Jesus Depictions in Modern Jewish Art

Folks, you’ve got to peruse this article in the online edition of The Tablet Magazine – not to be confused with The Tablet Catholic Weekly Newspaper, two very different animals – entitled, Cross Pollination: How the figure of Jesus came to be employed in modern Jewish art. This is how it starts:

He thought it would be Good for the Jews. That’s what led Max Liebermann, assimilated German Jew and well-respected realist painter, to plot out a radical new take on a well-known passage from the Gospel of Saint Luke.

The scene, in which Joseph and Mary lose track of Jesus, only to find their precocious preadolescent debating with the elders in the Temple, had been depicted over the course of Western art history by everyone from Giotto to Fra Angelico to Rembrandt. Some, like the Italian Lodovico Mazzolino, signaled the Jewish setting through the interiors, showing a relief of Moses and Hebrew writing. Others, like Dürer, indulged in anti-Semitic caricature, treating each elder’s nose as a tour de force of grotesque.

Liebermann, though, went for naturalism. He based the architecture in his 1879 painting The 12-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple on sketches he had made in synagogues in Amsterdam and Venice. He clothed the elders—a mix of Orthodox and assimilated German Jews—in contemporary Jewish garb. And the youthful Jesus was also, clearly, a Jewish boy—and a ragged urchin with bare feet, to boot.

At a time when the idea of the Jewish Jesus was just taking hold in intellectual circles, Liebermann’s image of the savior as a ragamuffin came as a shock. When the painting debuted in Munich’s Second Annual International Art Exhibition of 1879, the Catholic clergy complained. The prince regent himself demanded it be moved to a less prominent location. Months later, the charges of blasphemy, tinged with anti-Semitism, were still going strong, surfacing in a debate in Parliament.

Liebermann responded by repainting Jesus in an Italianate style suitable for German tastes, with Gentile features, golden tresses, and immaculate historical robes. That is the image we see today in the painting, which was eventually acquired by the Hamburger Kunsthalle—twice. The museum explains why in “The Jesus Scandal,” an inventive exhibition marking the 75th anniversary of the artist’s death that recounts the genesis, reception, repainting, and subsequent peregrinations of Liebermann’s artwork. It includes preparatory sketches, works on the theme by such other artists as Rembrandt and Menzel, and documentation of the scandal at the Munich exhibition…

Please, continue reading here.

It includes a line up of photo and painted art depicting Jesus by various Jewish modern artists and photographers. One of the most impressive to me was this photo-rendition of a very Semitic-looking “Jesus” that has somehow escaped the notice of Western Christian artistic tradition – for judging by their iconography, the Byzantine tradition never lost sight of Jesus’ ethnic origins. Anyway, I think this is a good “bridge article” between Judaism and Christianity.

On a related subject, the current exhibit at Ben Uri Gallery: The London Jewish Museum of Art, titled Cross Purposes: Shock and Contemplation in Images of the Crucifixion, is raising some eyebrows, according to a recent story in the Jewish Chronicle (London), according to Menachem Wecker of the Huffington Post. Ben Uri is the first UK Museum and the first Jewish Museum internationally to trace the evolving representation of the Crucifixion from strictly Christian and religious iconography to a generic expression of anguish, designed specifically to elicit shock and contemplation, according the Museum’s website. I’ve read a similar idea in the novel My Name Is Asher Lev and its follow up, The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, which I still have to review here.

Anyway. All this is food for thought.