together familiar. Jewish seeing is theologically as well as historically constructed. Michael Wyschogrod assists us here with his claim that while the Holocaust is not itself redemptive, ‘for believing Israel, the Holocaust is not just another mass murder’. Jews are not ‘fi xated’ by the Holocaust simply because it is their catastrophe. Rather, The fate of Israel is of central concern because Israel is the elect people of God through whom God’s redemptive work is done in the world. However tragic human suffering is on the human plane, what happens to Israel is directly tied to its role as that nation to which God attaches His name and through which He will redeem man. He who strikes Israel, therefore, engages himself in battle with God and it is for this reason that the history of Israel is the fulcrum of human history. The suffering of others must, therefore, be

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seen in the light of Israel’s suffering. The travail of man is not abandoned, precisely because Israel suffers and, thereby, God’s presence is drawn into human history and redemption enters the horizon of human existence.79 Wyschogrod’s claim, which he knows to be a scandal to non-belief, suggests that Jewish artists could use the symbol of the cross in the light of Jewish suffering, not Jewish suffering in the light of the cross. Although theologies of redemptive suffering are far more readily associated with Christianity than Judaism, a glance at the historical spectrum of Jewish thought about suffering suggests that they should not be. The Piazesner Rebbe, Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira, for instance, wrote his homiletic discourse, Esh Kodesh (Holy Fire) on the problem of suffering between Autumn 1940 and the Summer of 1943 when the manuscript was hidden before the final liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and the Rebbe’s own death in 1943. Esh Kodesh affirms that God and humanity are bonded in mutual suffering, a view that originates in the midrashic literature and which is prominent in the hasidic theology of the period.80 Shapira teaches that Israel does not suffer alone. God is Israel’s partner in suffering. When that is accepted, he says, there will be no need to accuse God of turning his face from suffering. Indeed suffering presents Israel with a revelation that is an opportunity to draw close to God. And when the burden of suffering becomes so great that only God can bear it, then each Jew must perform acts of prayer, repentance and kindness to relieve God’s suffering. Suffering with love is a sacrifice to God that he will accept with love.81 Shapira may have been right in urging that if Jewry could only contemplate God’s suffering it would lose its attachment to its own. But in one of his last sermons, given on 11 July 1942, Shapira went further and argued that because it is ultimately God who is under attack, and Israel is the people identified with his cause, it is they who must bear his suffering. Israel is innocent but must suffer on God’s account by virtue of her identification with God.82 There is a biblical precededent for this theology of suffering. Isaiah 52:13– 53:12 has already reversed the more prevalent biblical view that the suffering is a retribution for sin. It is those who are not suffering who have sinned, not the suffering servant, Israel.83 As Leora Batnizsky puts it, ‘far from being a Christian innovation, the notion that suffering reflects a kind of moral superiority not inferiority, and that, moreover, there is theological and ethical value in suffering for others, is basic to the Jewish tradition in its rabbinic, medieval, and modern forms.’ It is fundamental to rabbinic thought (Rabbi Akiba, R. Eliezer b. Jacob and R. Meir in particular) that Jewish suffering is a sign of Israel’s election as a light unto the nations, the strict love of God their Father, and their future redemption.84 Without valorizing suffering itself (a Christian tendency), the rabbis trust, as did Hermann Cohen, Abraham Geiger and subsequently modern Judaism, that Israel suffers vicariously; that is, not because she is worse than others, but better.85

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Even if the Jewish use of the cross as a symbol of the Holocaust is the mark of an impoverished Jewish iconography, it is not the mark of an impoverished theology. ‘The world’, writes Eliezer Berkovits, ‘is sustained by the suffering of the guiltless’. Casting Israel not only as the Suffering Servant, but also, effectively, as Christ, Berkovits regards Jewry as having taken the punishment due to the world for its sin. Without Israel’s acceptance of the yoke of God’s punishment over the centuries and during the Holocaust, the world would revert to the tohu v’bohu or chaos from which it first came. The vicarious, but pitiful, sufferings of ordinary Jewish men, women and children, not gods, is the true crucifi xion. And yet Berkovits is not offering another reductionist protest against Christendom, for God ‘suffers the suffering of His servant, the agony of the guiltless. In all their affliction, He is afflicted’ (Is. 63:9).86 In some paintings of the Holocaust as a crucifi xion, perhaps not all, a crossreligious hermeneutic is evidently at work: the vicarious suffering of Jewry is visualized as the vicarious suffering of God in ways that Christian art has done. And Christian art could only have done so because Judaism had first provided the theology. Even so, it must be emphasized that if Jews have perceived the cross as an available symbol of their own vicarious suffering that does not make Jewish images of the crucifi xion Christian. The figure on the cross is European Jewry, not the Christ of faith making his sacrifice on their behalf. Israel is not a collective incarnation of God on the cross. And these pictures yield no sense that Jewry would, like Jesus, forgive Nazi Germany from its cross on the grounds that it knew not what it had done to them. (Joseph Foshko’s 1945 painting of a crucified elderly Jew wrapped in a prayer shawl is notably entitled Forgive Them NOT For They Know What They Do.) Nonetheless, even if these Holocaust crucifi xions are not celebrating a cosmic reconciliation effected by the death of European Jewry – and they are clearly not – they do seem to counter a theology of absence that could only leave Jewry abandoned to the cross. That the cross – the suffering – is raised up on the rubbish heap of Golgotha may suggest to us, as it may have done to some Jewish artists, that God’s presence to suffering is revealed when his image in those he created is lifted from the pit and set on a hill above us. In Chagall’s White Crucifixion the Jewish Jesus is lit from a beam of light coming from above and by a lit menorah at his feet. There is something in the darkness to which it is imperative that we bear witness. Or in his later Exodus (1952–66), Jesus/God/Jewry towers over the fleeing crowd of refugees – his arms outstretched not in the throes of death but in an embrace of their suffering – he carries their darkness up with him into the redemptive light. In the crucified Jew, the suffering of God under the burden of our suffering is held up to view and demands our compassion for he suffers on our account just as we suffer on his (Shapira would have rejected the iconography but not the theology). And conversely, it is from up on the cross (not in some transcendental dimension of the averted face called ‘absence’) that God can see and absorb our suffering

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below. From the high ground, but not hidden in the heavens, God’s suffering is a sign of judgment under which history stands. Although, to repeat, not all Jewish artists use the cross in the same way, commentators’ apparently unanimous view that artists’ representations of the Holocaust as a crucifi xion are non-redemptive representations of suffering may therefore be somewhat short of the truth. If that were so, why would Jewish artists have used the world’s most powerful symbol of redemptive suffering other than to say that holocaustal suffering is redemptive, or that it will be redeemed? The cross, rather than any other instrument of torture and execution, is used in these paintings precisely because its dereliction is known to be not the last word; because, as in the Lutheran notion of Anfechtung, in the dereliction or absolute end of hope is the beginning of hope. By depicting the depth of Jewish abjection as a cross dragged along the noisy crowded streets to a silent wind or spirit-swept place where it can be lifted up, the victims of the Holocaust are raised up by art to eternal presence, another kind of life. Jewish artists, I think, are able to use the cross as a way of lifting up love from the pit; a visual sign of God’s presence upto and beyond the moment of death in his own suffering love, a sign that commands not only our fear of judgment but our love of God. For as Simone Weil once put it: ‘What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final.’ Only by loving, even into the void, will the soul survive to experience the self-revelation of God once more.87 As a disclosure of truth, revelation is an inherently aesthetic category and moment. The imaginative contemplation of the Holocaust that produces art (and theology might be classed as a form of religious art) here turns the degrading spectacle of the Holocaust into a radiant image of divine presence to suffering that is at once despairing and triumphant: for in God, love will be historically destroyed but it will also be eternally renewed.

Chapter 6

The Dancing Figure of Jewish History

That the history of Israel might present a visual spectacle, the beauty of whose assembly would make it the object of an aesthetic judgment is rarely considered. Too often, modern Jewish thought has given an essentially ethical or legal account of the nature of Israel in terms of the historical expression of its collective moral will. Steven Schwarzschild, for example, precisely differentiates Judaism from Christianity by describing the Jewish God’s relationship with the world as one mediated by revealed will, while that of the Christian God is mediated through an incarnation of the divine in a particular historical space. The Jewish God’s concern for the world is ethical but that does not entail his immanence within it.1 And yet the notion of Israel as a collective body that mediates divine selfrevelation or presence through its own image is not entirely alien to modern and contemporary Judaism. Of modern Jewish thinkers, Rosenzweig has come closest to imagining Israel as a figure of revelation in envisioning the transcendental figure of the Star as a dynamic constellation embodying the relationship between God, world and humanity as each intersects with the other in the great moments of creation, revelation and redemption. Judaism is the eternal flame or inner core of fire within the star, generated in and by successive generations of Jews, each bearing witness to the past in faith for a future above whose dark sky ‘burns the star-strewn heaven of the promise: “so shall thy seed be.” ’2 About sixty years later, towards the end of the twentieth century, Michael Wyschogrod’s book The Body of Faith proposed that God enters the world ‘through a people whom he chose as his habitation. Thus there came about a visible presence of God in the universe, first in the person of Abraham and later his descendants, as the people of Israel’.3 Wyschogrod follows Rosenzweig in refusing the antisemitic caricature of the Jew as grossly carnal by recasting that very carnality as the locus of God’s presence.4 It is the Jewish people that constitutes Judaism and is the dwelling place of God, not a text, not an idea or a land.5 Ultimately denying intra-Jewish difference, Wyschogrod affirms that the House of Israel is not ‘a voluntary association defined by acceptance or rejection of a set of propositions’. Rather, the Jews are a natural family united by covenant and common destiny.6

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This book has so far examined two-dimensional still images of Israel, the collective Jewish body. Now, in its final chapter, with Michael Wyschogrod’s conception of Israel as the ‘carnal’ indwelling place of God in mind, that body will be set in motion to see how its movement, a form of dance, embodies and traces a figure whose visual image disseminates God’s self-revelation into the world. Here, the people Israel is conceived as an embodied collective entity whose search for the divine presence will be understood not so much as a ‘dwelling place’ for God (Wyschogrod) or as a celestial sign (Rosenzweig), but as a bodily self-representation to God and as an emergent image of God drawn by its own expressive movement towards the messianic age. As dance, revelation is patterned into the dynamic form of a fully embodied, vital and beautiful narrative spectacle whose very unity of form leaves no one’s experience uncomprehended. This, in all senses, moving spectacle is offered back to God as a gift of thanksgiving in which he might both sorrow and rejoice. As the Psalmist wrote: ‘Let them praise His name in dance; with timbrel and lyre let them chant His praises. For the Lord delights in His people’ (Ps. 149:3–4).

The kinetic energy of revelation I prefer the notion of Israel as a dance rather than, as in Wyschogrod’s conception, a habitation, or as in Rosenzweig’s, a constellation of forms. Certainly the trope of the Star to denote the generative and illuminative energies of God’s revelation in Israel has some affinities to that of Israel as a processive dance. But Rosenzweig’s figure may be too symbolic an idea whose astronomical character detracts from the notion of Israel as an assembly of actual people in, if not of, the historical times and places that constitute the world. Dance suggests a more mutual, open and affective possession. For as a meta-linguistic communication that can be defined as ‘moving in rhythm with a pattern of expression’, dance might be regarded as the most immediate, perhaps the first, form of communal religious self-expression.7 And more than that, Rosenzweig is right that dance, while not a substitute for language, is the most profound form of human poetic expression: that of gesture. Although Rosenzweig does not develop his point, he recognizes that bowing, prostrating and other liturgical movement draw space and time together. It is in the dance that ‘the space separating man from man falls away in a “wonderfully still” moment of empathy’.8 Like ritual prostration before the sanctuary or ark, participatory dance is a spectacle that requires no audience and its energy exceeds its form and space. It is a moment of self-recognition – ‘a people recognizes itself in festive processions and parades’ – and a moment of praise offered with the whole body that signals entry into the sphere of redemption.9 As Hal Taussig notes, dance ‘lives at the heart of the Jewish Scriptures’. In ‘book after book of the Hebrew Scriptures’, group dance is not only a part

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of worship, it is part of the affective, spiritual and cultural interpretation of Jewish history.10 Many of the texts that are now preached or taught were originally performed as songs, dances and other enactments.11 The act of God passing over Israel in Egypt, sparing Israel’s sons, is a ‘divine dance. The graphic description of God touching down on the Egyptian households, but leaping over the Israelite homes is close to a description of a dance’.12 The Jewish dance tradition includes ecstatic, triumphal, courtship and wedding dances and these reflect the diverse biblical traditions of dance, if differently inflected by the dance traditions of the diasporic host culture.13 The rich history and classification of Jewish dance can only be glanced upon in the present chapter where I shall suggest that the variant forms of Jewish dance belong to a single transcendent dance that, in its process, is the tracing of God’s revelation in the body of Israel moving in diaspora across the earth.14 This renders the dance a messianic pathmaking, a halakhah of sorts whose way is made by the love between God and Israel as they go in search of one another in the mutual will to covenantal peace or at-onement. Some years ago, Louis Jacobs’ credentials as an Orthodox rabbi were questioned because he insisted that God does not only speak to Israel, but through Israel. Jacobs’ point might be developed by proposing that God not only speaks through Israel, but sees the world through Israel. By following the path Israel makes across the world, God’s presence comes out to meet and bless us; the light of his countenance going on before. Isaiah promises that ‘Requital is coming. (35:4)’. Redemption will come by road; ‘the Lord is marching before you’ (Is. 52:12): A highway shall appear there, which shall be called the Sacred Way. No one unclean shall pass along it, but it shall be for them [God’s people]. No traveller, not even fools, shall go astray. No lion shall be there, no ferocious beast shall set foot on it – these shall not be found there. But the redeemed shall walk it; and the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come with shouting to Zion, crowned with joy everlasting. (Is. 35:8–10) When Isaiah urges that God’s path be made straight and clear, he means that a path must be cleared and made traversable, allowing God to find God’s way by a meta-image of passage – a work of reconciliation whose beauty is laboured for on this earth, though visible, as it were, only from the air. I noted in the Introduction to this book that recent Jewish art criticism has disputed the need to ask any longer whether Jewish art exists (or whether as the sceptics jibe, it is a contradiction in terms) but rather asks how, if it all, Jewish art can be defined. I now want to define Jewish art as itself the figure traced by the diasporic movement of Jewish bodies across space: a figure that might finally, kinetically, reveal the form and approach of God’s presence in history.

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Much has been written about the despised figure of the Jew in antisemitic representation and discourse, just as it has been about the internalization of the antisemitic representation of the Jew in Jewish consciousness.15 But Jewry has also surely created its own figure. Modern Jews, after emancipation, and later, after the destruction of European Jewry, have also reproduced the past and expressed their self-image by collecting and exhibiting Jewish art that has become a vehicle of memory and identity, even in places where Jews are now barely present at all.16 Of course, the phenomenon of Jewish art as the generation of its own figure stops a long way short of affirming that Israel represents God’s self-revelation in that figure. It is theology, not art, which supplies a revelatory scheme. This notion of a redemptive figure is not unfamiliar to Christianity in which there is also a suffering Jewish body: the body of Jesus, another wandering Jew who has ‘no place to lay his head’ and who urges his followers to leave what they have and follow him. Jesus pursues a ministry of teaching and healing in a series of different communities whose locations are closely and precisely mapped by the (Jewish) gospel writers. Later, Christian art becomes a representation of a moving body both infinitely powerful and infinitely afflicted. Although the doctrine of Christ’s ‘two natures’ – his being fully human and fully divine – powerfully deters the representation of either, Christian art nonetheless attempts to represent God’s self-revelatory appearance in the body of Jesus as he moves from town to town and inexorably onwards to Jerusalem, where, at the end of his ministry, he drags his broken body through the city to his death outside its walls. So too, the Jew Saul becomes the Christian Paul in motion, as he embarks on a journey from Jerusalem to Damascus. The gospel of Jesus’ messiahship is spread abroad to the nations kinaesthetically; the spirit of Jesus, ‘the Lord of the Dance’, is not contained by the walls of buildings but is sent on before by apostles travelling diasporically on the public way.17 In Judaism, the suffering Jewish body is the body of Israel itself. As a bodily assembly before God, Israel is itself a figure. It is a collective image of God: a work of art that collapses the distinction between the artist as active subject and the artwork as his passive object. Israel is art and artist, artwork and viewer; all of these at once. The figure of Israel as a dancing body or sacral corps de ballet is, on that account, a non-idolatrous image because it is not static, complete or rendered dead by its representation; it is a living, moving, volitional image that can never be seen in its entirety but only from an infinite number of perspectives and moments. The dance, like cloud or fire, is a metonymic representation of God’s glory, just as the body, Israel dancing, is a metonymic representation of the dynamic, transformatory presence of God. The transmissive continuity of the revelation of God’s presence can be evoked by the image of a dance whose form, momentum and mood changes as it passes through time and space. In the present study, Israel is not so much

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displaced from history as processing through it. Her exilic progress patterns and repatterns salvation history into an image whose line marks the edge of an emergent order in the chaos of a rushed departure. This cartography of revelation; this mapping of devotion’s passage forms a figure: a series of lines drawn by historical individuals – you and I – passing over space. Revelation can be visualized as a sacral procession – ‘I will make all my goodness pass before thee’ (Ex. 33:18–19). Revelation is a ‘showing’ of God to those assembled not in the congregational rows of an eschatological roll-call, but a people lining history’s route and joining the procession as its standard passes by. The procession can be caricatured, even by Jews themselves (quoting Jeremiah and Isaiah), as that of docile lambs to the slaughter: a passive shuffle of the herd through the slaughterhouses of history (cf. Jer. 11.19; Is. 53.7). But perhaps, just perhaps, these processive movements towards death are not an undignified, chaotic falling into the pit, or the body’s gradual recession into the past. These movements may also belong to the pathos and mystery of a sanctificatory dance of which we, caught up in it, may be too much a part to understand until, after a moment of exhausted stillness, it has ingathered its energies for the final resurrective leap into the peace of completion. Like the starving woman Charlotte Delbo once saw keeping herself warm by jigging up and down in the snow outside a barrack block in Auschwitz, – a macabre half-naked puppet whom Delbo, at some distance away, mistook for a dancing child – Israel is a broken, dancing body. Delbo remembers: Standing, wrapped in a blanket, a child, a little boy. A tiny shaven head, a face with jutting jaws . . . Barefoot, he jumps up and down ceaselessly with a frenzy like that of some barbaric dance. He also waves his arms to keep warm. The blanket slips open. It’s a woman. A female skeleton. She is naked. Her ribs and pelvic bones are clearly visible. She pulls the blanket up to her shoulders while continuing to dance. . . . A dancing female skeleton. Her feet are small, gaunt, bare in the snow. There are living skeletons that dance.18 The body of Israel, still dancing, is not an incarnation or embodiment of God, but a figure or image of God’s presence in the world, which may die over and over again in history – ‘the living skeleton that dances’ – but which is also eternally alive. Just as fi fteenth-century kabbalism construed all Jewish ritual practice as a cosmic signifier; an ‘iconographic recapitulation of divine archetypes and intradeical processes’,19 so too this sacred dance recapitulates the story of the exile of Israel and of the God accompanying her so that God’s Torah might be carried from village to village, city to city: an exile whose purpose it is to bring all other exiles or estrangements to their close. A dance is a figure set in expressive motion. If the physical movement of diaspora and the spiritual movement of teshuvah (repentant return to God, both individual and collective) are figures of God’s own exile and return, they

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too belong to what Gerhardus van der Leeuw, in his classic phenomenology of sacred dance, calls, ‘the great mystery of movement and countermovement: the one movement which proceeds from this world to God, and the other movement which proceeds from God to this world’.20 If all of Jewish history – its ritual, familial and political spectacle – is itself a devotional work of religious art, and if God’s indwelling spirit or shekhinah is active within the historical process, then history itself becomes a processive dance or theatre of redemption. From all corners of the earth, Jewry walks behind the standard that bears the radiant face of the Shekhinah, tracing the sign of peace onto the land. And when Israel’s work of sanctification is done, the dance returns into its original unity; the order of creation is restored from chaos.

The aesthetic unity of Jewish history The truly Jewish work of art, then, is that which is Israel itself, in the eye of God. This is not to make God intrusively omnivoyant. Jewish history is not a mere audience with God. Rather, revelation is mediated through an interpretative response: God creates God’s own image of the world by seeing, construing and finally judging the meaning of the spectacle history presents to God. This makes God’s vision of the world a form of continuous creation. Just as a text becomes a text in and by its reading, the world becomes world in God’s sight. And, in turn, the world produces an ideational image of God’s presence in the performative historical revelation that is the body of Israel moving across space. A Jewish aesthetic theology is one that can finally move beyond its own commentary on the Second Commandment and even its own use of Jewish art as a locus theologicus. A Jewish aesthetic theology should be able to draw the spectacle of Jewish history into a unified object of aesthetic judgment. In the unfolding or unrolling of creation as an image drawn in and by history, we see it, not as totality, but as a single movement from the primordial, through the historical to the eschatological. It is not easy, however, to persuade modern Jewry of the unity, let alone sacrality, of its history and modern Jewish historicism is, in any case, allergic to typological or figurative historiographies. A theological historiography that draws the history of the individual, world and cosmos into a single normative scheme has become more or less alien to most contemporary Jews. Although one of the most significant differences between modern and medieval Judaism is modern Jewry’s interest in its own history,21 as Yosef Yerushalmi has observed, it is in the modern era that we find, ‘for the first time, a Jewish historiography divorced from collective memory and, in crucial respects, thoroughly at odds with it’.22 The divorce of Jewish history from collective memory has been a gradual one. In the nineteenth century, Abraham Geiger was still able to insist that the

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history of the Jews was rescued from fragmentation by the connectiveness of its ‘religious genius’. Jewish history was properly the history of Jewish faith.23 Whereas, for Geiger, the age of biblical revelation is progressively succeeded by the ages of Tradition, Law and Criticism, nonetheless, God’s self- revelation was carried through history. History remained unified by a revelation of the one God and it perpetuated itself by ‘the sheer force of its inner truth.’24 Nineteenth-century wissenschafliche historiography remained confident of the ‘essential “Idea” of Judaism informing its evolving movements and phases. Even if the emancipated nineteenth-century collective Jewish memory was substantially constructed and mediated by the books and lectures of historians, it is doubtful that even the radical historicization of Judaism separated scholars entirely from collective Jewish memory; for the maskilim, the uniqueness and eternity of Israel had simply given way to its putative universality.’25 Even at the turn of the twentieth century, Leo Baeck’s 1905 The Essence of Judaism unified Jewish history against Jewry’s lapses and assimilations by reference to its continuous practice and confession of ethical monotheism.26 Until the mid-twentieth century the essence of Jewish religion and history, however defined, was regarded either as a source of strength or as ‘a weight anchoring the Jewish people in an obsolete world’. Whether such an essence was celebrated or lamented, Judaism was granted an essentially unalterable ontological reality of its own standing over and against the individual.27 But by the late twentieth century, German-Jewish idealism, along with any notion of an essential and normative Judaism, had been challenged to the point of its appearing merely antiquated.28 It now seems obvious to most commentators that there is not, and never has been, just one kind of Judaism.29 Although there is a difference between attempting to isolate an ‘essence’ of Judaism as a religion and making some claim to the unity of the Jewish people, in the postmodern academy at least, both of these notions are widely discredited, and sometimes for very good reasons. Essentialist accounts of religion are usually negligent of historical and geographical diversity and defined by a male elite who exercise their self-accredited authority to dominate the tradition in ways that push marginal people and their ideas to the edge of the tradition, or beyond it altogether. It has now become apparent that not all contemporary Jews would subscribe to the notion that the Jewish people are a self- contained people with a wholly discrete culture, let alone ‘are’ Israel. Not all Jews consider themselves members of a collective body unified by a single historical purpose, nor do they wish to be such. (As Kafka famously wrote in his diary on 8 January 1914, ‘What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself, and I should be quite content to breathe and stand quietly in a corner.’) There are now, for example, secular, post-Zionist Israelis who identify themselves as Israelis, not Jews; for whom Israel is a nation state but not a Jewish state. Or post-Soviet Jews may feel more kinship with Russian non-Jews than

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Israelis and so on. Far from lamenting this drift from collective identity, Caryn Aviv and David Shneer not only reject the notion of ‘the Jewish people’ but think that the end of the Jewish people is ‘good for the Jews’. ‘New Jews’ can now learn to celebrate their rootedness in the places they live without feeling it is incumbent on them to ‘return’ anywhere. At the same time, ‘new Jews’ can now become better global citizens, having nothing more in common than the choice of calling themselves Jews.30 Juliet Steyn is another who does not accept the singularity of the Jewish people. In her characteristically postmodern opinion, Jews are heterogeneous and non-identical; ‘the Jew’ is little more than an antisemitic construction.31 Griselda Pollock also does not accept that ‘being Jewish’ is a fact about someone: ‘Jewishness is relative to hugely diverse and historically varying cultural and religious identities and the changing circumstances of where and how such identities are lived.’ ‘In modernity, “being Jewish” is no longer a mark of religious difference. In the dual aspect of Jewish modernity – emancipation and genocide – Jewishness has become paradigmatic not of one thing, but of the difference and the plurality of diasporic identities.’32 While a diffuse emotional commitment to the idea of ‘the’ Jewish people may be difficult to unseat, most contemporary commentators nonetheless prefer to conceive Jewish history with more scientific accuracy in its plural and specific geographical parts and historical periods. For Michael Meyer, not only does Jewry enjoy ‘no single territorial concentration, no single spoken language, no single political framework’ but also, over time, ‘such far-reaching changes have occurred that it becomes questionable whether there is at all anything in common between King Alexander Yannai and the Jews of the United States, between the author of the medieval Book of the Pious (Sefer Hasidim) and the secular Jew living in the state of Israel.’ A problem of continuity then arises for the modern Jew who wants to define his or her Jewish identity in historical terms. But Meyer regards the attempt to situate Jewish identity in a single historical tradition as futile or at least necessarily selective. Especially since the Enlightenment’s rupture with the past, Jewish tradition has not been uniform in its practice or faith.33 Even Yerushalmi wonders parenthetically, ‘is all of Jewish history “Jewish”?’34 When, in the late 1980s, David Roskies compiled his great volume The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe he was aware that as the Jewish people continued to fragment, the canon of Jewish religious mythography he was compiling was also in the process of closing forever. His book would be no more than a reminder of how Jews once used the word of God to respond to catastrophe.35 There are, it should be said, exceptions to the postmodern rule, and I sense a growing intellectual resistance to recent deconstructions of the concept of ‘Israel’ as a single, continuous spiritual and physical entity. Some contemporary Jewish historians have sought to moderate the effects of postmodern fragmentation of Jewish consciousness and culture. In the light of modern and

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contemporary Jewish historians’ inability to find the single ‘scarlet thread’ of continuity and integrity running the whole length of Jewish history, Michael Meyer proposes a solution to the spiritual and theoretical problem of Jewish continuity in the image of a long rope. Like a rope, Jewish history has many overlapping, intertwined national, linguistic, political and religious strands, not all of which might stretch across its entire length. Although some of those strands might be damaged and eventually break, as long as the rope itself holds then it can, in its entirety, represent the Jewish people, whose meaning and identity changes according to the place and time through which the rope is passed.36 Meyer’s metaphor of the rope as a symbol of Jewish historical continuity and unity has the considerable virtue of suggesting the resilience and transmissibility of Jewish tradition as that emotional and spiritual tug that draws, binds and supports the people Israel.37 But to figure the continuity of the tradition as a rope that can, after all, strangle as well as tether neglects the possibilities of geist. To figure tradition as a rope neglects the embodiment of Torah as a people whose relation to that tradition is freely missiological, not that of heritage alone; whose revelation is not anchored or bound but in the soaring freedom and vitality of spirit in flight. Lori Krafte-Jacobs has also sought to mitigate the corrosive effects of the postmodern campaign against essentialism. Speaking on behalf of a putative ‘essence’ of Judaism, though her argument is equally adaptable to that of the unity of Israel as a religious body, Krafte-Jacobs uses Process thought to suggest that ‘all becoming, including that of Judaism, is characterized by some degree of freedom, and that all becoming is partially constituted by its internal relations’.38 Even if the continuity of Judaism may not be said to have an unchanging core, the weight of its past – its rich creative, geographical and spiritual legacy – continues to shape each generation’s becoming: ‘The past of our people persists in our present.’ We have no choice about our history, but we are free to cherish or ignore its familiar elements and free to choose how we synthesize Jewish history into our own becoming. She concludes, ‘we cannot finally get to the heart of the thing because the heart lives and grows and changes along with the rest.’ Judaism will go where future generations take it, but we can look forward in hope to its unfolding.39 More specifically, a sense of the embodied aesthetic unity of the Jewish people is not, even now, wholly unknown to contemporary Jewish art and culture. Rachel Lichtenstein, born in 1969, has used ancient ceramic shards from archaeological sites in Israel to make Kirsch Family (1996) – a mosaic image in twelve separate square panels made of Herodian, Byzantine and Roman ceramic pieces mixed with lime, lava and concrete that reconstitutes a photograph of her grandmother’s family taken in Lodz, Poland, probably in 1915. That photograph is the only surviving record of the whole family before they were dispersed through emigration and the Holocaust.40 The transmutation of the image from photograph into mosaic is a reminder that dispersion is,

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among other things, a visual fragmentation of the personal and collective ideational image of Jewish history. And yet the broken shards, which are thousands of years older than the whole image, materially connect the history of one Jewish family – the Kirschs – to the history of Israel as a collective family. Enlarged, and in layered sections of rock and ceramic, the picture has become difficult to see, but the historic unity of Israel is affirmed in a single image of a single family. Differently, an ideational image of Jewish history as a body unified by its own mythos is illustrated in the late Isaiah Berlin’s autobiographical reflections on his Jewish identity. He knows himself to belong to two thousand years of Jewish history unified by ‘a single longing to return, to cease being strangers everywhere’: Such criticisms as I have made of the doctrines of the Enlightenment and of its lack of sympathy for emotional bonds between members of races and cultures, and its idealistic but hollow doctrinaire internationalism, spring, in my case, from this almost instinctive sense of one’s own roots – Jewish roots, in my case, of the brotherhood of common suffering (utterly different from a quest for national glory), and a sense of fraternity, perhaps most real among the masses of the poor but literate and socially cohesive Jews of Eastern Europe – something that has grown thin and abstract in the West, where I have lived my life.41 Jewish identity as a form of historical continuity is, for Berlin, effectively, if not actually, ontological: ‘as for my Jewish roots, they are so deep, so native to me, that it is idle for me to identify them let alone analyse them.’42 Yet it may prove simply impossible to unite the history of all Jews in all lands and in all periods by a linear, unitary historical and ontological theory of the Jewish people. Such might also present an unacceptable level of risk of mystification: the mythologization of Jewry, even by Jews themselves, can either raise unreasonable expectations of Jewish moral standards or confirm the otherness of the Jew as the eternally unassimilable stranger in the Gentiles’ midst.43 An aesthetic approach to Jewish history might therefore seem to be not only a risky, even faintly perverse, throw-back to medieval theological historiography, but also a selective artistic arrangement of memory that presents the past nostalgically as an object of pleasurable longing. The aesthetic rearrangement of Jewish history has, itself, a history. Richard Cohen has examined how modernization among western and central European Jews from around 1830 to the beginning of the twentieth century produced a nostalgic, essentially visual, memory of the world of the ghetto that Jews had, in fact, usually been relieved to leave behind. It was nostalgia, rather than some more lofty religious emotion, which expressed its attachment to a vanished world that would help them overcome the emptiness of relentless modernization and to integrate

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a half-forgotten past into their contemporary existence. In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Jewish art, the ghetto or shtetl came to serve as the visual touchstone of ‘authentic’ Jewish experience.44 Sadness or poor adaptation to the new social conditions of western Jewry provided a market for its own memory in art. In the first half of the nineteenth century the German Jewish artist Moritz Oppenheim (sometimes designated the first Jewish painter) evoked Jewish life, especially that of the Jewish family, in a congenial, sympathetic Beidermeier style. His pictures appealed to nostalgic sensibilities while offering an ethical and spiritual commendation of traditional Jewish life to modern Jews and non-Jews as well.45 Isidor Kaufmann’s similarly accessible genre paintings of the simple customs and pieties of traditional Jewish life, of Jews at devotion and at leisure, were also painted in a nostalgic mood, gently protesting the rapid modernization of western Jewry.46 For nineteenth-century artists like Oppenheim, Kaufmann and the Parisian artist Alphonse Lévy, whose idyllic depiction of the rural Alsatian Jewry of his childhood was coloured by his awareness that by about 1870 this community had already been largely urbanized,47 a ‘return’ to the ghetto to re-collect or capture the spirit and scene of a vanishing past through visualization and imagination became ever more compelling. For the affluent bourgeois families who bought these paintings, Jewish authenticity could be preserved in pictures of dignified Jews in their Shabbos-best even as they sought their own integration into Gentile culture.48 A closely related impulse was at work in the founding of Jewish museums throughout post-Emancipation Europe and later in the United States. Jewish museums allowed acculturated Jews to maintain a proud sense of their past while assimilating into the dominant gentile culture. Such museums educated themselves and others into a particular image of Jewish history.49 In short, there is some risk that an aesthetic historiography could produce an ideational image of history that is as close to myth as it is to history. It may be that ideational images of the unity of Jewish history are born as much of anxious melancholy and its consolation as a sense of continuous revelation. Yet I am not convinced that the demythologization of Jewry (or any other historic collective) is either possible or desirable. Saul Friedländer, after Michel Tournier, defines myth as ‘a history that everyone already knows’. 50 Emancipation and the establishment of the state of Israel have given Jews access to the historical mainstream but their perception of how they arrived there is still permeated by unexamined myth; by something evocative as well as explanatory. 51 But the element of ‘unexamined myth’ in the Jewish history that ‘everyone already knows’ is surely quite properly evocative because it does not offer a historical explanation for the present but rather imposes an obligation to the present whose meaning is continuous with that of the past. The mythos of Jewish history is not synonymous with illusion, but is a function of Israel’s being set apart to the holy. An aesthetic sacralization of Jewish

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history as a dance or movement before God that draws history in its train, resists the scientific, post-emancipation historiography that grew out of the fragmentation and decay of tradition. Yerushalmi is right that scientific historiography is not a substitute for collective memory. 52 Nor has it become one: Yerushalmi, quoting the nineteenth-century Italian Jewish humanist Samuel David Luzzatto, notes that the sacral historiography that ‘sees in Jewish history the singular chronicle of a singular people’, has not entirely fallen into obscurity in the Jewish religious thought of the modern period. Just as Samson Raphael Hirsch had attacked historicism in the nineteenth century, Rosenzweig was notable in the twentieth century for his view that Jewry, not least in its observance of an atemporal law, was not subject to the ordinary historical process but rather draws eternity into history. 53 In the third part of The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig denies that Israel belongs to the history of the nations. 54 The ecstatic aestheticism of Rosenzweig’s thought distinguished his approach from the ethical and rationalistic methods of most other nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Jewish philosophers.55 Rosenzweig’s historiography rejects the relativistic wissenschaftliche liberal view of the historicity of Judaism. Using Schelling’s notion of myth and Mendelssohn’s account of Judaism as a set of symbolic acts, Rosenzweig instead describes the temporal structure that Israel inhabits as that of perpetual revelation, forming a narrative re-enactment or mythos in which revelation events narrate themselves in language and in act.56

Revelation and the moving image Turning to the interpretation of diaspora – for it is this that sets the figure of Israel in motion – it should be noted that the biblical and rabbinic theodical historiography of exile continued to exercise its authority in twentiethcentury Jewish religious responses to the Holocaust. Mid-twentieth-century Haredi Jews continued to accommodate the history of all Jews, religious and secular, into a single sacral scheme predicated on the necessity of Israel’s vicarious or sacrificial suffering. For some, not all, the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the Jewish sins of post-emancipation assimilation and of Zionism (Zionism’s presumptuous anticipation of the messianic age having ‘dug the pit’ of the Holocaust).57 Hasidim also continued to elaborate a cosmological perspective on exile. The classical rabbinic interpretation of exile as both an expiation and purification of the sins of social injustice and internal division was supplemented by a Lurianic mystical account of exile as the historical manifestation of a primordial internal process of rupture and reunion within God.58 Although the punitive elements of Haredi theodicy would be unpalatable to most contemporary Jews, a Jewish historiography of diaspora unified by

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mere ethos alone remains affectively, and above all, theologically inadequate. Contra the dominant biblical and rabbinic theodic opinion, where diaspora is a punishment for various defections that might be summarized under the heading idolatry, there have always been those Jews for whom the fact of diaspora belongs within a larger, more compassionate, redemptive scheme in which suffering is an offering of love for God and the world, not a punishment for sin. The thirteenth-century Geronese kabbalist R. Ezra b. Solomon, for example, proposes that dispersion is the ‘atoning altar’: ‘Nowadays the Jews are already released from the obligation [to dwell in] the Land of Israel. Their suffering – out of the love of God – the [vicissitudes] of dispersion, and their afflictions and subjugation are like an atoning altar for them, as it is written (Psalm 44:23) “Yea, for Thy sake are we killed all the day long”.’59 In modern Jewish thought, Hermann Cohen’s theology may be predicated on an essentially non-personalistic idealism in which God is a real metaphysical ideal (not just an idea) for which we strive, but it is also a theology of love where love of God develops from love of the suffering other. He too equates Israel with the Suffering Servant’s vicarious endurance of injustice and poverty. The Messiah is not a particular dynastic individual but the collective remnant whose ethical power consists in the assertion that God loves not the powerful or the heroic but the pious poor.60 The humble servant, unadorned by beauty and unadornable by art, is a tragic bearer of the heavy truth that the world does not exist for human well-being or enjoyment but to develop the ethical ideal.61 This is a messianic ethic of suffering: ‘only at this point does suffering as historical power reach an elevation that surpasses social misery.’62 Rosenzweig, early in the twentieth century, drew upon the Jewish philosophers Philo in Roman Alexandria and Yehuda Halevi in tenth-century Spain, both of whom had argued that Jews had to be dispersed in order to spread the word of God to the nations. Halevi in particular had portrayed the Jews as each one carrying the seeds of the divine logos among the nations. Rosenzweig is further indebted to the medieval rabbinic commentator Rashi who, echoing Christian theologies of Christ’s suffering for the sins of the world, understood the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 to refer to the people Israel who suffered vicariously for the sins of the world.63 This para-Christian scheme helped Rosenzweig to justify Jewish wandering and its afflictions theologically. Israel is elected to suffer not only for its own sin but for those of the world. God afflicts Israel so that the nations will be healed.64 Rosezweig’s gloss on Halevi and Rashi’s missiology suggests that Jewish movement should be interpreted within a redemptive scheme, a view not unfamiliar to some artists of the period. Alfred Nossig’s sculpture The Wandering Jew (c. 1901, whereabouts now unknown) depicts the wandering Jew in positive terms as a muscular patriarch carrying the tall staff of a traveller and holding the scroll of the Torah, emblazoned with a Star of David, to his chest. That the Torah is held in the patriarch’s arms like a child, conveys not only that

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the Torah is a source of spiritual sustenance in his wanderings, but that the wandering itself is a generative medium of Torah.65 Jewish wandering is not as aimless as Christian antisemitism once made it sound. That God declares in the book of Leviticus, ‘I have set you apart from other peoples to be Mine’ (Lev. 20:26) entails a purposive movement of bodies in space from one place to another, one which itself supervises and perpetuates a covenantal relationship with God. An aesthetic theology of diaspora would, I think, have some appeal to Jewish theologians sympathetic to process thought.66 Sandra Lubarsky describes Process theology as an account of God’s power as persuasive, not coercive; where reality is ‘organic and social, creative and communal – change and interrelatedness are part of its nature – and God is intimately involved in all the events of reality. God’s involvement is revealed in the ongoing process itself, although God is not the process per se’.67 If the very process of Jewish movement is redemptive, then it will produce a distinctively Jewish kind of image: an image is drawn by a history of Jewish passage through the world not only as exiles, migrants and refugees, but also as those in search of God. In Genesis 12:1–9 Abraham, an old man of seventyfive, leaves his father’s house and the scenes of his childhood and travels to the land that God wished ‘to show him’. As Abraham travels, he builds altars to the God who has appeared to him. He maps revelation. The processes of Jewish history have been necessarily spatial as well as chronological, even those of its own secularization: ‘The modernization of European Jewry was a gradual process that spread from individuals to communities and from one social class to another. It travelled from city to small town and from central and western Europe eastward. Among its component elements were economic redistribution, acculturation, secular education, and religious reform.’68 Of course, the destruction of Jewish history has also been spatially effected. In the midtwentieth century the advance of the Nazi Reich set European Jewry into movement along a network of roads and railway tracks leading from every town and village towards death.69 Diasporic movement is not, then, to be equated with the dynamics of either historical progress or destruction as such, but with God’s labour to redeem his own creation, positively through the dissemination of the spiritual, moral and intellectual inheritance of Torah, but also negatively, from the consequences of its rejection. Diasporic movement suggests that a Jewish theology of art need not invest its Jewishness in an aesthetic of distortion or abstraction such as those discussed in the first chapter of this book. A Jewish aesthetic may rather be shaped by its experience of diaspora: both its trauma and its opportunities. Nicholas Mirzoeff’s diasporic aesthetic, while not itself theological in reference or intention, suggests that the dislocations and ruptures of diaspora generate visual hybridity or ‘intervisuality’. Drawing on Kitaj’s First Diasporist Manifesto,70 Mirzoeff recognizes that the diasporic perspective is alien to the modern

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Cartesian single perspective and proposes instead a multiple viewpoint in which the visual is located in the interactive, interdependent, intertexual process of encounters between persons, communities and cultures.71 The static, single perspective and the tyranny of unidirectional mass movement are lost in the turmoil of the shifting crowd. Theologically, Israel is a people rooted in the transcendental promise of land, but like God’s spirit, it is historically, and perhaps spiritually, more accustomed to residing in no one place. Jewish patterns of diaspora – the Greek word refers to the casting of seeds on the wind – are patterns of dissemination that are undetermined; the seed is carried by a will subordinate to spirit, not to fate. Bearing in mind Mirzoeff’s argument for the complexity of a Jewish visual aesthetic, it seems clear that the transmissibility of Judaism is not dependent on the auditory alone. While the visual spectacle of Israel’s history produces a written commentary, the theodramatic sweep of Israel’s history – whether the flight from Egypt, the assemblies at Sinai, on Masada, and even on the ramp where Jews disembarked from the trains that had taken them into Auschwitz and awaited selection for death or a temporary reprieve from death – form a series of moving images whose configuration of bodies it is the task of theology to interpret. The dance of exodus from Egypt in which, as one body, the people follow Moses across the Sea of Reeds and through the wilderness and on, after Moses, into the Land, is counter-danced in the funerary processions of exile and captivity, ancient and modern, that signal catastrophe and disappearance, but also move towards the last resurrective dance that ingathers and restores Israel. With a historic integrity of their own, these dances flow into one another until they are all danced at once. Hans Urs von Balthasar presents the process of Christian redemption as a divine play or theodrama. Perhaps Charlotte Saloman also had some inkling of this when she produced a series of over a thousand multi-media images between 1941 and 1943 as a deposition of evidence to her full humanity. Her Leben? Oder Theater? took the form of a drama or singspiel, as she called it, recalling the ensembles of songs and plays once performed by travelling troupes of entertainers, with a prelude, central section and epilogue by which she restaged her life as a dramatic production.72 While Levinas may be right that ‘on the mean and petty level of day-to-day reality, a human community does not resemble its myth’,73 from the telescopic perspective of the religious historiographer each historical crisis can be interpreted as a tableau or positioning of bodies, the choreography of whose theomorphic movement through the world marks the pathos and the triumph of a God in exile and return. That which is only glimpsed in diasporic motion from a train; seen in passing from the roadside, may constitute some of the distinctive nature of Jewish vision and its promise of what lies ahead. If, for most of Jewish history, revelation is not centralized in Jerusalem but given on the way, what we see and understand of God may have been carried not only

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as words in books but also in motion, on the carts rumbling along the road out of the city that are laden with the furniture, pots, pans and clothing also necessary to the daily fulfilment of the commandment. For obvious reasons, modern Jewish art has been troubled by this movement. Migration has turned presence into trace and, over and over again, has occasioned the irretrievable loss of visual artefacts that mark a stable, continuous presence.74 In Yosl Bergner’s painting Flying Spice Box (1966), dented pots, pans and spice boxes fly through the air on the winds of holocaustal dispersion and land where they fall. In his Destination X (1974) all sense of a cultivationary dispersion is lost and dispersion is now no more than a long processive line of furniture – tables, mirrors and chairs that represent the deported crowd forming a long, slow, congested line for death. Or again, R. B. Kitaj’s The Jew etc. (1976–9) and The Jewish Rider (1984–5) allude to holocaustal movement. The riders on the train are unsettled, preoccupied and have distorted, averted postures. The train has become the symbol of their homelessness; of their constant movement towards a ‘destination at best unknown’.75 A Jewish aesthetic theology should neither ignore Jewish suffering nor be defined by it. Although the Hebrew mahol usually refers to biblical dances that celebrate the joy of safe return from battle (as in Judges 11:34; 1 Sam. 18:6–7 and 1 Sam. 29:5) and is associated with chanting and the playing of flutes and drums, nonetheless, by the end of the Second Temple period, if Jewish dance is triumphal it is in spite of its circumstances, not because of them. After the destruction of the Second Temple Israel was, and remains, in mourning for its loss; festivity is muted until its rebuilding. Diasporic Jewish movement is, by its nature, non-triumphal. Indeed, it would seem counter-intuitive to see diasporic movement as anything other than repeatedly and irredeemably destructive, giving rise to the sense that the Jew is not only dis-placed but never-placed. But since dance is not only celebratory or inaugural, the notion of Jewish history as a dance expressive of suffering that is an integral element of revelation is not self-contradictory. Dance may ultimately compose itself into a graceful and harmonious whole, but it is also produced by inner tensions and resistance to its own fractious energies. This is also true of the dance of Jewish history, some of whose momentum has been the result of its quarrelsome division or of catastrophe. After this, a dance can indeed seem to lose form and grace as its participants, straggling far behind, retire exhausted. Grief also turns or prostrates the body, though this is rarely seen in the emotionally muted religious culture of western Europe, where more often grief leaves the body listless. Twentieth-century Jewish art has represented the collective movement of Jewry from death or into death in a succession of inter-referenced images. For the ideational image of Jewish history as passional movement on an epic scale is a very old one. The iconography of the Jewish refugee dates back at least as far as Assyrian reliefs depicting prisoners leaving Lachish holding their few belongings. In the modern Jewish imagination, economic deprivation and

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Figure 11 Samuel Hirszenberg, Exile (c. 1904), oil on canvas. Whereabouts now unknown, presumed lost or destroyed. Efforts have been made, without success, to trace the owner of the copyright of this photograph.

persecution in eastern Europe and the rise of antisemitism and intolerance in western Europe was reflected in art by the end of the nineteenth century, most notably in the paintings of the Polish Jewish artist Samuel Hirszenberg (1865–1908). Hirszenberg’s Exile (c. 1904, whereabouts now unknown) is perhaps the most striking of all depictions of the mass movement of Jewry. Painted in response to the Kishniev pogrom of 1903, this large, sombre canvas depicts destitute Russian Jews of all ages and types walking onwards as one body across an empty steppe shrouded in snow, carrying nothing but a few religious and domestic necessities. After Hirszenberg, images of large huddled groups of people carrying meagre bundles of possessions and trudging across empty landscapes on foot, their children walking alongside, a fire glowing in the sky from the destruction of their homes,76 became the visual epitome of Judenschmerz in an age of pogroms. Hirszenberg’s Exile was exhibited in numerous European galleries and, much reproduced, lauded as an icon of Russian Jewish suffering (‘the first icon of Jewish suffering to gain a mass audience’).77 This picture set the tone for Jewish artistic production through subsequent years, though some Zionist ideologues objected to its despondent, even tragic, mood. Another of Hirszenberg’s funereal depictions of Jewish mass-movement under another dark sky is Czarny Sztandar, The Black Banner (1905) which depicts a great crowd of Orthodox Jewish men bearing a black coffin that might carry the remains of a victim of the pogroms or, with reference to the book open on top of the coffin, might symbolize the passing of the religious world of the eastern European shtetl into the past.78 Like Hirszenberg, Jewish artists and poets of the time were preoccupied with homelessness and its physical and spiritual exhaustions. Notable among their works (most of whose present

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whereabouts are now unknown) are Leopold Pilichowski’s Emigrants (c. 1906); The Tired Wanderers (c. 1900) and Rest (1900). Maurycy Minkowski depicts of three generations of a dazed and disorientated family huddled together in After the Pogrom (1905); Jews Leaving the Town (c. 1910), and At the Train Station (c. 1906–14).79 The theme of the Jewish refugee was pronounced in two major exhibitions of Jewish art in London 1906 and Berlin 1907. The exhibitions lack hope and the Jewish religion seems only to intensify the sense of tragedy, not alleviate it.80 Just as Hirszenberg’s Exile was indebted to Honoré Daumier’s depictions of fugitives, Chagall’s Exodus (1909) closely resembles Hirszenberg’s Exile. Chagall repeatedly uses two figures borrowed from Hirszenberg’s painting: the mother carrying the child and the male Jew carrying the Torah, though with the addition of mythological elements. Chagall’s refugees are led by a child and an angel and the Wandering Jew, dressed as an itinerant peddler, follows behind.81 The image of the Wandering Jew carrying all his worldly goods in a sack was one that Chagall, himself a refugee twice over,82 personally identified with. The image would appear in his paintings until his death in 1985. The Hirzsenbergian theme of a mass exodus of Jews forced to leave their eastern European villages at the turn of the twentieth century went on to accrue a further density of historical reference during the Holocaust, in particular shaping the representation of Jewish refugees fleeing or in hiding from the Nazis; deported from hiding places or ghettos to death and concentration camps, and, after the war, displaced persons (DPs) liberated by the Allies. Halina Olumucki, Leo Haas, Peter Ludwig, Raphael Mandelzweig and numerous other Holocaust artists depicted Jews not merely fleeing persecution but being deported under armed guard to the ghettos and onwards, to their death in the camps.83 Ben Shahn’s Immigration Design No. 7 (1939); Max Weber’s Refugees (1939) and Wayfarers (1940) and Raphael Mandelzweig’s Refugees (c. 1945–7) are also derived from Daumier’s representation of refugees on the move, again mediated through Hirszenberg’s work. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, many Jews would have been dressed in the western secular clothing of the time, yet these and other artists tended to depict the refugee archetypally in the dress of eastern European Orthodox Jewry, without the historical particularity of the yellow star sewn to their coats and without the painting alluding to any identifiable destination.84 For these artists, the mythos of Jewish movement overwhelmed, or at least diffused, its immediate historicity. In Holocaust art, the processive spectacle of the murder of European Jewry in the long columns of the deported filing into darkness and on into a deeper and then deepest darkness, is recorded in Otto Ungar’s Street Scene With Crowds, a tumultuous, pen, ink and gouache drawing made in Terezín in 1943. Against an almost operatic backdrop of the eighteenth-century baroque architecture in which the camp was housed, the murder of European Jewry is

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Figure 12 Jan Burka, Deportees, Terezín (undated) brown sanguine chalk, 500 ⫻ 325 cm, with permission of The Museum of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

figured in the form of a funeral procession. So too, in Jan Burka’s Deportees, an undated chalk drawing made in Terezín, Jewry forms a long line; its congregational shadow moving along the walls of the building anticipates Jewry’s transformation into ghosts. Depicted as a death march, the line passes between two long buildings along a cobbled street whose abyssal perspective funnels the procession into darkness. The street narrows and the Jews and their possessions disappear into an opening on nothingness: into what we now know to be effectively a line for the gas chambers.85 The sense that tradition might have lost its future is signalled in a series of pictures Samuel Bak painted in 1996. Bak paints the holocaustal aftermath: what we can see receding from view when we look backwards from the window of time’s train. Generation to Generation III depicts pious elderly men wearily blessing not children, but one another. The men are painted as fading

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presences; the visible connection between the Jewish past and its future has become difficult to discern. In Symposium, the old scholars, like the tree of life, are painted as uprooted and adrift in history; the texts they study are now no more than blank pages. In Return to Paradise, a family, posed as if for a formal photograph, have become no more than a memory, disappearing back into nature, literally petrified as rocks or wood by their captivity to a terrifying past. Looking bleakly out at us, these Jews are inert cultural fossils, lacking the will and capacity to reach us. In Final Movement, Bak’s depiction of a group of Jewish musicians playing by a crematory chimney in view of a windswept coast may signal to the possibility of new horizons. Yet the picture seems to echo Jeremiah 7:34 where, at the pronouncement of God’s judgment, the laughter and music at the wedding falls silent, the dance is stilled and the land falls into ruin. After 1945, in the still and silent wake of mass death, the theme of diasporic movement lost currency. The Hirzsenbergian image of the refugee in Jewish art was more or less abandoned after 1950. And for several decades after the war, national Holocaust memorials tended to forge a form of memory that was rooted to the spot. In huge pieces of metal and rock sunk into the ground, a post-Holocaust visual rigor mortis had set in. Vast metal or granite monuments such as Wikto Tolkin’s 1969 monument at Majdanek, near Lublin in Poland are impressive signals of the descent of an unrelenting, impenetrable darkness, and suggest a history of pain too massive and heavy to move aside and give way to the future. Yet the figure of Jewish history is a complex one to which monumental remembrance cannot do justice, or may even, in the very act of memorialization, forget.86 The image traced by Jewish movement replicates and recapitulates itself over and over again – its lines cross, loop and doubleback – until it becomes a recognizably Jewish image. The ‘primal scene’ for the Belgian Jewish avant-garde filmmaker Chantal Akerman is that of holocaustal departure. Akerman writes in a prose poem: ‘Once the film was finished / I said to myself, /so that’s what it was:/ that again’: And slowly you realize that it is always the same thing that is revealed, a little like a primal scene. And the primal scene for me although I fight against it . . . is far behind or always in front of all images barely covered by others More luminous, radiant even Old images of evacuation Of walking in the snow with packages Toward an unknown place . . .87 Perhaps, after the Holocaust, a missiological account of diaspora has become increasingly difficult to sustain: the seeds have been buried too deep in mass graves or, too heavy with grief to disperse, seem no more than ash and greasy

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smoke falling on rock. And besides, the establishment of the State of Israel, which most Jewish theologians of the time welcomed as the ultimate providential sign, extended an invitation to every Jew on earth to end his or her exile; to be not refugees but settlers. Yet one of the great engines of revelation is diaspora.88 If redemption and diasporic movement are part of the same process, then the history of Jewish diaspora can be read not only as a series of disappearances but rather as the very circulation of revelation. To suggest a hesitant visual analogy – the sort one wants to withdraw even as one offers it: at the site of the death camp at Teblinka, the names of the communities that were murdered there are painted on jagged rocks that cover the site in waves and drifts of stone. On the quiet June morning in 2005 that I visited the site, the remains of close to a million people who had been slowly and agonisingly gassed by carbon monoxide lay beneath a bright coverlet of wild flowers, and in the forest around, under a carpet of tiny red wild strawberries; they seemed lulled at last into death’s peaceful sleep by the drone of bees. The drifts of colour, rather than the commemorative rocks sunk in the ground, seemed a natural post-historical symbol of the dissemination of revelation; of how seeds and good things are carried on the wind; on the spirit of prayer, taking root even in the greyest of ashes.89 A more positive missiological account of Jewish diasporic movement can be inferred from the spectacle presented through centuries of eastern European Jewish piety. In Leviticus 25:23 God says, ‘you are strangers and sojourners with Me’, and before the Holocaust, Ashkenazic folk culture was densely populated by God’s sojourners: the poor and the simple of no fixed abode that God says go with him. There were the Thirty-Six Just Men of Jewish legend who, to save God’s heart from breaking, would slip, weary and unnoticed, from shtetl to shtetl, carrying the burden of the world’s sin on their back;90 the Luftmenschen: the peddlers who once showed us how to live on air, and the Purimspielers: the itinerant groups of actors, acrobats and clowns who, from the sixteenth century, carried the Purim story of redemption from death from one remote rural community to another. Consider, also, how the great hasidic rabbis are identified with and by the names of towns and regions in a Jewish Europe that once was and is no longer. Their names remember real places that their disciples would journey for days to reach, and where their piety invited and welcomed God’s presence. The recitation of these men’s names – Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg; Rabbi Moshe of Kobryn, Rabbi Shelmo of Karlin, Rabbi Mordecai of Lekhovitz, Rabbi Yehudah Zevi of Stretyn, Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk, Rabbi Yitzhak of Vorki . . . – calls part of a long register of devotion to HaShem – the Name of all names, and one of whose other names is Ha Makhom, the place. As it says in the Midrash (Gen. R. 68), ‘The Holy One, blessed be He, is the place of the world but the world is not His place’. God moves with and through the body of Israel, from place to place. In the Orthodox and the nonOrthodox alike – in any Jew who seeks to be a light to the world – the beacon

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of divine presence can be tracked as when, on a clear night, bonfires or torches are lit in succession across the land; as one light is seen, another is lit. Although most hasidic sects now recognize the State of Israel, hasidic emissaries have long undertaken missionary journeys precisely to ‘bring the Master of the Universe into the world’. They do so in the spirit of the first disciples of the Baal Shem Tov who endured exile to atone for Israel’s sin and hasten redemption; who travelled to ransom kidnapped Jewish children; to find a teacher whose soul would meet theirs in study, and to convert others to Hasidus.91 While the hasidic kfitzas haderech – the miraculous journey in which vast distances were covered with a giant stride in the wink of an eye – has now been replaced by jet-propelled aircraft carrying hasidic missionaries around the world, the missiology remains the same. As Wellen Levine notes, ‘Chabad Houses have nurtured Lubavitch’s outreach success through classes, holiday celebrations, and cultural events geared toward secular Jews. The shluchim who run them base their lives on a few central goals: to teach Jews throughout the globe about their religious heritage and to convince as many Jews as possible to follow Jewish law.’ The shluchim are often ‘the lone Hasidim in the area, with no surrounding religious community’ and yet ‘these outposts are surely among the Rebbe’s proudest legacies’.92

Dancing the arrival of the messianic age It is on grounds such as these that I elaborate on the suggestion with which I began this chapter, namely that God’s passing with Israel over the land might be imagined as a congregational work of art. Diasporic movement is a messianic dance or series of rhythmic movements and disseminatory trajectories through space by whose progression Israel makes straight God’s path into the world and thereby into a renewed future: a future that re-calls the beginning. For as Gerhardus van der Leeuw reminds us, moved by the spirit, our movement is in the image of God’s. The biblical God is one who moves: his creative spirit moves over the waters of chaos, his pillar of fire leads the Israelites through the desert. Dance reminds us that God’s movement is the expression of his creative love: ‘God moved, and he set us upon this earth in motion. That is sublime and impressive. It is the beginning of his work in creation and salvation. It is also the beginning of the dance.’93 That which is expressive and creative in the human: the ruach or spirit that is the body’s life, is that which will dance in God’s image. ‘Dance is to the body as spirit is to the body.’94 Seldom is this more evident than in the swaying and rocking movement that Orthodox men make in prayer. Mystics understood this movement (in Yiddish, shockeling) as a religious dance that intensified concentration, though their detractors regarded it as merely undignified.95 Although silence and stillness can punctuate or form the climax of worship (‘Be still

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and know that I am God.’ Ps. 46:11),96 worship at its most intense is a bodily agitation. Moved by the spirit, worship becomes dance, which is why, in early hasidic worship, devotional joy is reputed to have moved men not only to sway as they worshipped but to engage in sacral acrobatics as well.97 (Compare how, in Dante’s vision, ‘the closer one comes to God the more active one becomes – the angels dance around the Lord.’)98 And not only the human creation dances its relationship with God. A theology of dance can be traced in the Hebrew Bible where creation dances its worship of its creator: the floods clap their hands, mountains rejoice and spring like goats, hills skip like lambs.99 There is a hasidic principle that suffering is overcome by the discipline of religious joy, that each step of a dance can have spiritual meaning, and that dance has a supernatural power to work miracles of liberation and healing. (Recall the story of Rabbi Moshe Leib putting on new shoes of morocco leather, lacing them up and dancing for the healing of his friend the Rabbi of Berditchev who had fallen seriously ill. Those keeping watch over the dying man remembered that ‘power flowed forth from his dancing. Every step was a powerful mystery. An unfamiliar light suffused the house, and everyone watching saw the heavenly hosts join in his dance.’)100 Dance expresses joy, and perhaps in the joy it gives God to see it, hasidic dance is also believed to soften the harsh judgment of Din or divine retribution and life is permitted to go on.101 The infectious energy of dance revives the spirit. That is why, in Ashkenazic culture, the agile ‘fiddler on the roof’ is one whose nimbleness of foot, wit and spirit makes him a figure of Jewish survival. Like him, Jews bear their burden lightly and hold their balance despite the precariousness of their situation. The figure of the fiddler on the roof, in silhouette against a turbulent sky, has, of course, been popularised by the eponymous musical as the ‘spirit of the Jewish people’. But more ambiguously, the fiddler on the roof in Chagall’s sombre painting Dead Man (1908) plays a lament for the dead man lying in the shetl’s main thoroughfare as another man clears up the detritus the pogrom has left strewn around the village. Michael Fried distinguishes between those images in which the figures depicted seem unaware of the viewer who is, effectively, an invisible voyeur, and those images whose mode is ‘theatrical’: where the viewer is addressed by the figure.102 Jewish history forms an image of itself in theatrical mode as the Jewish fiddler playing from the rooftops. The fiddler draws the past into the future with a haunting, lilting tune that conjures or renews hope in those who catch its elusive notes and hurry onwards to follow its source. Tradition addresses its future, beckoning across the snow for the others to follow behind. (A much earlier incarnation of the fiddler on the roof appears in Christian tradition as the Galilean rabbi who urges his followers to leave all that they have and follow him.) But spirit can also dissipate when it is not answered by spirit. The dancing Jew can seem abjected by his dance when that dance is coerced and ridiculed. In Poland before the Holocaust, Jewish tenant farmers were sometimes forced

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by the squire or poritz and his drunken party to sing and dance before them to the traditional Sabbath hymn. Jeered at by the goyim, this Jew was also sometimes referred to contemptuously by his own kind as a bootlicking Yid or mahyofis Yid (a term later used of self-effacing galuti Jews by Zionists wishing to cast off an Ashkenazic identity they considered a humiliation).103 And yet this dancing Jew is subject to differing interpretations. Anti-Zionist haredim like Moshe Scheinfeld saw the mahyofis Yid as a hero of Jewish sanctity, of ‘a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations’, so that even when dancing before the poritz, the Jew knew himself to be noble, exalted and proud and joyous in his otherness.104 Or again, although the Holocaust witnessed the abjected dance of elderly Jews forced by Nazis to dance before jeering crowds, and rabbis forced to dance on desecrated Torah scrolls, there were also male hasidim who, on the edge of mass graves, before the fi ring squads of the Einsatzgruppen, sang and danced themselves into an ecstatic state of communion with God by which to rejoice at their sacrificial sanctification of his name.105 The Dombrover Rebbe, Rabbi Haim Yehiel Rubin is known to have led twenty Jews in a hasidic dance before they were shot into the graves they had dug themselves.106 Other stories are told of the hasidic conviction that dance was prerequisite to survival. In Mauthausen, Rabbi Moshe, a Bobover hasid, remembers surviving the long hours of a roll-call, naked and wet, in the freezing wind of a December day in 1944 because he senses the presence of the Rabbi of Bobov, Rabbi Ben-Zion Halberstam, at his side, urging him to dance: ‘One foot began to move, to free itself from its chains of frost. The ice crackled; one foot began to dance. The other foot tore itself away from the clinging ice. The snow became red as skin from the sole of Moshe’s foot remained grafted to the ice. Bones, muscles, and sinews began to step in the snow, to dance to the rabbi’s niggun (melody).’107 Hasidim danced the condition and possibility of messianic dance. This was the purposive movement that in biblical prophecy becomes a visual image of redemption: ‘A voice rings out: Clear in the desert a road for the Lord! Level in the wilderness a highway for our God! Let every valley be raised, every hill and mount made low. Let the rugged ground become level and the ridges become a plain. The Presence of the Lord shall appear, and all flesh, as one, shall behold’ (40:3–5). Not only his people, but God himself, is on the move: ‘Requital is coming, the recompense of God – He Himself is coming to give you triumph’ (Is. 35:4). The prophets’ ecstatic pronouncements of the coming redemption were probably also accompanied by ecstatic dance (as in 1 Sam. 19:18–24). Jewish dance traditions have long been associated with liberation. Prophetic dance traditions live on in contemporary protest marches where an assembled community processes forward in rows, their arms linked in solidarity, forcing the past to give way to a liberated future.108 Just as when Miriam led the women in dance to celebrate the escape from Egypt, a celebratory dance marks the end of slavery to the past and the beginning of a new, free community that both

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embodies its past and casts it off in a moment of ecstatic forgetting. Similarly, hasidic dance, which understands itself to be an heir to the biblical tradition of prophetic dance, remembers how the Baal Shem Tov used the power of ecstatic dance to liberate Jews held captive in prison. Dance shakes off the chains of bondage to an oppressive past.109 Liberative movement is not peculiar to Hasidism. My point could also be illustrated by the March of the Living. Established in 1988 by Israel’s Ministry of Education, this is a ‘symbolic journey’ for teenagers and young adults in which a group travel from Israel to Poland, with Poland acting as a spatial symbol of the ‘dead’ past and Israel, the ‘living’ future. The centrepiece of the March is a one-mile silent walk between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau), culminating in a memorial service and the singing of the Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem.110 The March is sometimes dismissed as a crudely nationalistic, ideological gesture. But equally, the spectacle of Jewish youth processing through Auschwitz under the flag of the shield of David could be at once an intentional reversal of the processive holocaustal movement into death and a commemoration of the heroic spirit that raised the Zionist flag carried by the Warsaw ghetto orphans in Janusz Korczac’s care as they attempted to march – a heavy child in Korczac’s arms – to the Umschlagplatz or ghetto deportation point, on the way to their death in Treblinka.111 In his later thought, Schwarzschild, like his mentor Hermann Cohen, and in opposition to messianic Zionism, was persuaded that rabbinic doctrine demands that we must work always for the coming of the Messiah so that he will approach ever closer, but that his coming will be forever deferred. Even if, like other religious Jews, Schwarzschild had occasionally ‘espied the outlines of the figure of the Messiah in the faintest wisps of smoke over the chimneys of Auschwitz and on the skyline of Jerusalem rebuilding’,112 the messianic age is and should be, as Hermann Cohen argued before him, an earthly political future that defies the present actuality with a new ethical reality. The messianic age is not a prehistorical Golden Age or an eschatological miracle, but the ethical process of striving for the ideal.113 For Schwarzschild, citing Maimonides, ‘the Messiah will always not yet have come, into all historical eternity. It is his coming, or rather the expectation of his coming, not his arrival, his “advent”, that is obligatory to Jewish faith.’114 Schwarzschild detects some residual fidelity to the notion of messianic deferral in the modern period, when ‘the religious power of such a proposition was once again, and unforgettably, demonstrated when religious Jews in the ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps, and among the partisans and the survivors, made Maimonides’ twelfth principle their universal anthem: I believe with full faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he may tarry, I anticipate him, nonetheless, on every day, when he may come.’115 That the processive image of Jewish death might be performative as an act of prophetic protest and as an inauguration of a new order is not only apparent

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from the holocaustal spectacle of those religious Jews who went to their death affirming their faith, reciting Ani Ma’amin (‘I believe’). Differently, those mainly secular Jews who went fighting to their death in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 also staged a prophetic spectacle. The Uprising, whether interpreted as an act of token vengeance or as the exercise of Jews’ freedom to choose death rather than have death chosen for them, could not pretend to an act of war towards decisive victory. In some senses it was a futile gesture that could only fail, yet from the perspective of the historical spectator for whom it may in part have been staged, it was a moral victory. And more than that, it was a bid for the future of the Jewish people by means of a theatrical recasting of the male Jew from that of ghetto victim to ghetto fighter, anticipating the Zionist recasting of the European Jew from scholar to farmer and soldier, defender of the secular Jewish state. Although such a recasting of the Jew reclaimed the image of the Israelite warrior and rejected the pieties of the more immediate past, the Uprising was a characteristically messianic gesture in so far as it fought to establish conditions for a renewed future that these Jews would not live to see. That the Messiah never gets to Jerusalem does not defeat hope, it permits it. For messianic coming is not an arrival but the transmission or sending-across of spirit. Revelation is free – that is, suprahistorical and supraterritorial – because diasporic Jewish movement occupies space alone, not its own place. Revelation is therefore unlimited by, or transcends and exceeds, its own history, creating the possibility of hope. Here, communal movement is transformed by hope into a dance that anticipates messianic rejoicing. For when Israel is vindicated by God, the lame will get up and dance like harts, and the dumb will break into song (Is. 25:6). Lifted up from the pit, the Psalmist thanks God with the words, ‘You turned my lament into dancing, you undid my sackcloth and girded me with joy, that [my] whole being might sing hymns to You endlessly; O Lord my God, I will praise you forever (30:12).’ From the fi fteenth century onwards, the grinding miseries of persecution and vilification in late medieval Europe had been relieved not only in prayer, but in art that is itself a form of prayer. In the Passover Haggadah, also known as the sefer ha’geulah or Book of Redemption, the whole household of Israel were often shown travelling with the messiah. In the Venice Haggadah of 1609 the prophet Elijah walks in front of the messiah, seated on an ass, blowing the shofar or ram’s horn heralding redemption. With exiled Jews ingathering from all corners of the earth, the figures are moving in a processive line towards the Gate of Mercy in Jerusalem where the Temple is already rebuilt within its walls.116 Before the emancipation period, Jews saw themselves as ‘ “captives of war” among the nations’. Yet this was mitigated by the messianic expectation that was ‘literally the daily and even hourly posture of the Jew’. Orthodox Jews still make that eschatological bid for freedom three times a day when they pray for the messianic restoration of Jewish sovereignty, the restoration of

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the monarchy and judges, and return from Exile to land of Israel, all of these being awaited within the finite historical continuum.117 Despite the counter-tradition of the Messiah who is eternally on his way, but ‘will always have not yet come’ – where Jerusalem somehow always lies beyond the next hill – festive movement in anticipation of the coming of the messiah persists right through the twentieth century. Zionist art of the first half of the century depicted aliyah, emigration to Palestine, not merely as a renewal of nationhood but as in all senses a return to life: a resurrective ‘getting up’ from the pit or grave that was eastern Europe. In diaspora, Reuven Rubin had once painted weary, destitute, hunched and huddled Jews, often seated on the ground with their heads held in their hands. But after his emigration to Palestine in 1923, Rubin ceased to paint images of persecuted Jews and instead created joyous images of devotional dance. In works such as the series of woodcuts entitled The God Seekers (1923) and The Dancers of Meron (1926) Rubin depicts exultant dancing Jews. His best-known image from this period, The Dancers of Meron, conveys an eschatological vision of Jewish unity through the dynamic embrace of dance. Here a realized, not merely anticipated, eschatological

Figure 13 Reuven Rubin, The Dancers of Meron (1926), oil on canvas, 160 ⫻ 128 cm, with permission of The Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv.

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reconciliation is enacted in Rubin’s representation of the customarily divided communities of Sepahardic and Ashkenazi Jews dancing together, unified in their ecstatic celebration of Lag b’Omer in Safed.118 Dalia Manor finds in these and related images a demonstration of the ultimate spiritual unity of Zionism and Orthodoxy in the formation of a new national culture in Palestine. Rubin and others’ theological aesthetic contradicts the usual assumption that Israeli art insisted upon an ideological, Zionist severance from its religious and social heritage. Rather, images such as Dancers of Meron represent an element of Zionist art that is continuous with tradition: in this picture, ‘there is no rupture between the generations, and the young and the old are united in their faith. The embrace of Oriental and Ashkenazi Jews evokes the idea of the Ingathering of the Exiles, a messianic concept that had been adopted by Zionism.’119 A different and equally striking modern instance of collective redemptive Jewish dance was that of the Purim carnival which took place in the 1930s in Tel Aviv. This was the first city in Palestine to hold a Purim parade, which was instituted by the modernist painter, dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Baruch Agadati. Agadati was himself a keen painter of dancing hasidim, and through his own solo interpretations of hasidic dance he turned himself into a Jewish type that inspired Rueven Rubin’s 1924 painting Hasidic Ecstacy, also known as Agadati Dancing. Since his youth in Odessa, Agadati had aspired to create an essential, ‘original Hebrew dance’.120 When this opportunity arose he himself taught the people the new dance he had devised for the Purim Adloyada (an Arameic term evoking drunken revelry, literally: ‘until you do not know the difference’). Agadati’s Purim dance was intended to be continuous with the long history of Purim carnivals and fairs where people ran in a joyous winding, procession through the streets, spreading the good news of redemption from house to house.121 Even during the Holocaust itself, some Jews sensed that by virtue of its process(ion), the dance that is Jewish life is always open to the possibilities of a better future. Recall how God says in Isaiah 43:18–19, ‘Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?’ If the Holocaust was a war on God, then even one living, dancing Jew figured the deathless eternity of his spirit going on before. In the Vilna ghetto, on Sunday 11 October 1942, Zelig Kalmanovitsh, a historian and philologist who became an observant preacher while in the ghetto, was honoured on Simchat Torah with the first hakafa or processional circuit around the bimah carrying the Torah scroll. Kalmanovitsh records in his journal that through dancing in that small and ruined synagogue he knew himself to be united with every generation of the house of Israel. In dancing the Torah scrolls round the shul, he was able to write ‘I know that the Jewish people will live.’122 Perhaps this is also why, in 1940, a year in which there was less than nothing for the Jewish people to celebrate,

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Max Weber was able to paint images of ecstatic religious dance, notably Hasidic Dance. Or again, Weber’s Adoration of the Moon (1944) depicted not the end of Jewish life but the possibility of its renewal in the cyclic celebration that accompanies the new moon (Rosh Chodesh). In the image of dance, Weber was able to strike a celebratory note of messianic resistance to genocide. The circular forms of many of these dances, in which all arms are linked, illustrate and preserve the eternity, equality and solidarity of the Jewish people. Although, as sacral movement, dance must retain the spiritual and aesthetic grace and dignity of a unified body – a priestly convocation – ‘the tendency in Judaism has been to accept a wide range of even awkward movements within the group so that all persons are included.123 Throughout Jewish history, the linear and circular form of its dances has intended to move all their participants into an unified whole. Ashkenazic dance includes the worldwide custom of ‘dancing’ the young and the weak on the shoulders of the other dancers. Even as its individual participants stumble with thirst, hunger and exhaustion, they too are carried high on the shoulders of others in the long dance towards Jerusalem. Emmanuel Levinas, predictably, contemplates the elation of collective dance with suspicion, claiming that its ‘rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it. . . . In rhythm there is no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage from oneself to anonymity.’124 Levinas’s diatribe against the aesthetic is an attack on drama as essentially pagan. Levinas warns that if salvation is depicted as a dramatic and miraculous journey – a pageant in which ‘it is as if our ancestors were dressed up in exotic costumes and made to speak in accents that render them, finally, unrecognisable’ – it will become merely theatrical.125 Dance leaves its audience ethically unimplicated by its numinous spectacle; its participants are possessed and transported by a power that binds them into a drama of which they are not the author. In both the audience and the participant, the ethical relation to the other is annulled.126 Levinas therefore declares, ‘I refuse to figure in a drama of salvation or of damnation that would be enacted in spite of me.’127 But in rejecting what it is that makes sacred dance sacred, Levinas also subjugates a collective messianic history to his own ethical and aesthetic sensibility. It is ironic that, after the Holocaust, Levinas further suppresses the sheer vitality that is a locus of messianic resistance to death. We have seen that it is more than possible to represent the procession of Jewish history as if it were something of a funeral cortege; as if the railway lines of Jewish history all lead with no return into the death camp of AuschwitzBirkenau. Indeed, Jewish diasporic art has often, and understandably, reinforced what Salo Baron has called ‘the lachrymose account’ of Jewish history. But modern Jewish art has also celebrated the carnivalesque festivity of a Jewish life that is not always ‘back-shadowed’ by knowledge of the catastrophe

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that was to come. This more festive mood, though hardly an incitement to the bacchanal Levinas fears, is evident in Marc Chagall’s idiomatic theatrical set designs painted on the walls of the Kamerni Yiddish Theatre, Moscow, incorporating the rhythms and burlesque of the circus and exemplified in his pencil, gouache and watercolour study for the Introduction to the Jewish Theatre (1920). One thinks too of the teeming street market that wound its way along Hester Street in the Jewish Lower East Side of New York, depicted in Jacob Epstein’s illustrations for a 1902 book, The Spirit of the Ghetto. Or again, Yefim Ladizhinski’s recent panoramic canvases of Jewish life in Odessa depict brightly coloured parades of sailors, men gathered for prayer in synagogues, weddings, funerals, children playing, mothers hanging out the washing. Here, in these drawings and paintings, the continuity of Jewish history is domesticated in the love – and the conflict – that drive the history of each family and each community. But each family and community’s patterns of love and estrangement are situated in Israel’s trans-temporal and trans-spatial search for God and God’s search for Israel, danced across time and space. The mutual revelation of the face is a moment of appearance that overcomes the disappearances produced by divine concealment and human defection. In God’s command ‘Seek My face!’ (Ps. 27:8) and the response, ‘O Lord I seek Your face’ is the affective imperative of the still or moving image as a locus and token of presence. Like David’s solitary dance before the Ark in 2 Sam. 6:14, perhaps in joyous anticipation of his marriage to Michal, dancing before and towards the other is an invitation to, and a celebration of, covenantal love.128 If God’s arch- commandment of Deuteronomy 6:5 requires us to love God with passion, not from a sense of moral obligation (Rosenzweig), then Israel is the one who arises and goes out in search of a love who is at the same time, ‘leaping over mountains, bounding over hills’, coming in search of her (Song of Songs 2:8). The sixteenth-century Jews of Safed knew the power of dance to summon divine presence in love. Before sunset on Fridays, mystics went out from the town and over the Galilean hills to dance their welcome of the Sabbath Bride – the Shekhinah or indwelling presence of God. At the close of the Sabbath they danced their farewell to her. That farewell acknowledges that God and humanity have also been the more elusive object of each other’s love; their search for one another has been at once playfully erotic and the consequence of having each, at significant moments, failed the other: ‘I opened the door for my beloved, but my beloved had turned and gone’ (Song of Songs 5:6).129 The movement of one towards the other – whether in the first courtship of God and Israel, or in the teshuvah of Israel turning back to God in the hope of forgiveness for having turned away – dances a love story that is, in all senses, a moving image of eschatological reconciliation and peace.

Notes

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See Robert Vas’s The Vanishing Street (1962), a Free Cinema visual documentary about Hessel Street, at the heart of the Jewish East End, filmed just days before its demolition. Elisheva Revel-Neher, ‘ “With wisdom and knowledge of workmanship”: Jewish art without a question mark’, in Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd (eds.), Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001, p. 29. Susan White, ‘The theology of sacred space’, in David Brown and Ann Loades (eds.), The Sense of the Sacramental: Movement and Measure in Art and Music, Place and Time, London: SPCK, 1995, p. 35. For a good historical and denominational range of Christian theological texts on aesthetics, see Gesa E. Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics: A Reader, London: SCM Press, 2004. http://www.jewishculture.org./conferences_visual_artists_rand.htm 20/01/03. Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995, p. 55. See Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 52; Steven S. Schwarzschild, ‘Aesthetics’, in Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (eds.), Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements and Beliefs, New York: The Free Press, 1988, pp. 1–6. Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, trans. Ismar Schorsch, New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America/Ktav, 1975, pp. 68–9, 174–83. See further, Joseph Gutmann, ‘Is there a Jewish art?’ in Clare Moore (ed.), The Visual Dimension: Aspects of Jewish Art, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993, p. 2. JeanFrançois Lyotard offers an important commentary on the Jewish dichotomization of the aural and the visual in ‘Figure foreclosed’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader, Oxford and Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989, pp. 69–110. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Through A Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 13–16. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. Authorized Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, London: Collins 2006. Translated and with a Commentary by the Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, p. 279. Bland, The Artless Jew, p. 13.

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Curse or Blessing. What’s in the Magic Bowl? University of Southampton, Southampton: Parkes Institute Pamphlet no. 2, 2002, p. 5. Vivian B. Mann, ‘Introduction’, eadem (ed.), Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 17. The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 2. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 187. Through a Speculum That Shines, p. 50. Through a Speculum That Shines, pp. 4–5. The Artless Jew, pp. 140–1, 143, 152. See also Richard I. Cohen’s parallel rejection of stereotypical modern assumptions about Jewish logocentrism, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. It should be noted that, in this case, a theology of image does not refer to the ‘image’ that presents or projects personal identity through the adoption or cultivation of a personal style. While consideration of the (stereotypical) modern image or representation of the Jew – whether that of the pale, scholarly blackcoated eastern-European hasid or the tanned Israeli ‘sabra’ in his shirt-sleeves, newly possessed of agricultural and military competences – is relevant to some parts of the book, ‘the visual image’ refers rather to the phenomenon of the Jewish face and body – individual and collective – as reproduced in visual art or as the actual object of vision. ‘Revelation in the Jewish tradition’, in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, trans. Seán Hand, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989, pp. 192–3. Although the distinctive attributes of a particular art are often summarized in terms of national identity or style, it seems clear that, even after 1948, Jewish art is not and never was a national art in the sense of its being rooted in the history of one land. Jewish art might only be termed a ‘national’ art in so far as it is understood as a collective enterprise of the Jews as a single ‘people’. Assertions of Jewish art as a ‘national’ art are, however, now widely regarded as antiquated and indefensibly essentialist. See Lional Kochan’s recent study, Beyond the Graven Image: A Jewish View, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1997. Kochan’s neo-rabbinic (and gender-blind) approach to Jewish aesthetics largely represses the theological possibilities of the visual image. Anthony Julius’s very different Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Jewish Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000, sketches the cultural and political ramifications of the Second Commandment for Jewish artists, but few of its theological ones. In accordance with their period and culture Jewish communities have varied greatly in their attitudes to the visual and as knowledge of these attitudes and practices has grown it is no longer possible for a single scholar to pretend to expertise in all of them. Jewish art’s modern phase alone takes the student through emancipation into numerous developments including the avant-garde revival of Jewish folk art in modernist Russia between about 1915–25, the development of a national art in Palestine, expressionism in Berlin and abstract expressionism in New York see e.g. Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, Jewish Art, trans. Sara Friedman and Mira Reich, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995, pp. 325–87. A

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number of fine studies do, nonetheless, cover much of the historical ground. See e.g. Grace Cohen Grossman, Jewish Art, Fairfield, CT: Hugh Lauter Levin, 1995. Other such studies are referenced elsewhere in this book. I leave it to the respective specialists to chronicle each phase and locality of the evolution of Jewish art over its several millennia. Cited in Mark Godfrey, Barnett Newman’s ‘ “Stations of the Cross” and the memory of the Holocaust’, in Melissa Ho (ed.), Reconsidering Barnett Newman, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, p. 46. Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century, New York: The Jewish Museum, 1975, pp. 160–1. Baigell and Heyd (eds.), Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers, 2001, p. xiv. ‘From Bezal’el to Max Liebermann: Jewish art in nineteenth-century art-historical texts’, in Catherine M. Soussloff (ed.), Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, London: University of California Press, 1999, p. 33. Elisheva Revel-Neher, ‘ “With wisdom and knowledge of workmanship”: Jewish art without a question mark’, in Baigell and Heyd (eds.), Complex Identities, p. 12. See Kochan, Beyond the Graven Image, esp. pp. 7–20. Lee I. Levine, ‘Art, architecture and archaeology’, in Martin Goodman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 844. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. pp. 63–4. It should be noted that Greek thought was not without reservations about beauty and materiality. In Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophy, the ideal form of beauty is spiritual rather than material, and the Romans were inclined to think that beauty corrupts and softens virtue; it was seen as a decadent, feminizing, and comparatively trivial diversion from the serious pursuits of agriculture and war. Levine, ‘Art, architecture, and archaeology’, pp. 826–9, 844. See Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archeology, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Revel-Neher, ‘ “With wisdom and knowledge of workmanship” ’, pp. 14–22. Irene Korn, A Celebration of Judaism in Art, New York: Todtri Productions, 1996, p. 7. Kathryn Salomon, Jewish Ceremonial Embroidery, London: B. T. Batsford, 1988, pp. 17–20. See Bland, The Artless Jew, passim; Steven Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis Under Early Islam, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 224. See Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 274. Olin, ‘Graven images on video?’, pp. 42–3. See further, Margaret Olin, The Nation Without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Revel-Neher, ‘ “With wisdom and knowledge of workmanship” ’, pp. 22–4.

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Richard I. Cohen, ‘An Introductory essay: viewing the past’, in Ezra Mendelsohn (ed.), Art and Its Uses: The Visual Image in Modern Jewish Society, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 6. Vivian B. Mann (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 4. Carol Zemel, ‘Imaging the shtetl: diaspora culture, photography and eastern European Jews’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 198–9. Michael Berkowitz, ‘Art in Zionist popular culture and Jewish national selfconsciousness, 1997–1914’, in Mendelsohn (ed.), Art and Its Uses, pp. 9–18. Berkowitz, ‘Art in Zionist popular culture’, pp. 21–7; Braiterman, The Shape of Revelation, pp. 215–17. Mann, Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, p. 144. See further, Richard Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998, p. 7. Levine, ‘Art, architecture and archeology’, p. 825. See Signe Rossbach and Kathrin Kollmeier (eds.), Stories of an Exhibition: Two Millennia of German History, Stiftung Jüdisches Museum: Berlin, 2001, p. 148. Glenn Sujo, Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory, London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2001, p. 8. Godfrey, ‘Barnett Newman’s “Stations of the Cross” ’, p. 63. See further, Chaim, W. Reines, ‘Beauty in the Bible and Talmud’, Judaism 24 (1975), 100–7; Schubert Spero, ‘Towards a Torah esthetic (sic)’, Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 6 (1964), 53–66. ‘Introduction’, Cohen and Mendes-Flohr (eds.), Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, pp. xiii–xiv. Norbert M. Samuelson, ‘Theological issues: survey’, in Nicholas de Lange and Miri Freud- Kandel (eds.), Modern Judaism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 270–4. Freedberg, The Power of Images, p. 282. Freedberg, The Power of Images, p. xxiii. Looking In: The Art of Viewing, Amsterdam: G. & B. International, 2001, p. 266. Bal is not alone in adopting this sort of aesthetic hermeneutic. Leaving aside the particularities of Theodor Adorno’s critical theory, he also rejects the Kantian notion that the meaning of art resides in the perception of the viewing subject. The meaning of art is open and self-renewing, not to be subsumed under some universal concept or category. Art is not passive. Truth and beauty in art is mediated in the moment of relationship between the viewer and the viewed: ‘all beauty reveals itself to persistent analysis’ (Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 69). S. Brent Plate’s crosscultural reader Religion, Art, and Visual Culture, New York: Palgrave, 2002, usefully charts the current concern with ‘the meaning-making activity of seeing’. Its papers on Judaism focus on how Jewish memory can be built into architecture. Editor’s note, in Lawrence A. Hoffman (ed.), The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986, p. 234. Richard Cohen, Jewish Icons, p. 2.

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Marcus Banks, ‘Visual anthropology: image, object and interpretation’, in Jon Prosser (ed.), Image-Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers, London: Falmer Press, 1998, pp. 9–23. Cohen, Jewish Icons, p. 8. Cohen, Jewish Icons, p. 257.

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Soutine was born in Smilavichy, now in Belarus. See Alfred Werner, ‘Ghetto Graduates’, American Art Journal 5 (1973), 71–82. ‘Graven images on video?’, p. 41. ‘Rebellious rubies, precious rebels’, in idem and Vera Grodzinski (eds.), Rubies and Rebels: Jewish Identity in Contemporary British Art, London: Lund Humphries, 1996, p. 42. ‘Rebellious rubies, precious rebels’, p. 53. A Tree of Life: Diversity, Flexibility and Creativity in Jewish Law, Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, revised 2nd ed., 2000. Even, Catholicism, with its illustrious history of religious art, has a tradition of moral and social opposition to art, especially high art untethered to the purposes of sacred art, which is seen as unserious, decorative, leisured; even less than incidental to revelation. In Late Antiquity, Tertullian feared that it encouraged pagan worship of nature. Augustine feared that art’s pretence to realism encouraged falsehood and untruth. Bernard regarded art as at best a distraction from higher concerns; Jerome and many others dismissed it as a waste of money. Pope Gregory the Great denigrated art as a medium of biblical education that merely catered to the needs of the illiterate. See Brown and Loades, ‘Introduction’, The Sense of the Sacramental, pp. 7–8. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, New York: HarperCollins, 1990, p. 49. Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 241. Idolatry, p. 250. Freedberg, The Power of Images, p. 59. Freedberg, The Power of Images, p. 56. See Michael Kaniel, Judaism (The Art of World Religions), Poole, Dorset: Blandford Press, 1979, p. 3. Revel-Neher, ‘ “With wisdom and knowledge of workmanship” ’, p. 13. It is evident from the biblical text that a dangerous or magical power was occasionally attributed to images and the act of making an image. See e.g. Ezekiel 4:1–3 in which the prophet is commanded to engrave an image of Jerusalem on a brick. By doing so ‘Ezekiel enacts the imminent fall of Jerusalem. The engraved city becomes an active element in the symbolic tragedy’, the city is the victim of the siege Ezekiel has drawn upon the brick (Mann, Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, pp. 4–5). See also Deut. 4:28; Ps. 115:4, 135:15; Is. 44:9–20; Jer. 10:3–9.

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See further, Edward Meadors’ Christian study of idolatry in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, Idolatry and the Hardening of the Heart: A Study in Biblical Theology, London: Continuum, T & T Clark, 2006. The rabbinic midrash based on Deut. 26:5–8 asks whether the deity can appear in visible form and save his people. The Sadducees believed that this was possible, and the Pharisees did not. Idolatry, p. 46. Idolatry, pp. 38–9. The authors use C. S. Pierce’s typology of representation. Idolatry, p. 47. Idolatry, pp. 48–9. In Chapter 5 of the present study I will argue that the figure of Israel is a causal metonymic representation of God’s presence; not a resemblance to God, but a representation of the dynamic self-revealing will, energy and pathos of God. Idolatry, pp. 1–2. Mishneh Torah. Code of Jewish Law, Laws of Idolatry, ch. 3, section 6. Trans. S. Pines, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Kochan, Beyond the Garden Image, pp. 93–4 Salomon, Jewish Ceremonial Embroidery, p. 28. Edited and abridged by Jacob Neusner, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 33–4. On figurative decoration of the Jewish catacombs in Rome and in the Jewish tombs of Gamart near Carthage see E. R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Graeco-Roman Period, Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1988. Margolit and Halbertal, Idolatry, p. 5. See further on the rabbinic interpretation of the Second Commandment, Ephraim E. Urbach, ‘The rabbinical law of idolatry in the second and third centuries in the light of historical and archaeological facts’, Israel Exploration Journal 9 (1957): 149–65, 228–45. ‘Shekhinah and eschatology’, in Menachem Kellner (ed.), The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild, New York: New York University Press, 1990, p. 244. Kochan, Beyond the Graven Image, p. 94. Rabbinical portraits were frowned upon as idolatrous and as an aping of Christian custom until the end of the seventeenth century, by which time the easing of tension between the Jewish and Christian communities had allowed the rabbinical portrait to confer spiritual security and inspiration after the Isaianic dictum, ‘and your eyes shall see your teachers’ (Is. 30:20). Rabbinical portraits were, at first, more prevalent in the more heterodox Dutch Sephardic communities, often painted by Christian artists (Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 117–21). However, even though portraits of Reform and Conservative rabbis circulated through the nineteenth century, they were ‘never sought after by their devotees or marketed by publishers’. In these modern circles, charismatic power or ‘talismanic protection’ would not have been attributed to rabbis, let alone images of them (Ibid., pp. 126–7). See Kochan, Beyond the Graven Image, pp. 112–35. See further B. Bezazel Narkiss, ‘On the zoocephalic phenomenon in mediaeval Ashkenazi manuscripts’ in Norms and Variations in Art: Essays in Honour of Moshe Barash, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983, pp. 49–62.

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‘Birds’ Head Haggadah’, http://www.hlla.com.reference/jewsartmast.html, accessed 10/12/2004. Cited in Mann, Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, pp. 128–9. For further examples of the rabbinic responsa literature on distortion see ibid., pp. 35–6, 128–9. Janet Backhouse, ‘ “Outward and visible signs”: the Lindisfarne Gospels’, in Brown and Loades (eds.), The Sense of the Sacramental, pp. 109, 120. ‘Introduction’, The Sense of the Sacramental, p. 9. See Leora Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 17–21. Religion of Reason, pp. 51–3. Religion of Reason, pp. 54, 57. Sexism and God-Talk: Towards a Feminist Theology, London: SCM Press, 1983, p. 66. Standing Again at Sinai, pp. 151–2. See Cohen, Religion of Reason, pp. 50–8. See Batnitsky, Idolatry and Representation, pp. 20–1. Batnitsky, Idolatry and Representation, pp. 23, 84–5. Amos Funkenstein reflects that Rosenzweig’s vocabulary can be impenetrable and that almost all of his interpreters must sometimes doubt whether the effort of deciphering Rosenzweig’s code is commensurate with its yield (Perceptions of Jewish History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 302–3). Trans. from the Second Edition of 1930 by William W. Hallo, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1985, p. 295. Better than Wine: Love, Poetry and Prayer in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig, Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1996, pp. 119–20. Star, pp. 423–4. Star, p. 38; Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine, pp. 76–9. Star, p. 81. Star, p. 245. Star, p. 147; Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine, pp. 19–34, 74–5. Star, pp. 176–8. Rosenzweig, On Jewish Learning, New York: Schocken Books, 1955, p. 118. Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation, pp. 12, 24, 83, 98–104. Star, p. 243. Star, p. 411. ‘Constriction’ here refers to the ability of the Jew to forget that anything else in the world exists outside the world of Judaism. Star, pp. 402–3. See further, Marc A. Krell, Intersecting Pathways: Modern Jewish Theologians in Conversation with Christianity, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 39ff; Batnitzky, Idolatry and Representation, pp. 89–90. Star, p. 423. Star, p. 418. Star, p. 422. Star, pp. 423–4. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, London: John Calder, 1956, p. 138. God in Search of Man, pp. 184–5. God in Search of Man, p. 187. God in Search of Man, p. 276.

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‘Reality and its shadow’, in Seàn Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, p. 141. This distinction is articulated in a number of books, articles and interviews. See e.g. ‘Beyond intentionality’, in Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 112–13; Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981, pp. 72–4. Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969, pp. 140, 297. Totality and Infinity, p. 174. ‘Reality and its shadow’, p. 3. Totality and Infinity, p. 198. Pp. 11, 14. ‘Reality and its shadow’, pp. 12–13. Totality and Infinity, p. 51. ‘Reality and its shadow’, p. 3. Totality and Infinity, pp. 171, 196, 295–7. ‘The transcendence of words’, in Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, p. 149. ‘Revelation in the Jewish tradition’, p. 207. Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999, p. 55. See my own study, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 3–5. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Séan Hand, London: Athlone Press, 1990, pp. 17, 144, 23. Difficult Freedom, pp. 14–15. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesue University Press, 1969, pp. 171, 196, 295–7. Difficult Freedom, pp. 143–5. ‘Enigma and phenomenon’, in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987, p. 69. Overblown adjectives such as ‘monstrous’, ‘wicked’, ‘cowardly’ and ‘inhuman’ are used to describe art in general, including music (‘Reality and its shadow’, pp. 11–13). An account of Levinas’s account of art as an occlusion of the ethical can be found in Jill Robbins, Altered Reading, esp. pp. 75–90. In this book Robbins also offers a counter-reading of Levinas, using his approach to fi nd the trace of the transcendent in literature. Ibid., pp. 134, 138. ‘The transcendence of words’, pp. 138, 147. ‘Reality and its shadow’, pp. 137–9. Beyond the Graven Image, p. 31. Beyond the Graven Image, p. 110. Beyond the Graven Image, p. 111. Beyond the Graven Image, p. 101. Beyond the Graven Image, pp. 104–5. Beyond the Graven Image, pp. 7–8. Beyond the Graven Image, pp. 105–6.

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Beyond the Graven Image , p. 112. Beyond the Graven Image, p. 2. Simon Critchely, ‘Emmanuel Levinas: a disparate inventory’, in Simon Critchely and Robert Bernasconi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 22. ‘Aesthetics’, p. 3. ‘The Legal foundations of Jewish aesthetics’, in Kellner, (ed.), The Pursuit of the Ideal, p. 114. Halbertal and Margalit make much the same point: idolatry is the error of attempting to represent what is unrepresentable. Art cannot represent spirit (Idolatry, passim). ‘The legal foundations of Jewish aesthetics’, p. 296; ‘Aesthetics’, p. 5. ‘Aesthetics’, p. 3. New York: Pantheon, 1986. A Celebration of Judaism in Art, p. 5. Leo Steinberg, exh. cat., Artists of the New York School: Second Generation, New York: The Jewish Museum, 1957, p. 18. Cited in Mann, Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, p. 151. Idolizing Art, pp. 39–40. Idolizing Art, pp. 41–52.

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I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1970, p. 125. See further Braiterman, The Shape of Revelation, pp. 211–13. Braiterman, The Shape of Revelation, pp. 7–9. See Krell, Intersecting Pathways, p. 25; Rosenzweig, Star, pp. 176–7. Star, pp. 107–8. Star, p. 420. God in Search of Man, pp. 28–9, 184–5. God in Search of Man, p. 31. God in Search of Man, pp. 28–30. God in Search of Man, p. 175. Jacob Neusner, Confronting Creation: How Judaism Reads Genesis, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991, p. ix. My reading of Genesis 1 is a specifically aesthetic theological reading of the visual implications of the text in its fi nal biblical form, intended for a broad theological readership. For these reasons, as well as limitations of space and training, I do not generally refer to classical Jewish sources on Genesis such as the medieval commentaries offered by Rashi (11th century) and Abraham Ibn Ezra (12th century) or the earlier Genesis Rabbah (c. 200–400 CE), much of whose reading of Genesis is shaped by the sages’ need to correct the broadly Gnostic philosophical tendencies prevalent at the time. For more on Jewish readings of Genesis see Neusner’s Confronting Creation. Readers concerned with critical aspects of the sources and redaction of Genesis 1 should consult the considerable literature of Jewish and Christian commentary on Genesis.

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Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989, p. 7; Gordon Wenham, Word Biblical Commentary vol. 1, Genesis 1–15, Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1987, p. 18 (Wenham is a Protestant commentator); Neusner, Confronting Creation, p. 50. E. A. Speiser, Genesis, New York: Doubleday, 1981, p. 5. Cf. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, p. 18, ‘It may be noted that light, not darkness, is noted as good. God is, as it were, prejudiced in favour of light.’ Quoted in Glenn Sujo, Legacies of Silence: The Visual Arts and Holocaust Memory, London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2001, p. 101 (emphasis mine). ‘The sublime and the avant-garde’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader, p. 207. I and Thou, p. 77. Sarna, Genesis, p. 12, notes that the full resonance of the terms is illuminated by reference to the wider biblical literature and their relation to ancient near eastern terminological analogies. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker and ed. Robert Bernasconi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 98–9. Sarna, Genesis, p. 12. Blumenthal, David, R. Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993, pp. 247, 266. Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, pp. 48–9. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, p. 29. Genesis 1–15, p. 30. Facing the Abusing God, p. 8. God in Search of Man, p. 136. See Hannah K. Harrington, Holiness: Rabbinic Judaism and the Graeco-Roman World, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 30. A group of Barnett Newman’s works painted in 1946 – The Word I, The Command, The Beginning, Moment and Untitled – use ‘zips’ and ‘beams’ on textured fields of colour, inspired by Genesis’s account of the division between night and day into two primal abstract colour fields. See Jeremy Strick, The Sublime is Now: The Early Work of Barnett Newman. Paintings and Drawings 1944–1949, New York: Pace Wildenstein, 1994, p. 21. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, p. 18. Sarna, Genesis, p. 11. London: Vintage Books, 2007, p. 294. The chaos and miscegenation more commonly associated with the bubbling cauldron of pagan cosmology can differently fund an aesthetic that might be considered more organic and non-divisive than one constructed through the rigid separation of elements. So too, not all of Jewish thought and practice can be schematized on the principle of structural differentiation. It would be the task of another scholar to track this aesthetic through the history of Jewish thought. Other than those already cited, a notable text with which to begin might be the c. mid-second-century Letter of Aristeas (edited by R. H. Charles, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1913) written by a Hellenistic Jew to persuade Jews of the authority of the new Greek translation of the Pentateuch.

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Paras. 56 and 72 of the letter indicate that Jewish thought of the period shared with Greek philosophy an interest in the relation of a plan or visualized idea of beauty and its realization, and in the effect of beauty on the religious consciousness. In para. 229, piety is considered to be the preeminent form of beauty, and its power lies in love, which is the gift of God. Of particular relevance to the present discussion is the author’s association of the classification and separation of forms with righteous relationships (paras. 139–69). Abraham J. Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom, New York: Schocken Books, 1959, pp. 66–7. Schwarzschild, ‘Aesthetics’, pp. 4–6. Harrington, Holiness, pp. 181–5, 205–6. On the relation of holiness and ethics see my Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, pp. 116–48. Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, p. 10. Star, p. 423. Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine, p. 121. Totality and Infinity, p. 78. Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine, p. 62. Edward Farley, Faith and Beauty: A Theological Aesthetic, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001, p. ix. ‘Newman: the instant’, Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader 240–9, p. 242. Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, Italian brotherhoods used a small painted image known as a tavoletta to console prisoners who were about to be executed. Sometimes made with a handle, the tavoletta was painted on both sides; on one was an image of Christ’s Passion, one the other an image of Christian martyrdom. The tavoletta was left in the prisoner’s cell during his last night on earth, and held before him as he walked to the place of execution and until he took his last breath (Freedberg, The Power of Images, pp. 5–8). Whatever the actual historical efficacy of this practice, it is a metaphor for how the visual image in art can function as a mirror, not directly onto God, but onto a better or redeemed self. The Power of Images, p. 432. God in Search of Man, p. 85. Levinas, ‘Reality and its shadow’, p. 142. Totality and Infinity, p. 23. Middx: Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, p. 48. My Name is Asher Lev, p. 186. My Name is Asher Lev, p. 184. The Gift of Asher Lev. Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1990, p. 66. Mishneh Torah. Code of Jewish Law, ‘Law of idolatry’, 3:10ff; Sefer Chinuch, Commandment 39:12. See further, Schwarzschild, ‘The legal foundations of Jewish aesthetics’, p. 113. Man’s Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism, New York: Scribner, 1954, pp. 124ff. Recent Christian aesthetic theologians (most notably, Edward Farley in Faith and Beauty and Patrick Sherry in Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) helpfully posit the beautiful more

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immediately as a medium and sign of a redeemed world. Farley contends that ‘theological aesthetics uncovers the relation between what is intrinsically attractive and the life of faith’, that is, ‘the mode of existence that comes with redemption’ (Faith and Beauty, p. viii). Farley follows the eighteenth-century divine Jonathan Edwards in finding moral virtue or the disposition of benevolence to be an instance of the primordial beauty and self-transcending generosity of God’s holiness. Beauty is not therefore the subjective judgment of mere sensibility; it is the quality of moral virtue itself and demands the modification of action. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006, pp. 153–5, 222–3 and passim. Broadly speaking the representation of the Jew in western European culture falls into three distinct periods. From the high Middle Ages until the early modern period, the representation of Jewry belonged to that of popular Christian iconography which demonized the Jew in symbolic images in churches, manuscripts and, eventually printed books. Although this superstitious iconography circulated until the eighteenth century, a new and more documentary approach emerged in the early sixteenth century, in Germany especially, when the daily life of Jews began to be depicted with a more objective interest in its customs. Although not entirely lacking in ideological intentions or implied criticism, this new attitude owed much to Protestantism’s sometimes philosemitic preoccupation with the Old Testament and its rationalistic individualism, which permitted empirical study of the other without superstitious fear of his otherness. By the late nineteenth century, curiosity about the religious and cultural life of the Jews had diminished and instead artists were more preoccupied with their physiognomic, economic and racial status, producing the cruel caricatures that were to become the staple propaganda of burgeoning nationalism and, eventually, the Third Reich (Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 11–67). Religion of Reason, p. 455. Schwarzschild, ‘On Jewish eschatology’, in Kellner (ed.), The Pursuit of the Ideal, p. 211. See Braiterman, The Shape of Revelation, p. 209. The Eclipse of God, New York: Harper and Row, 1957, pp. 40–3. Jüdische Künstler, Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1903, p. 28. Moses, Zurich: Gregor Müller Verlag, 1948, p. 186. The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, edited by Maurice Friedman, trans. Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith, New York: Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 161–2, 164. I and Thou, p. 61. I and Thou, p. 58.

Chapter 3 1

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Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Hill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 47–8, 145–6. This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 22–6.

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‘Survey’, in Helena Reckitt (ed.), Art and Feminism, London and New York: Phaidon, 2001, p. 17. Space permits only a brief indicative survey of Anglo-Jewish art from around 1830–1930, adapted from Julia Weiner, ‘Jewish women artists in Britain 1700– 1940’, in Monica Bohm-Duchen and Vera Grodzinski (eds.), Rubies and Rebels: Jewish Female Identity in Contemporary British Art, London: Lund Humphries, 1996, pp. 29–39. From the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, only a very small number of Anglo-Jewish women became artists. These women were usually from wealthy families who had been encouraged to paint and draw by parents who considered drawing and painting to be ladylike accomplishments. The early-twentieth-century artist Amy Drucker, who painted unsentimental scenes of the London of her time, seems to have been an exception to this rule and painted for a living. More common, was the situation of Hannah Gluckstein (1895–1978). Known as Gluck, she was a fashionable (lesbian) artist in the 1930s and an heiress of independent means. Other well-known Anglo-Jewish women painters of the period were the portrait painter Flora Lion (1876–1958) and Orovida Pissarro, grand-daughter of Camille Pissarro (1893–1968) who favoured animal subjects painted or etched in an oriental style influenced by Chinese artistic traditions. Often childless, or otherwise exempt from immediate familial obligations, Anglo-Jewish women artists were also often the relatives of male painters and were able to practise professionally under their precedent, tutelage and care. Rebecca Solomon (1832–1986), for example, who exhibited at the Royal Academy, was the sister of the painters Abraham and Simeon Solomon and her reputation was closely allied to theirs. However, it was difficult for other nineteenth-century aspiring Jewish women artists to find tuition as it was expensive and social custom dictated it was normally undertaken at home with a private tutor. It was only by the end of nineteenth century that institutional training had become more accessible for women and it is notable that in 1906 over a third of the paintings on show at the highly successful exhibition of Jewish Art and Antiquities at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London were by women. Yet by the 1930s, the number of Anglo-Jewish women artists seems to have decreased, probably because artistic ability had ceased to be a prized asset for a bourgeois wife, and the daughters of the more recent eastern European immigrants did not have the time, money, space at home (nor the cultural expectations) to develop artistic skills. Freedberg, The Power of Images, p. 378. Poussin paints the calf in potently sexual terms as an image of a bull, rather than the young calf that Raphael paints in his less salacious Adoration of the Golden Calf (1516–19). Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, pp. 1, 10, 12. It should be noted that the Bible does not conceive of idolatry solely in terms of sexual transgression and betrayal. Idolatry can also be conceived as physically moving away from God: walking out of his land and straying from his path into the territory of other nations and other gods (e.g. Deut. 13:7–15). Jeremiah’s conception of Israel’s idolatry is couched in similar terms: ‘On every high hill and under every verdant tree, you recline as a whore’ (2:20). See Amanda Golby, ‘Women and the new moon’, in Sybil Sheridan (ed.), Hear Our Voice: Women Rabbis Tell Their Stories, London: SCM Press, 1994, pp. 119–21.

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It is not only women who are visible signifiers of the impurity of human physicality that is other to the blemishless ‘life-filled’ body of the priest – the one who is alone fit to mediate between God and Israel. The non-priestly character of female embodiment is paralleled by that of the disfigured and disabled. See Judith Z. Abrams, Judaism and Disability: Portrayals in Ancient Texts from the Tanach Through the Bavli, Washington DC: Galhudet Press, 1998, esp. p. 23. Ada Rapaport-Albert, The Sherman Lectures, Lecture One, 27 March 2006, ‘The classical rabbinic construction of the female body’ (www.mujs.org/ sherman06.htm). Kochan, Beyond the Graven Image, p. 4. Shmuel Boteach’s Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy, New York: Random House, 1999, exemplifies this genre of contemporary Orthodox sexual apologetic. Pp. 85, 87. The Power of Images, p. xxiv. The Power of Images, p. 424. As idols are clothed and coloured (Jer. 10:9; Ezek. 16:18; Wisdom 15:4), it is no coincidence that in Is. 3:16–26 female bodily adornment is a symbol of Israel’s spiritual corruption. An excessively detailed inventory of Israelite women’s splendid dress is given only to reinforce the warning that their rings, amulets, bracelets, lace and sashes will be stripped from them. Instead of perfume, they will stink of rot. Stripped of their material glory, the flirtatious daughters of Israel will be ‘emptied’: left sitting on the ground, sexually humiliated, their men-folk dead. Indeed, they too will be left for dead because they have been left without protection or provision. The Power of Images, p. 424. See The Power of Images, pp. 397–9. See further, Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988, p. 146. Totality and Infinity, pp. 249–53. This passage is, of course, the subject of a number of competing interpretations and, it should be acknowledged that Levinas’s relational ethic does not devalue the erotic dimension with which he associates femininity. See further, Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 23–6, where Irigaray remarks on the sexual organ of women presenting patriarchy with a hole: ‘the horror of nothing to see’. See also, Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty, London: Routledge, 1997. Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ and ‘Afterthoughts on “visual pleasure and narrative cinema”, inspired by Duel in the Sun’, reprinted together in Constance Penley (ed.), Feminism and Film Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 1988, pp. 57–68 and 69–79. Kochan, Beyond the Graven Image, p. 110. Stephanie Wellen Levine, Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls, New York: New York University Press, 2003, pp. 1–2. Judaism understands the public sphere as the congregational religious sphere rather than, as in secular sociological discourse, the non-domestic, social and commercial sphere.

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Wellen Levine, Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers, pp. 45–6. Wellen Levine, Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers, pp. 48, 59. In British Haredi newspapers, for example, images of women are not customarily included. Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Rabbis Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life, New York: New York University Press, 2006, pp. 141, 131, 164. Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers, p. 22. Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers, p. 44. To take but one well-known contemporary example, portraits of the wise and kindly face of the late Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitch Rebbe, both reproduced and original, graced all his followers’ homes. Jewish Icons, p. 157 and passim. London: Allen Lane, 1983. See BT Kid. 40; Meg. 13a. It seems clear from the Tenth Commandment prohibiting the coveting of other men’s property, including his wives, that the plural ‘you’ of the Ten Commandments is addressed to men. Star, p. 357. On the modern cultural construction of ‘the Jewess’ see Sander L. Gilman, ‘Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the “Modern Jewess” ’, in Love ⫹ Marriage ⫽ Death: And Other Essays on Representing Difference, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 65–90. Cited by Elliott Horowitz, ‘As others see Jews’, in de Lange and Freud-Kandel (eds.) Modern Judaism, pp. 418–9. It could be argued that images of Mary sacralize the image of the Jewish woman in Christian art. That this has not been the case may be because while the motherhood of the Mary is that of an adult woman, sexually, it is that of a virgin or young girl. Jewish women are, however, defined as wives who do not surrender their will to God, but to their husband, with whom they bear children in the natural way. Matthew Baigell, ‘Jewish artists in New York during the Holocaust years’, Mona and Otto Weinmann Lecture Series, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 16 May 2001, p. 5. Baigell’s point is historical; he does not refer to the gendering of the images. Mané-Katz was born in 1894 in the Ukraine and escaped from Paris to New York in 1940. Compare Rembrandt’s series of images of Jewish brides (1635, 1668 and others) which offer no obvious signifiers of the women’s Jewishness (or at least none that are recognizable to a non-specialist eye). Delissa Joseph exhibited her work at the Royal Academy and was closely involved in First Wave feminist activism. She was also active in the communal life of the Hammersmith Synagogue, where she founded the Ladies Guild and became its fi rst president. Joseph’s Orthodoxy may have made her reluctant to paint portraits. Self Portrait with Candles is the only known example, along with her life-size painting of her own family, which she later spoiled by re-working the faces (Weiner, ‘Jewish women artists in Britain, 1700–1940’, pp. 30, 36).

Notes 45

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Cf. Modigliani’s The Jewess (1908). The sitter wears a modest high-necked black dress. Again, she is in all senses unoccupied by religion, hers is an essentially secular image. Only the title of the painting indicates that this woman is Jewish. A Vanished World, p. 29. A Vanished World, p. 180. Comments on these paintings can be found in Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on Visual Arts, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993, pp. 141, 257. ‘Gender and atrocity: women in Holocaust photographs’, in Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust, London: Athlone Press, 2001, pp. 247–74. P. 15. Pp. 34–5. Compare Chaim Gross’s In Memoriam – My Sister Sarah, Victim of Nazi Atrocities (1947). His murdered sister and her fourteen-year-old daughter are memorialized through a Christian iconography, after Donatello’s Madonna and Child, with the daughter now a baby held on her mother’s lap. See Berkowitz, ‘Art in Zionist popular culture’, pp. 16–17. Griselda Pollock, ‘Is feminism to Judaism as modernity is to tradition? Critical questions on Jewishness, femininity and art’, in Bohm-Duchen and Grodzinski (eds.), Rubies and Rebels, pp. 17–18. Pollock notes that before the Holocaust, some 20 per cent of German Jewish women were members of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (the Jewish section of the socially activist Federation of German Women). Monica Bohm-Duchen, ‘rebellious rubies, precious rebels’, in Bohm-Duchen and Grodzinski (eds.), Rubies and Rebels, p. 42. Artist’s Statement (1980), cited by Helena Reckitt in Reckitt (ed.), Art and Feminism, p. 107. See Stephen Feinstein, ‘Jewish women in time: the challenge of feminist artistic installations about the Holocaust’, in Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg (eds.), Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003, pp. 229–59. See further, Bohm-Duchen, ‘Rebellious rubies, precious rebels’, pp. 42–5. Held was born in 1958; Loftus 1948 and Rolfe 1946. The London-based artist Lily R. Markiewicz, born in 1961 and the child of Holocaust survivors, explores postHolocaust Jewish women’s identity through video and installation pieces such as I Don’t Celebrate Christmas (1990) and Places to Remember II (1995). See further, Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust, London: Routledge, 1992. Annette Kleinfeld Lissaüer, exhibition catalogue for ‘Stuffed’, Jerusalem: Antea Gallery, trans. to Hebrew, Sara Almi, trans. to Arabic, Aida Nasrallah, trans. to English Rita Mendes-Flohr, curated by Sara Alimi, esp. pp. 11–19. I am grateful to my student Joanna Ryam for drawing my attention to Kleinfeld Lissaüer’s work. Assemblage may constitute a peculiarly female approach to the female composition of images. Miriam Shapiro has termed the method ‘femmage’ (Melissa Meyer and Miriam Shapiro, ‘Waste Not/Want Not: Femmage’, Heresies 4 1978, 66–9). In ‘collage’ or ‘assemblage’ women collect and join together disparate images into a functional, intimate and meaningful whole. In the art of the women’s altar, which is an act of assemblage found in women’s religious practice

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all over the world and especially in Catholic and pagan traditions, collections of precious images, souvenirs, gifts and so forth create a microcosmic universe, the ordering, accumulation, decorating of which also (re)creates and orders the goodness, abundance and beauty of the macrocosm (see Kay Turner, Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars, London: Thames & Hudson, 1999, pp. 100–5). A home altar, unlike those ceremonially presided over by male priests, is a place set apart to house images of the sacred whose presence brings assistance and comfort. A collection of objects ‘intuitively gathered together’ can be a powerful means of encountering the sacred (Turner, Beautiful Necessity, pp. 7–9). For Jewish women, self-portraiture through the assemblage of photographs or prized objects images Jewish memory, presence and history from a perspective and in a configuration different to that of the customary grand (male) narrative. [http://colophon.com/gallery/womenof the book. Accessed 14/03/03]. ‘Artists’ biographies and statements’ in Bohm-Duchen (ed.), Rubies and Rebels, 81–104, p. 86. A later work, Mistress 2 (2006) reverts to more apparently secular subject matter, though even here the woman has no face.

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‘Revelation in the Jewish tradition’, pp. 191–2. American Judaism, Adventure in Modernity, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972, p. 137. The Holocaust in American Life, Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000, 201. Glowacka is referring to the scene in Claude Landsmann’s film Shoah where Simon Srebrnik returns to the Chelmo death camp (which very few survived), and arriving at a large field, simply announces, ‘Yes, this is the place.’ (‘Disappearing traces: Emmanuel Levinas, Ida Fink’s literary testimony, and Holocaust art’, in Dorota Glowacka and Stephen Boos (eds.), Between Ethics and Aesthetics, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002, p. 98. The Holocaust in American Life, p. 351. Quoted in Sujo, Legacies of Silence, p. 95. Quoted in Potok, The Gift of Asher Lev, p. i. See Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Crauford, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951, p. 17. Simone Weil’s theology of affliction was also developed in her essay ‘Human personality’, written in England between 1942 and 1943, the last year of her life. In Siân Miles (ed.), Simone Weil: An Anthology, London: The Women’s Press, 1986, pp. 91–3 (69–98). Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman, New York: Atheneum, 1967. Josef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1996, p. 98. Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr, New York: Harper & Row, 1984, pp. 14–19.

Notes 12

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Reflections on Nazism, p. 21. See further, Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality, New York: Walker and Co., 1962. Reflections on Nazism, pp. 41, 43. Reflections on Nazism, p. 133. Christine Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, Routledge: London and New York, 2007, p. 11. Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 57, 89. Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, pp. 10, 18. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 125, 113. Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, p. 57. Battersby, The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, pp. 10–11. See Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, New York: Overlook Press, 2002. The best-known studies that both confess God’s capacity to have averted catastrophe and either mourn or indict his failure to do so are David Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1993; Eliezer Berkovits, Faith After the Holocaust, New York: Ktav, 1973; Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952. Aspects of this position can be found in the early work of Eli Weisel and in Arthur, A. Cohen, The Tremendum: a Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust, New York: Continuum, 1993. A conference was held in 1995 at Hebrew University, Tel Aviv, to debate God’s silence during the Holocaust. For a feminist analysis of the use of the hester panim trope see my The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 43–58; ‘The price of (masculine) freedom and becoming: a feminist response to Eliezer Berkovits’s post- Holocaust free will defence of God’s non-intervention in Auschwitz’, in Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack (eds.) Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 136–50. Here, I would add the suggestion that if God turned his face from the Holocaust it was also because he could not contemplate the monstrous idol of the demonically autonomous male of whom he was the first and principal victim. Real Presences, London: Faber & Faber, 1989, p. 229. See Samuel E. Balentine, The Hiding of the Face of God in the Old Testament, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. See ‘The concept of God after Auschwitz: a Jewish voice’, in Lubarsky and Griffin (eds.), Jewish Theology and Process Thought, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, pp. 143–58. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, sermon ‘Mishpatim’ (Exodus 21:1–24:18), 14 February 1942. Reprinted in Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman and Gershon Greenberg (eds.), Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses During and After the Holocaust, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 47–8. For the complete collection of Shapira’s commentaries and sermons see his Sacred Fire: Torah from the

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Years of Fury 1939–1942, trans. J. Hershy Worch and ed. Deborah Miller, Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 2002. It may be significant that far more post-Holocaust theology, philosophy and art has been produced by men than by women. An emphasis on the vanquishing sublimity of the Holocaust, rather than its pathos, is, like most other things, gendered: a sense of the sublime is more likely to characterize a male aesthetic response than a female one. As Christine Battersby has pointed out, a refined sense of the sublime has long been credited to white elite men, to the explicit exclusion of women and racial others (The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference, passim). Women have not been as culturally attuned to the sublime as men, for whom bloodshed has long been ennobled by religious and secular ideologies of masculinity, even if these latter do not characterize traditional Jewish attitudes to war. Quoted in Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 269. Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975, p. 8. Stephen Polcari, in Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 187–212, notes that abstraction is also a socially engaged artistic response to the horrors of the Second World War that had its roots in the radical left-wing politics of the 1930s. By the 1960s, the spirituality of abstract expressionism’s drive towards the sublime had declined, undermined by the dynamics of abstraction itself. The sublime had accrued too much content and its message of protest was eliminated in favour of the pure, flat materiality of paint alone (Andrew Weinstein, ‘From the sublime to the abject: six decades of art’, in Stephen C. Feinstein, Absence/Presence: Critical Essays on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust, Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005, p. 74). See Avram Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in Twentieth Century Art, London, Lund-Humphries/Barbican Art Gallery, 1990, pp. 162–3. Liliane Weisberg, ‘In plain sight’, in Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust, p. 18. See e.g., Giacometti’s Standing Woman (1946–7); and the Standing Nude drawing of 1946; Laurie Wilson, Alberto Giacometti: Myth, Magic and the Man, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, p. 179; Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, pp. 268, 303–4; Matthew Baigell, Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust , New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997, pp. 29–30. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, ‘Haunting the empty place’, in Feinstein (ed.), Absence/ Presence, pp. 123–7. Samuel Bak, ‘About myself’, at the Decordova Museum, Lincoln, Mass., 14 December 1999. See also Feinstein, ‘Toward a post-Holocaust theology in art: the search for the absent and present God’, in Feinstein, (ed.), Absence/Presence, pp. 244–50. ‘Toward a post-Holocaust theology in art’, pp. 250, 257. Dalia Manor, ‘From rejection to recognition: Israeli art and the Holocaust’, in Feinstein (ed.), Absence/Presence, pp. 194–216. Difficult Freedom, p. 143. ‘Holocauste, la représentation impossible’, Le Monde, 3 March 1994, cited in Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘Schindler’s List is not Shoah’, in Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust, p. 133.

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See e.g., Zoë Vania Waxman’s, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 and Barbie Zelizer’s, Visual Culture and the Holocaust (2001). See further, Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 13. See Janet Blatter and Sybil Milton, Art of the Holocaust, New York: Routledge, 1981. Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Sherry Weber, London: Neville Spearman, 1967, p. 34. See Weinstein, ‘From the sublime to the abject’, pp. 82–4. Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor, London: New Left Books, 1977, p. 199. From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences, New York: Schocken Books, 1990, p. 166. See further, Lawrence L. Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006, pp. 123–4. Lang, Holocaust Representation, pp. 7–8. One instance of the artistic reduction of the Holocaust’s actual degradation of all bodies to a palatable aesthetic cliché is film directors’ selective beautification of young women victims. See Esther Fuchs, ‘The construction of heroines in Holocaust films: the Jewess as beautiful soul’ in idem (ed.), Women and the Holocaust: Narrative and Representation, Studies in the Shoah, vol. xxii, Lanham, MD, University Press of America, 1999, pp. 97–112. Lang, Holocaust Representation, p. 131. Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982, p. 72. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 26, 37, 2. Holocaust Testimonies, pp. 204, 7, 41. Ibid., p. 48. Yaffa Eliach’s, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, New York: Vintage Books, 1988, exemplifies the theological interplay of Jewish religious memory and imagination that Langer discounts. Holocaust Representation, pp. 17–18. Using and Abusing the Holocaust, p. 130. Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Childhood Remembered, London: Bloomsbury, 2003, p. 116. Landscapes of Memory, p. 32. Landscapes of Memory, p. 9. Primo Levi remembers: ‘we [did] not dare lift our eyes to look at one another.’ Unable to look in a mirror, their appearance stood before them, ‘reflected in a hundred livid faces, in a hundred miserable and sordid puppets’ (If This is a Man, London: Abacus 2000, p. 32). Auschwitz inmates felt ‘overwhelmed by an enormous edifice of violence and menace but could not form a representation of it because [their] eyes were fastened to the ground by every single minutes needs’ (The Drowned and the Saved, London: Abacus, 1996, p. 6). Levi’s testimony is discussed in Sujo, Legacies of Silence, pp. 82–9. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, trans. David E. Green, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963, p. 131. Landscapes of Memory, p. 27.

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Elizabeth Grosz, Jaques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 38. Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p. xii. See further Howard Jacobson, Kalooki Nights, where Jacobson’s combination of levity and psychological insight demonstrates that Holocaust images of Jewish degradation can excite prurient interest at the same time as they properly educate memory. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving images: Holocaust photographs and the work of postmemory’, in Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust, p. 233. However, it should be noted that the photographer and the executioner would not have been standing side by side. These women had been stripped of their clothes and possessions, but would have been taken to the mass grave for execution some time later. Cited in Gordon Horowitz, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen, New York: Free Press, 1990, p. 35. Trespassing Through Shadows, passim. Sujo, Legacies of Silence, p. 7. See Mendel Grossman, Frank Dabba and Howard Jacobson, My Secret Camera: Life in the Lodz Ghetto, London: Frances Lincoln, 2003. See further, Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows, p. 203. See Ruth Liberman, ‘Matters of interpretation: one artist’s commentary’, in Feinstein, pp. 94–6. Legacies of Silence, p. 91. Sujo, Legacies of Silence, pp. 57–91. See Kellner (ed.), The Pursuit of the Ideal, n. 17, p. 296. Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, p. 89. Depiction and Interpretation, p. 45. Sujo, Legacies of Silence, p. 10. Cited in Sujo, Legacies of Silence, p. 79. Sujo, Legacies of Silence, p. 91. Sujo, Legacies of Silence, p. 19. See Lynn Poland, ‘The idea of the holy and the history of the sublime’, Journal of Religion 72 (1992), p. 175; Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, pp. 116–48.

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‘Faith and the Holocaust’ Judaism 20 (1971): 286–94. Reprinted in Katz et al. (eds.), Wrestling with God, p. 458. God in Search of Man, p. 140. The Tremendum, p. 23. Sacred Fire, trans. Worch and ed. Miller, excerpts from which are reprinted in Katz et al. (eds.), Wrestling with God, pp. 40–50. See esp. 46–7. ‘Toward penitent return and restoration’, reprinted in Katz et al. (eds.), Wrestling with God, pp. 134, 136. See also, Pesach Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic Thought, Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1990, passim.

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Holocaust Representation, p. 119. ‘Toward a post-Holocaust theology in art’, p. 256. ‘Toward a post-Holocaust theology in art’, p. 258. Idolizing Pictures, p. 52. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 202. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, pp. 8–9. ‘Surviving images’, pp. 218, 222, 242. Holocaust Representation, p. 117. God in Search of Man, p. 39. Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism and the Holocaust, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 124. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 351. Gryn, Hugo with Naomi Gryn, Chasing Shadows: Memories of a Vanished World, London: Viking, 2000, p. xxxi. Resurrection is rabbinic doctrine dating back to the mishnaic era and is the second of the liturgical Eighteen Benedictions: ‘Thou art mighty forever, O Lord – resurrecting the dead. Thou art great to save. Thou sustainest life with grace, resurrectest the dead with great mercy.’ Schwarzschild, ‘On Jewish eschatology’, p. 214. Cited Feinstein, ‘Toward a post-Holocaust theology in art’, p. 225. See Joseph Gutmann, ‘Return to mercy in Zion: A messianic dream in Jewish art’, in Lawrence A. Hoffman (ed.), The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986, p. 253. Rabbinic commentary on Ezekiel 37:12 states that the righteous dead will roll through underground caverns until they reach the land of Israel and emerge on the Mount of Olives. Ezekiel 37 is also illustrated in a frescoe in the ancient synagogue of Dura Europos, in which the metaphorical hand of God as the divine force is painted pulling the dead from their graves. Liss, Chasing Shadows, p. 113. Religion of Reason, pp. 160, 148. The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001, p. 21. The Last Album, p. 26. See Shimon Attie, The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter, Heidelberg: Braus, 1994, Lang, Holocaust Representation, pp. 115–23; James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 62–89. Lang, Holocaust Representation, p. 116. The history of this nine-hundred-year-old community that numbered about 3,500 people in 1939 and was notable for its Talmudic academy, came to an end in September 1941. Weinstein, ‘From the sublime to the abject’, p. 81. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 200. Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine, p. 141. Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine, p. 103. ‘Redemption’, in Cohen and Mendes-Flohr (eds.), Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, p. 763.

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Norman Bryson, ‘Introduction’ to Bal, Looking In, p. 15. Looking In, pp. 165–7. ‘Disappearing traces’, pp. 112–13. ‘Disappearing traces’, p. 100. J. T. Rhodes, ‘Ways of seeing: Christ in everything’, in Brown and Loades (eds.), The Sense of the Sacramental, pp. 142–44. Cited in Freedberg, The Power of Images, p. 168. Cited in Freedberg, The Power of Images, p. 173. The Holocaust in American Life, p. 11. Although approximately two-thirds of the Budapest community of around 300,000 Jews survived the Holocaust, 430,000 other Jews were deported from throughout the Hungarian countryside between mid-May and early July 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The vast majority of these Jews were killed upon arrival. The Book of Abraham, trans. Lowell Blair, London: Collins, 1986. Perhaps the best-known literary use of the crucifi xion is Elie Wiesel’s conclusion to his autobiographical novel Night, New York: Avon, 1960, pp. 74–6. Here the inmates of Auschwitz are assembled to watch the slow hanging on the gallows of a pitifully light young boy between two men whose weight allowed them to die more or less instantly: ‘the little servant’; ‘the sad-eyed angel’ in whose agonizing death God also hangs dying. A man standing behind Wiesel asked ‘Where is God?’ and a voice inside Wiesel answered that God was there, hanging on the gallows. This is not, however, a Christian crucifi xion. Hope is extinguished in this boy’s death and neither he nor hope itself will be resurrected. The glow in the sky is not the light of dawn but of the crematory fires. Amsterdam: Polak and Van Gennep, 1965. ‘New Revelations and New Patterns in the Relationship of Judaism and Christianity’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 16 (1979), 255 (249–67). See further, Krell, Intersecting Pathways, pp. 10, 107. Greenberg understands the Isaianic Suffering Servant in non-messianic terms as the suffering Jewish people of the Holocaust. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997. Difficult Freedom, p. 143. Mark Godfrey, ‘Barnett Newman’s “Stations of the Cross” and the memory of the Holocaust’, in Melissa Ho (ed.), Reconsidering Barnett Newman: A Symposium at the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, Yale University Press, 2005, p. 51. See Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, p. 184. The title of the work – Stations of the Cross – came to Newman as he was painting the fourth canvas. The subtitle therefore refers not only to Psalm 22 in the Hebrew Bible, but to Jesus’ own quotation of the Psalm at the ninth hour; his last words, as he died on the cross burdened not merely with physical torment, but a powerful sense of God’s absence at the very moment that he had demonstrated his perfect obedience to God’s will (Mark 15:34; Matt. 27:46). Although Newman made it quite clear that he did not see the viewers’ walk through the sequence of paintings as constituting a via dolorosa, the paintings were to be viewed in a processive movement unified by the single question Lema: ‘Why?’ (Godfrey, Barnett Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross’ pp. 53–5). See also Barnett

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Newman and Fritz Meyer, Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani, Richter Verlag, 2005. Vivianne Barsky, ‘ “Home is Where the Heart Is”: Jewish themes in the art of R. B. Kitaj’, in Mendelsohn (ed.), Art and Its Uses, pp. 169, 176–7. See Feinstein, ‘Toward a post-Holocaust theology in art’, p. 249; Langer, Landscapes of Jewish Experience, Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 1997, p. 89. It is also reasonable to suggest, as Daniel Langton has done in email correspondence with me (10 April 2008), that the cross is used ironically as a Jewish critique of the Christian Teaching of Contempt. Jewish artists might well have been more familiar with the Christian charge of deicide than some of the theological concepts elaborated in the present chapter. ‘Jewish artists in New York during the Holocaust years’, pp. 2, 8. ‘Jewish artists in New York: the 1940s’, in Feinstein (ed.), Absence/Presence, p. 158. Abstraction and the Holocaust, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 64; Godfrey, ‘Barnett Newman’s “Stations of the Cross” ’, p. 50. Depiction and Interpretation, p. 178. Depiction and Interpretation, p. 197. ‘Art confronts the Holocaust’, in Monica Bohm-Duchen (ed.), Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art, London: Lund Humphries, 1995, p. 62. ‘On crucifying the Jews’, Judaism 27 (1978), p. 487. ‘On crucifying the Jews’, p. 486. ‘On crucifying the Jews’, p. 488. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, pp. 48–9. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 59. Arthur Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, New York: Random House 1967; Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, New York: Pimlico, 1981; David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941– 1945, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, p. 184. Mira Friedman, ‘Icon Painting and Russian Popular Art as Sources of Some Works by Chagall’, Journal of Jewish Art, 5 (1978), pp. 94–107. David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 258–310. Sujo, Legacies of Silence, p. 27. Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, pp. 178–9. Krell, Intersecting Pathways, pp.13–15. See Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Judaism and Christianity, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Godfrey, ‘Barnett Newman’s “Stations of the Cross” ’, p. 53. See Andrea Pappas, ‘Invisible Points of Departure: Reading Rothko’s Christological Imagery’, American Jewish History 4 (2003), 401–37. Post-war Jewish-Christian dialogue was facilitated by the mood of the post-Holocaust Church in America particularly. A widely liberal, ecumenical spirit encouraged many Christian

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theologians to reassess their own theological identities in relation to Judaism in a spirit of contrition. The publication in 1948 of Jules Isaac’s ( Jewish) and James Parkes’ (Christian) assertions of Christian culpability for, or at least complicity in, the Holocaust (Jules Isaacs, Jésus et Israël, Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1948; James Parkes, Judaism and Christianity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948; Antisemitism, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964) was followed by important contributions from A. Roy Eckardt, Paul van Buren and Franklin Littell. There was a common will to repair the relationship between Jews and Christians through dialogue and an emphasis on interrelationship and mutuality. My Name is Asher Lev, p. 188. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, in ‘Art confronts the Holocaust’, p. 64, interprets the lamb as a symbol of hope. ‘Faith and the Holocaust’, reprinted in Katz, Wrestling with God, p. 461. Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust, p. 35. Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust, pp. 25–7. Pesach Schindler finds that hasidic responses to the Holocaust are relatively free of the traditional theodic opinion that the catastrophe is a retribution for the sins of the Jewish people, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust, p. 116 and passim. See Roskies, The Literature of Destruction, pp. 504–5. The fullest commentary on Shapira’s thought is in Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire. The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, Lanham MD: Jason Aronson, 1998. Leora Batnitzky ‘On the suffering of God’s chosen: Christian views in Jewish terms’, in Tikva Frymer-Kensky et al. (eds.), Christianity in Jewish Terms, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000, p. 204. ‘On the suffering of God’s chosen’, pp. 206–9. ‘On the suffering of God’s chosen’, pp. 214–9. Faith after the Holocaust, New York: Ktav, 1973, pp. 124–7. It is worth noting that in this section of the book Berkovits quotes from André Schwartz-Bart’s novel, The Last of the Just, trans. Stephen Becker, London: Secker & Warburg, 1962, a book criticized by Orthodox commentators for the supposedly Christian tendencies in its interpretation of the Holocaust. Waiting for God, p. 121.

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‘The lure of immanence’, p. 64. Star, p. 298. The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election, New York: Seabury Press, 1983, p. 36. See also ibid., p. 57. Krell, Intersecting Pathways, p. 141. Batnitzky, ‘On the suffering of God’s chosen’, pp. 200–5, notes certain affinities between Rosenzweig and Wyschogrod’s conception of Israel, though Wyschogrod does not appear to acknowledge them. The Body of Faith, pp. 103, 174. Batnitzky, ‘On the suffering of God’s chosen’, p. 205.

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Margaret Taylor, ‘A history of symbolic movement in worship’, in Doug Adams and Diane Apostolos-Cappadona (eds.), Dance as Religious Studies, New York: Crossroad, 1990, p. 15. Star, p. 372. Star, pp. 372–3. Hal Taussig, ‘Dancing the scriptures’, in Adams and Apostolos-Cappadona (eds.), Dance as Religious Studies, p. 67. Taussig, ‘Dancing the scriptures’, p. 69. Taussig, ‘Dancing the scriptures’, p. 74. The Hebrew Bible has at least nine verb forms for the dance. The customary words for dance in Hebrew scriptures are mahol, meholot, hyl or hll. These are group, not individual, dances, translated as chorós in the Greek Septuagint and chorea in the Latin vulgate (Mayer I. Gruber, ‘Ten dance-derived expressions in the Hebrew Bible’, in Adams and ApostolosCappadona (eds.), Dance as Religious Studies, pp. 48–66). It should, of course, be noted that the type of the dancing Jew is essentially male. Despite biblical evidence for female public dance, the image of a dancing Jewish woman is almost irrevocably sexualized in figures such as Salome who represents an impure form of dance as erotic display that merely excites lust rather than the infectious joy of dance in the spirit. (See further, Martha Ann Kirk, ‘Biblical women and feminist exegesis: women dancing men’s ideas or women dancing women’, in Adams and Apostolos-Cappadona (eds.), Dance as Religious Studies, pp. 134–49. Kirk examines how feminist choreographers, inspired by texts in the Hebrew Bible, are reclaiming the possibility of female religious dance.) See further, Fred Beck, (ed.), The Jewish Dance, New York: Exposition Press, 1960. That sense of movement as drawing Israel onto the world is conveyed by Michael Drucks’ Israel Pattern (1971), which maps an outline of Israel onto the coordinates of a German paper garment pattern. See Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Antisemitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 218–9. The early church built upon Jewish traditions of communal dance (chorós) especially that of the ring dance, but discouraged individual dance (orchoumenos). The sacred chorós was the choral liturgical dance practised in the early church and often commended by the Church Fathers, at least when danced by men, as a legitimate expression of joy and adoration. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, monastic orders used rhythmic revolutions to express cosmic mysteries in the mystery and miracle plays that were commonly chanted to music and sometimes presented in the balletoria or dancing pavement in the front or west door of a church. Yet even by the early medieval period, it was becoming ever more common for the Church to interpret psalmic references to dance as metaphors for a harmonious community rather than as legitimations for bodily dance. Christian dance was in gradual institutional decline until the Reformation, when all dances and processions other than funerary processions were abolished (Margaret Taylor, ‘A history of symbolic movement in dance’).

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Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 26. Bland, The Artless Jew, p. 106. Sacred and Profane Beauty, p. 71. See also, W. O. E. Oesterly, Sacred Dance, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1923. Michael A. Meyer, Judaism Within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001, p. 11. Zakhor, p. 93. Meyer, Judaism Within Modernity, p. 57. Meyer, Judaism Within Modernity, pp. 123–4. Meyer, Judaism Within Modernity, p. 20. On modern German Judaism’s account of revelation in Jewish history, see further ibid., pp. 111–27. New York: Schocken Books, 1948. Lori Krafte-Jacobs, ‘The “essence” of Judaism: a process relational critique’, in Sandra B. Lubarsky and David Ray Griffin (eds.), Jewish Theology and Process Thought, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, p. 78. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 92, 95. Krafte-Jacobs, ‘The “essence” of Judaism’, p. 79. Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora, New York: New York University Press, 2005, pp. xvi, 174–5. The Jew: Assumptions of Identity, London: Cassell, 1999. ‘Is feminism to Judaism as modernity is to tradition? Critical questions on Jewishness, femininity and art’, in Bohm-Duchen and Grodzinski (eds.), Rubies and Rebels, p. 16. Meyer, Judaism Within Modernity, pp. 87–8. Zakhor, p. 96. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1989, p. 11. Meyer, Judaism Within Modernity, pp. 95–6. See further, Moshe Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History? Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilisation, 2007; Michael A. Meyer (ed.), Ideas of Jewish History, New York: Wayne State University Press, 1974. The metaphor of the rope is reminiscent of the traditional metaphor of Jewish history as a bent but unbroken reed, able to turn tribulation into joy by its sheer powers of acclimatization, endurance and hope. ‘The “essence” of Judaism’, p. 81 ‘The “essence” of Judaism’, pp. 85–6. Rubies and Rebels, Bohm-Duchen and Grodzinski (eds.), p. 91. Personal Impressions, edited by Henry Hardy, London: Pimlico, 1998, pp. 258–9. Personal Impressions, p. 258. In Modernity and Ambivalence, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991, Zygmunt Bauman argues that the Jew represents the unassimilable other in Christian and post-Christian Europe and so disturbs modernity’s vision of the orderliness of the same. Jewish Icons, p. 157. In turn, an affectionate nostalgia for the world of the shtetl, mediated through the memory and imagination of writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, has powerfully shaped the identity of many Anglophone Jews of my own generation, born a decade or so after the Holocaust and around seventy years

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after our families had fled the poverty, persecution and limited cultural horizons of eastern European Jewish life. My grandparents found my own adolescent preoccupation with the shtetl, or at least an essentially literary and cinematic idea of it, incomprehensible. Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 158, 163–5. Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 171–5. Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 175–6. See Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 184–5. A parallel motivation obtained for Jewish folklorists, poets and storytellers of the mid-nineteenth-century living in urban Europe (ibid., pp. 175–6). Aviv and Shneer, New Jews, pp. 74–5. Reflections of Nazism, p. 46. See Yerushalmi, Zakhor, pp. 99–100. Zakhor, p. 116. Amos Funkenstein asserts that Yerushalmi and others have exaggerated the extent of pre-modern typological interpretations of Jewish history. Even though rabbinic analogies have certainly been made in the past between the ‘pristine time’ of the united ancient Kingdom and the messianic era, these were not, claims Funkenstein, as influential as Yerushalmi supposes. While Nachmanides’ exegetical study proposed a typological vision of history his method was not, in Funkenstein’s opinion, widely imitated (Perceptions of Jewish History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993, p. 16). Christianity, by contrast, proved a far more fertile ground for symbolic readings of historical events, probably because the body and life of Christ were considered redemptive, not his words alone (ibid., p. 101). Since antiquity, Christian theologians have interpreted history by means of symbolic types (typoi) and figures (figurae) – ‘symbolical-speculative analogies’ (ibid., p. 99). The present chapter’s interest in the body and life of Israel, not just its texts, make parallels with Christian historiography inevitable. Zakhor, p. 93. Emil Fackenheim rightly objects to Rosenzweig’s abstraction of the Jew from history, arguing that eternity may break into the temporal in redemptive moments within the experiential reality of the Jewish community (To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought, New York: Schocken, 1982, p. 82). Kornberg Greenberg, Better than Wine, pp. 12–13. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, pp. 295, 302. Menachem Friedman, ‘The Haredim and the Holocaust’, The Jerusalem Quarterly 53 (1990), esp. pp. 107–12. See Krell, Intersecting Pathways, p. 38; Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, pp. 203–6. Cited in Moshe Idel, ‘The Land of Israel in medieval Kabbalah’, in Lawrence A. Hoffman (ed.), The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives, p. 177. Religion of Reason, p. 246. Religion of Reason, pp. 260–5. Religion of Reason, p. 267. Krell, Intersecting Pathways, p. 38. See The Star of Redemption, pp. 306–7, 314; Krell, Intersecting Pathways, pp. 38–9, 64–5.

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Cf. Jeremiah’s image of the people of Israel and Judah going on their way together, weeping, seeking their Lord (Jer. 50:4). Process thought is more prevalent among twentieth-century Protestant theologians than Jewish, but is no means conceptually exclusive to Protestantism. ‘Introduction’, Lubarsky and Griffin (eds.), Jewish Theology and Process Thought, p. 8. A process metaphysic allows Lori Krafte-Jacobs in ‘The “essence” of Judaism’ (in the same volume) to suggest that the concept of ‘Judaism’ and of ‘the Jews’ can enjoy freedom, complexity, difference and change without surrendering to the authoritarian normativity of an essence of Judaism to which particular Jewish phenomena may, or may fail to, conform. Meyer, Judaism Within Modernity, p. 44. The destruction of European Jewry effectively redistributed the energies and centres of Jewry from eastern Europe to Israel and the United States. In The Face of God After Auschwitz, Amsterdam: Polak and Van Gennep, 1965, Ignaz Maybaum therefore casts the post-Holocaust westernization of Jewry as an emancipatory movement towards cultural progress, thereby rendering the Holocaust ultimately providential. I entirely reject this teleological account of the Holocaust as an agent of modernization. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989. ‘Introduction: the multiple viewpoint: diasporic visual cultures’ in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 3, 6–7. Saloman was deported from Paris in 1943, when she was 26. Newly married and pregnant, she was murdered on arrival in Auschwitz. See Mary Lowenthal Felstiner, To Paint Her Life, New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Difficult Freedom, p. 208. Korn, A Celebration of Judaism in Art, p. 5. Avram Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in Twentieth-Century Art, London: Lund Humphries, 1990, p. 105. See also Kampf’s discussion of Bergner’s work, ibid., p. 88; Sander Gilman, ‘R. B. Kitaj’s “Good Bad Diasporism” ’, in Baigell and Heyd (eds.), Complex Identities, pp. 223–37, esp. 234; R. B. Kitaj, ‘A Passion’, London, Marlborough Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, 1985, p. iii. Amishai Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, p. 19. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, p. 174. Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 211–33, 234–5. See Cohen, Jewish Icons, pp. 237–49. Cohen, Jewish Icons, p. 254. Amishai Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, pp. 19, 21. Chagall left Soviet Russia for France in 1923 and was forced to leave Paris and live in the United States from 1941 to 1948. Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, pp. 32–4. Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation, pp. 19–21. See further, ibid., pp. 19–34. Sujo, Legacies of Silence, p. 58, notes the affinity of this path to that of the Himmelfahrt Strasse – the so-called ‘Road to Heaven’ in Sobibor: a 30ft road which ran between the railway tracks and the woods at Sobibor, along which Jews were driven to their death. This ironic phrase is also used of the topography of

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Treblinka’s killing operation. A processive death is also signalled by Tadeusz Borowski, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, who before killing himself published a collection of short autobiographical stories entitled with the macabre humour of the circus ringmaster: This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, new edition, 1992. There has been significant feminist criticism of the tendency to monumentality in Holocaust memorials, of its inhuman scale in opposition to the small intimacies and tendernesses of female life (Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows, p. 110). It seems oblivious to the pathos of the photographs, embroideries and other precious but ephemeral domestic items that token the presence, history and identity of their owners that were caught up in the storm and littered in all directions. Cited by Margaret Olin, ‘Graven images on video?’, p. 38. There are a number of spiritual and political reasons why Jews might be committed to settlement in the land of Israel, yet not all Jews have felt compelled to make aliyah and remain in movement or, in all senses, unsettled. One of Israel’s most prominent literary figures, A. B. Yehoshua, has argued that Judaism can exist perfectly well without Eretz Yisrael – a land of its own. Abraham, who was born outside the land of Israel, may have received the promise of land and nationhood, but also became its first yored (Jewish immigrant from Israel), leaving the promised land when economic conditions deteriorated there and travelling instead to Egypt. Abraham and Jacob, the founding patriarchs of the nation, created the nation in golah (exile). As Yehoshua points out, if the Jewish people was neither created nor born in its own land, perhaps the association of Jewish nationhood and land is not as inevitable as is so widely supposed. Moreover, the law – the source of Jewry’s spiritual renewal – was not given in Eretz Yisrael, but in the wilderness outside it. So too, when the kingdom of Judah was destroyed in 586 BCE and Jews went into exile in Babylon, it survived and even thrived as a nation, with a substantial part of the community preferring to remain in exile rather than return to build the Second Commonwealth. Yehoshua notes that even in 70 CE, when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans, a third of the Jewish people were already living outside the land of Israel. Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai left on the eve of the destruction of Jerusalem to establish, in exile, the school of Yavneh that would and did create a new, halakhic, non-territorial Jewish way of life for Jews in the golah. During nearly two thousand years of exile, in which the Jews suffered appallingly harsh discrimination and persecution, the Jews (even those in Mediterranean lands close to Israel) then proceeded to make no serious attempt to return to Eretz Yisrael until the birth of Zionism in the late nineteenth century. It is ironic that even after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, in which the British government backed the establishment of the State of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Jews were emigrating from eastern Europe to west, and by 1921, only 30,000 had settled in Israel. Yehoshua believes that it was the Holocaust that created a sense of fear of the golah – that Jews would never be truly safe unless they were able to defend themselves on territory in which they were self-governing (‘Exile as a neurotic solution’, in Etan Levine (ed.), Diapora: Exile and the Contemporary Jewish Condition (New York: Steimatsky, 1986), pp. 15–35).

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This experience was similar to that of Gillian Rose when she visited the graves in the beech forests outside Tarnów, where 800 Jewish children and 1,000 sick and elderly Jews had been shot. By early spring, she remembered, the graves were surrounded by ‘masses of tiny, white wood anemones, wind-flower and bird-song, and the audibly rising sap of the pearly trees, as if a fairy tale has taken place [t]here’ (Love’s Work, London: Vintage, 1997, pp. 10–11). See further, my article, ‘The face of God in every generation: Jewish feminist spirituality and the legend of the Thirty-Six Hidden Saints’, in Ursula King (ed.), Spirituality and Society in the New Millennium, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001, pp. 234–46. Potok, My Name is Asher Lev, pp. 10, 104. Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers, pp. 30–1. Sacred and Profane Beauty, p. 74. Doug Adams, ‘Communal dance forms and consequences in biblical worship’, in Adams and Apostolos-Cappadonna (eds.), Dance as Religious Studies, p. 42. It is sometimes suggested that shockeling originated in the sharing of prayer books, when men had to look over the shoulders of others to see the text. Ps. 46:11 is translated with less poetry in Tanakh as ‘Desist! Realize that I am God!’ See Clifford Trolin, Movement in Prayer in a Hasidic Mode, Austin: The Sharing Co., 1979. Adams, ‘Communal dance forms’, p. 41. See Olaf Hoeckmann, Dance in Hebrew Poetry, Austin: The Sharing Co., 1987. Significant references to dance and worship in the Hebrew Bible include Ex. 15:20; 2 Sam. 6:14; Ps. 149:3; Ps. 150:4. Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters, New York: Shocken Books, 1948, pp. 90–1. Schindler refers to this belief in Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust, p. 84. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Friedman, ‘The Haredim and the Holocaust’, p. 90. Friedman, ‘The Haredim and the Holocaust’, p. 101. See e.g. Eliezer Berkovits, With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Deathcamps, New York and London: Sanhedrin, 1979, pp. 75, 112; Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust, pp. 60–5. Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust, p. 63. Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, p. 187. Adams, ‘Communal dance forms’, p. 42. See Adams, ‘Communal dance forms’, pp. 39–40. Aviv and Shneer, New Jews, pp. 62–3. Aaron Zeitlin, ‘The last walk of Janusz Korczak’, trans. Hadassah Rosensaft and Gertrude Hirschler in Janusz Korczac, trans. Jerzy Bachrach and Barbara Krzywicka, Ghetto Diary, New York: Holocaust Library, 1978, pp. 56–7; Hanna Mortkowicz Olczakowa, ‘Janosz (sic) Korczak’s last walk’, in Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox and Samuel Margoshes (eds.), Anthology of Holocaust Literature, New York: Atheneum, 1985, p. 135. ‘Shekhinah and eschatology’, p. 241.

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Religion of Reason, pp. 289–91. ‘On Jewish eschatology’, p. 209. Schwarzschild, ‘On Jewish eschatology’, p. 209. Schwarzschild is referring to the story (how it was verified is difficult to ascertain) of the Grodzisker Rabbi, Rabbi Yisrael Shapira, who before entering the gas chamber at Treblinka, led his fellow Jews in singing Ani Ma’amin (‘I believe’), urging them to accept their martyrdom (Kiddush Hashem) with joy. For this and other accounts of Hasidim confronting death in religious ecstasy, see Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust, pp. 62–3. Gutman, ‘Return in Mercy to Zion’, p. 241. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, pp. 294–5. See Manor, ‘The dancing Jew’, p. 82; Sed-Rajna, Jewish Art, pp. 337, 498. Lag b’Omer corresponds to the date of the death of the great Mishnaic sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. In Israel, since the sixteenth-century kabbalists made Safed a place of pilgrimage second only in importance to the remains of the Temple, Lag b’Omer has been celebrated at the rabbi’s supposed grave in the city of Meron with ecstatic dance and the building of bonfires. See further Moshe Idel, ‘The Land of Israel in medieval Kabbalah’, in Lawrence A. Hoffman (ed.), The Land of Israel: Jewish Perspectives, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986, p. 181. Manor, ‘The dancing Jew’, p. 85. Manor, ‘The dancing Jew’, p. 80. The Artist of Hebrew Dance: Baruch Agadati, Tel Aviv: Hedim, 1925, http://www. torahmitzion.org, Parshat. Tzav/Purim 24–26 March 2005, 15 Adar 5765, accessed 27.05.05. Compare the Pesach figuration of Elijah: a herald of liberty, passing from one house to the next, he is another Jewish dancer. In Roskies (ed.), The Literature of Destruction, pp. 509–10. Adams, ‘Communal dance forms’, pp. 35–6. ‘Reality and its shadow’, pp. 132–3. Difficult Freedom, p. 122. Difficult Freedom, p. 7. Totality and Infinity, p. 79. The erotic dance of courtship and the wedding dance that celebrates the covenantal promises made between persons and between God and Israel does not, however, permit orgiastic dance. Regulatory law and ethics impose certain constraints on freely expressive individual dance and Orthodoxy does not permit adult men and women to dance together at communal celebrations. It is no coincidence that Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son has several times been choreographed as a ballet. The Prodigal Son was first performed as a ballet in 1812 by the Paris Opera Ballet and then, some hundred years later, in 1929 choreographed by George Balanchine, to Sergei Prokoviev’s score, for the Diaghilev Ballet Russe. There were further balletic treatments of the parable in 1931 and 1938 and Balanchine’s is still performed.

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Index

abstraction and Jewish aesthetics 40–1 Adler, Rachel 193 Adorno, Theodor 110, 183 aesthetics, Jewish see abstraction; distortion aesthetic theology Christian 2 Jewish, possibility of 16–18 Agadati, Baruch 177 Akedah (sacrifice of Isaac) 146 Akerman, Chantal 169 Aliyah (emigration to Israel) 209 Amishai-Maisels, Ziva 116, 141–2 Anfechtung, Christian concept of 100, 149 Antea Gallery, Jerusalem 92 anthropology, visual 16 antisemitism and art establishment 12 and representation of the Jew 82, 153, 191 Antokolsky, Mark 145 Appelfeld, Aharon 137 Ardon, Mordecai 88 art, Jewish ceremonial 14 and conceptual art 41 definition of 8–9 ironic 41–2 as a ‘national’ art 181 Attie, Shimon 129–30 Aumant, Jacques 3 Auschwitz (camp) 117, 127, 129, 136, 154, 174, 178, 199 Aviv, Caryn and David Shneer 157 Aylon, Helene 94

Bal, Mieke 15–16, 133 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 164 Baron, Salo 178 Bartov, Omer 103 Bataille, Georges 197 Batnitzky, Leora 33, 147 Battersby, Christine 198 Bauman, Zygmunt 206 beauty Greek and Roman notions of 182 Jewish notions of 55, 56, 59, 60, 190, 191 male 83 moral dimension of 125 Belsen (camp) 137 Ben Uri Gallery, London 142 Bergner, Yosl 108, 165 Berkovits, Eliezer 98, 148, 210 Berlin, Isaiah 159 Berman, Hariette Estel 90 Bezalel Academy of Art and Design 13 Biale, David 145 Bland, Kalman 5, 6, 37 Bloom, Hyman 84, 116 Blumenthal, David 48, 50 Bohm-Duchen, Monica 20 Bomberg, David 83, 84 Borowski, Tadeusz 209 Boyarin, Daniel 145 Braiterman, Zachary 4, 188, 191 Bromberg, Maurycy 116–17 Brown, Michael 142 Brushkin, Grisha 40 Buber, Martin 13, 32, 33, 42, 43, 47, 62, 63–4 Buchenwald (camp) 116 Budapest, Holocaust Memorial Center 135

Baal Shem Tov, the 171, 174 Baigell, Matthew 141 Bak, Samuel 14, 107–8, 111, 123, 134, 168–9

Cagli, Corrado 116 Cahana, Alice Lok 123 Caro, Joseph 29, 38

226 Cavani, Liliana 101 Chagall, Marc 9, 83, 138–9, 141–2, 144–6, 148, 167, 172, 179 Chicago, Judy 91 Cohen, Abigail 94–5 Cohen, Arthur 8, 14–15, 122, 131 Cohen, Hermann 3, 29–30, 31, 38, 41, 61, 62–3, 64, 127–8, 147, 162, 174 Cohen, Richard 16, 81, 89, 159–60, 181 Cohn-Sherbok, Dan 137 crucifi xion, as a symbol for the Holocaust in Jewish art 137–49 Dachau (camp) 116 dance Christian 205 Jewish, theology of 151–5, 171–9, 205, 211 Dash, Janet 90 Delbo, Charlotte 154 ‘Devout Beholding’ 119 of images of the Holocaust 133–6 diaspora art in 13 theology of 18, 150–79 passim distortion and Jewish aesthetics 28–9, 41, 61–2, 82 Druck, Michael 205 Dura Europos, frescoes of 201 Eckardt, Roy 137 Eichmann, Adolf 138 Eliach, Yaffa 199 Elijah 175, 211 Epstein, Jacob 179 ethics, and the aesthetic 45–7, 49, 53, 54–7 Ezekiel, Moses 145 Fackenheim, Emil 207 Farley, Edward 190–1 Fautrier, Jean 88 Feinstein, Stephen 123 fiddler on the roof, the, figure of 172 Flack, Audrey 123 flood, the 52 Foshko, Joseph 148 Frankel, Gerhart, 116 Freedberg, David 15, 21, 55, 73 Fried, Michael 172 Friedländer, Saul 101–2, 160 Fritta, Bedrich 107

Index Fuchs, Esther 199 Funkenstein, Amos 186, 207 Galles, Arie 123, 127, 133, 140 Garfield, Rachel 93 Geiger, Abraham 144, 147, 155–6 Gershuni, Moshe 131 Gertler, Mark 83–4, 85 Giacometti, Alberto 106, 198 Gilbert, Martin 143 Glowacka, Dorota 98, 133–4 Gluska, Aharon 127 God, holocaustal absence of 98, 148 see also hiddenness of God’s face suffering of 122, 147–9 Godfrey, Mark 141 Golden Calf, worship of 68, 71 Goodenough, Erwin 27 Gottlieb, Maurycy 13, 86, 145 Graetz, Heinrich 3, 63, 144 Greenberg, Irving 130–1, 137, 202 Greenberg, Yudit Kornberg 31, 131 Gross, Chaim 195 Gross, Michael 9 Grossman, Grace Cohen 182 Grossman, Mendel 114 Gruber, Mayer I. 205 Grundig, Lea 116 Gryn, Hugo 126 Gutmann, Joseph 180 Haas, Leo 167 Halbertal, Moshe and Avishai Margalit 21, 25, 27 Halevi, Yehuda 162 Halter, Marek 136 Held, Julie 92 Herzl, Theodor 13 Heschel, Abraham Joshua 34, 44, 51, 56, 58, 121, 125 Hesse, Eva 91 hiddenness, of God’s face 6, 27, 36, 80, 100, 104–6, 107, 122, 126, 136, 197 Hirsch, Marianne 124 Hirszenberg, Samuel 166, 167 Hiszpanska-Neumann, Maria 91 Hoffman, Judith, A. 94 Hoffman, Matthew 144 holiness 51–4, 56, 78, 85, 95–6, 122, 160 Holocaust and abstract expressionism 106 Americanization of 109–10

Index art during the 14, 91, 100, 115–17 in films 101–2, 103 images of 60, 61–2, 97–149 passim and Israeli artists 108–9 as locus of anti-revelation 97–8 and the sublime 98–109 Holocaust Studies 109, 110, 121 iconoclasm 11 idolatry 10, 21–37, 57, 68–75, 80 contemporary forms of 58–61, 64 image of God in the human 7, 28, 38, 47–50, 53, 55, 57–8, 60, 61, 81, 83, 136 images see Holocaust and love 50–1, 59, 60, 124–5, 127–9 messianic 38, 51 and prayer 130–3 prophetic or counter-idolatrous 17, 42, 55, 56–7, 59–60, 62–4, 171–9 resurrective 124–30 and revelation 17–18 sacral, of men 80–6 of women 6, 59–60, 61, 62, 65–96 passim Irigaray Luce, 65, 193 Israel, establishment of State of 170 Jacobs, Louis 20, 152 Jacobson, Howard 52, 88, 200 Jay, Martin 4 Jerusalem 164, 178, 184 Jesus, figure of, in motion 153 Jewish art, history of 9–14, 181–2 theorizations of 8–9, 152, 155 Jewish-Christian dialogue post-Holocaust 203–4 John Paul II, Pope 137 Joseph, Lily Delissa 86 Jost, Herbert (Heinz) 114 Julius, Anthony 41–2, 123, 181 Just Men, Legend of the Thirty-Six 170 Kalmanovitsh, Zelig 177 Kampf, Avram 8, 9 Kant, Immanuel 11, 103–4 Kashetsky, Herzl 131, 133, 134 Kass, Deborah 92 Katz, Alex 9 Kaufmann, Isidor 80–1, 83, 86, 160 Kfitzas haderech (miraculous journey) 171 Kiefer, Anselm 123

227

Kitaj, Ron B. 9, 140, 146, 163, 165 Klee, Paul 46 Kleeblatt, Norman 115 Kluger, Ruth 112 Klutzick National Jewish Museum, Washington 121 Kochan, Lionel 20, 36–7, 181 Korczac, Janusz, 174 Korn, Irene 39 Krafte-Jacobs, Lori 158 Kramer, Jacob 83 Krell, Marc 145 Krestin, Lazar 83 Kristallnacht (pogrom) 13 Kuk, Abraham Isaac 13 Ladizhinski, Yefim 179 Lag b’Omer, festival of 176–7, 211 Lang, Berel 111, 112, 121, 123, 125 Langer, Lawrence 111–12, 121 Langton, Daniel 203 Lanzmann, Claude 107, 109, 196 Lasansky, Mauricio 143 Leeuw, Gerhardus van der 112, 155, 171 Leibowitz, Cary 92 Lepajya, Latvia (massacre) 114 Letter of Aristeas 189–90 Levene, Dan 4 Levi, Primo 99, 117, 199 Levinas, Emmanuel 6, 20, 31, 34–6, 55, 56, 64, 109, 134, 137, 164, 178, 179 Levine, Stephanie Wellen 77, 79 Lévy, Alphonse 160 Levy, Emmanuel 139 Lewis, Morris 106–7 Lichtenstein, Rachel 158–9 Lipschitz, Jacques 88, 146 Lipton, Seymour 83, 139 Liss, Andrea 114–15 Lissaüer, Annette, Kleinfeld 92–3 Lissitsky, El 40 Loftus, Barbara 92 logocentrism, patriarchal 65 love see images Ludwig, Peter 167 Lyotard, Jean-François 46, 55, 72, 180 ‘magic bowls’ 4 Maimonides, Moses 26, 29, 48, 58 Majdanek (camp) 169 Mandelzweig, Raphael 167

228 Mané-Katz, Emmanuel 84 Manor, Dalia 177 March of the Living, the 174 Markiewicz, Lily R. 195 Maryan, Maryan S. 39, 116 Mauthausen (camp) 114, 173 Maybaum, Ignaz 137, 208 Mehitzah (screen) 76–8 Meidner, Ludwig 87 Mendelssohn, Moses 161 messianic age, the 122 see also, images, messianic Meyer, Michael 157, 158 micrography 39–40 Minkowski, Maurycy 167 Mirroring Evil (exhibition) 115 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 58–9, 163–4 modernism, in Yiddish culture 144 modesty see tznius Modigliani, Amedeo 39, 195 monotheism 80 Morris, Robert 107 Morse, Arthur 143 Mulvey, Laura 75–6 music, Zoran 100–16 Neusner, Jacob 45, 97 Nevelson, Louise 91 Newman, Barnett 8, 106, 139–40, 143, 145–6, 189, 202–3 Nossig, Alfred 163 Novick, Peter 97, 99, 135 Nussbaum, Felix 86–7 occularcentrism 65–6, 75 Olin, Margaret 8–9, 19 Olumucki, Halina 91, 117, 167 Oppenheim, Moritz 12, 160 Otto, Rudolf 83 patronage, Jewish, of art 12 Petraka, Vivian 125 Pieck, Henri 116 Pilichowski, Leopold 167 Pissarro, Camille 13 Plaskow, Judith 21, 30 Plate, Brent S. 183 Polanski, Roman 102 Pollack, Elza 107 Pollock, Griselda 157 Potok, Chaim 57, 89

Index Poussin, Nicolas 68–9 Prodigal Son parable of as ballet 211 Purim carnival 177 Purimspielers (Purim players) 170 Rand, Archie 2 Rapaport-Albert, Ada 193 Raphael, Melissa 187, 190, 197, 200 Rattner, Abraham 139, 144 Ravensbrück (camp) 117 revelation 5, 6, 156–79 passim aesthetic dimension of 43–4, 100 cartography of 151–5 and language 32–3, 34 see also images Revel-Neher, Elisheva 9 Rilik-Andrieux, Lili 91 Rilke, Rainer Maria von 100 Robbins, Jill 187 Rolfe, Marlene 92 Rose, Gillian 209 Rosenberg, Harold 40–1, 141 Rosenzweig, Franz 20, 31–5, 43–4, 55, 64, 82, 122, 131, 150, 151, 161, 162, 204 Roskies, David 157 Rothenberg, Susan 91 Rothko, Mark 106, 135, 145 Rougier-Lecoq, Violette 117 Rubin, Reuven 144, 176–7 Ruether, Rosemary 30 Sabbath 52 Sacks, Jonathan 3–4 Safed 179, 211 Saloman, Charlotte 164 Sarna, Nahum, M. 45 Sarna, Yehezkel 122–3 Scheinfeld, Moshe 173 Schindler, Pesach 204 Schneerson, Menachem 77, 194 Schorsch, Ismar 106 Schwartz, Shuly Rubin 79 Schwartz-Bart, André 137, 204 Schwarzschild, Steven 38–9, 55, 63, 64, 116, 127, 150, 174 Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) 11–12 Second Commandment, the 19–42 and passim Sed-Rajna, Gabrielle 8, 181–2 Segal, George 116

Index Servant, Suffering, the 62, 147–8, 162 Shahn, Ben 40, 167 Shapira, Kalonymous Kalman 122, 147 Shapiro, Miriam 195 Sherry, Patrick 190 shluchim (emissaries) 171 shockeling (swaying movement in prayer) 171, 210 Silberstein, Lawrence 45 Siminski, Wiktor 116 Sobibor (camp) 208–9 Solomon, Ezra ben 162 Soutine, Chaim, 19 39, 145 Spero, Nancy 91, 93 Spiegelman, Art 39 Spielberg, Steven 125–6 Steinberg, Leo 40 Steiner, George 101–2, 104 Steinhardt, Jakob 145 Steyn, Juliet 157 Streisand, Barbra 92 Struck, Hermann 13, 83 Sujo, Glenn 14, 115, 117 Szajna, Jószef 107 Szpilman, Wladyslaw 102 Taussig, Hal 151–2 tavoletta, (small Christian image held up by a handle) 190 Teresienstadt (Terezín) (camp) 115–16 Tertullian 73, 184 teshuvah (repentance) 122, 154 theology Jewish, feminist 30, 49 nature of 14–15 post-Holocaust 104–6 see also aesthetic theology tikkun (restoration or healing) 62, 64, 119, 124, 126, 130 Tolkin, Wikto 169 ‘Tower of Faces’ exhibit 130 Treblinka (camp) 170, 209, 211 tznius (modesty) female 78–80, 85 male 78 Ungar, Otto 167–8 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington 113, 130

229

unity, Jewish, historical 155–61 Ury, Lesser 13, 83 Vas, Robert 180 Vilna, ghetto 177 Visconti, Luchino 101 Vishniac, Roman 81–2, 87–8 Warhol, Andy 59 Warsaw, ghetto 99, 122, 175 Weber, Max 84, 178 Weil, Simone 100, 149 Weinfeld, Yocheved 109 Weiss, Ann 129 Wellhausen, Julius 144 Wenham, Gordon 45, 49 Wiesel, Elie 99, 100, 110, 137 Wilke, Hannah 91–2 Wizard of Oz, The 74–5 Wolfson, Elliot 4–5 women and altars 195–6 and dance 205 as hypostasizing the holocaustal corpse of European Jewry 88 images of see images Jewish, artists 67, 192 and the sublime 198 and the visual 4 Women in Black, the 90 Women of the Book, (exhibition) 94 Women of the Wall, the 90 Wyman, David 143 Wyschogrod, Michael 121, 146–7, 150–1 Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jerusalem 113, 127 Yehoshua, A. B. 209 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim 101, 155, 157, 161 zakhor (the obligation to remember) 119 Zeldis, Malcah 91 Zionism and art 13 iconography of 90, 176–7