Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation: Women in the Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien at the German Fin de Siècle 9781501336140, 9781501336171, 9781501336164

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Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation

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Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation Women in the Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien at the German Fin de Siècle Lynne M. Swarts

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Lynne M. Swarts, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xxv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Maria Rajka Cover illustrations by E.M. Lilien, from left to right, Ein Garten ist meine Braut (1909); Harfenspielerin (1903); Das Stille Lied (c. 1900). 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. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Swarts, Lynne M., author. Title: Gender, orientalism and the Jewish nation at the German fin de siècle: women in the art of Ephraim Moses Lilien/ Lynne M. Swarts. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019026349 (print) | LCCN 2019026350 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501336140 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501336157 (epub) | ISBN 9781501336164 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Lilien, Ephraim Moses, 1874–1925–Criticism and interpretation. | Women in art. | Femininity in art. | Orientalism in art. | Art and society–Germany–History–19th century. | Art and society–Germany–History–20th century. Classification: LCC N6888.L48 S93 2019 (print) | LCC N6888.L48 (ebook) | DDC 700/.4522–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026349 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026350 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3614-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3616-4 eBook: 978-1-5013-3615-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Dedicated to the memory of my grandmothers Rachael Marks (née Rabinowich) (z”l) and Elizabeth Swarts (née Cohen) (z”l)

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Contents List of Figures List of Plates Foreword Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Biographical Timeline: Ephraim Moses Lilien and His Family Introduction 1 ‘We Put All Our Hope in Him’: Ephraim Moses Lilien and His Oeuvre 2 ‘No Longer Art Speaking but Culture’: Lilien, Zionism, and Male Aesthetics 3 Boundaries and Borderlines: The ‘New Woman’ and the New Jewish Woman 4 The Dangerous ‘Other’: Lilien’s Jewish Femmes Fatales, Other Male Avant-garde Behaviour, and Else Lasker-Schüler’s Transgendered Vision 5 Biblical Illustrations, Biblical Heroines, and the Search for Meaning 6 Ost und West, Zionism, and the Construction of German Jewish Orientalism 7 The Exotic ‘Other’: Lilien’s Oriental Beauties and a Jewish Oriental Voice? Conclusions Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Appendix D A Note on Sources Bibliography Index

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List of Figures BT.1 Grave of Helene and Ephraim Moses Lilien, Braunschweig (Brunswick). Reproduced from a photograph. Courtesy of Owen Watkinson, 2018. xxxi BT.2 The Magnus-Lilien home at 3 Wolfenbütteler Straße 3, Braunschweig (Brunswick). Reproduced from a photograph. Courtesy of the Centre for Jewish Art, Braunschweig. xxxii BT.3 E. M. Lilien, The Magnus-Lilien home at 3 Wolfenbütteler Straße 3, Braunschweig (Brunswick), 1913, etching, P74.09.2500. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. xxxiii I.1 E. M. Lilien, Logo of Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, c. 1906, ink and gouache on cardboard, B03496. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Peter Lanyi. 3 I.2 Israeli stamps from 1977, commemorating Lilien’s art from the Fifth Zionist Congress of 1905. http://www.boeliem.com/content/1977/209. 4 html, accessed 5 September 2009. Courtesy of Boelim Stamps, Israel. I.3 Book cover, Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). Courtesy of Cornell University Press. 5 I.4 E. M. Lilien, Abraham’s descendants will be like the stars (Genesis 15). In The Family Participation Haggadah, ed. David Dishon and Noam Zion (Jerusalem: The Shalom Hartman Institute, 1977), 77. Courtesy of the Shalom Hartman Institute. 5 I.5 Broken Fingaz Graffiti Collective, Homage to E. M. Lilien, Kazimierz, Kraków, 2014. Photograph by author. 6 1.1 E. M. Lilien, Selbsportrait (Self-Portrait) with Vom Ghetto nach Zion in background, 1912. Oz Almog, Gerhard Milchram, and Erwin A. Schmidl, E. M. Lilien, Jugendstil, Erotik, Zionismus [eine Ausstellung des Jüdischen Museums der Stadt Wien, 21 Oktober, 1998 bis 10 Jäner, 1999 und des Braunschweigischen Landesmuseums, 21 März bis 23 Mai,1999] (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 1998), 21. Photograph by I. Simon. Courtesy of the Braunschweig Landesmuseums. 16

List of Figures Photograph of Ephraim Moses Lilien at his desk, 1902. Probably from the German Jewish Press. From the Schwadron Portrait Collection. No. 002780928. Courtesy of the National Library, Jerusalem. 1.3 E. M. Lilien, Das Stille Lied (The Silent Song), Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien (Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d.), n.p. 2.1 E. M. Lilien, Market Place at Drohobycz, 1913, etching, P74.09.2498. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. 2.2 E. M. Lilien, Lieder der Arbeit, 1903. In Morris Rosenfeld, Lieder des Ghetto, trans. Berthold Feiwel, with illustrations by Ephraim Moses Lilien (Berlin: S. Calvary,1903), 25.  2.3 E. M. Lilien, Theodor Herzl on the balcony of the Three Kings Hotel, Basel, Switzerland, 1901. 2.4 E. M. Lilien, Moses Zerbricht die Tafeln (Moses Breaking the Tablets), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. I (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1908), 224. 2.5 E. M. Lilien, Moses, 1922. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 81. 2.6 E. M. Lilien, Vom Ghetto nach Zion (From Ghetto to Zion) or Congresscarte (Congress Card), 1901, India ink over graphite and white gouache, B51.11.2917. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner. 2.7 Members of the Democratic Fraction (?), at the Fifth Zionist Congress, 1901, Basel. No. 002643746. Courtesy of the National Library, Jerusalem. 2.8 E. M. Lilien, Die Erschaffung des Menschen (The Creation of Mankind) or Die Erschaffung des Dichters (The Creation of the Poet), 1903. In Morris Rosenfeld, Lieder des Ghetto, trans. Berthold Feiwel, with illustrations by Ephraim Moses Lilien (Berlin: S. Calvary,1903), 116–17. 2.9 L’Antijuif Francais Illustrè, September 1898. Exact whereabouts unknown. 2.10 Postcard for IVRIA, Association of Jewish Academics, Vienna, 1907. Postcard Collection, colour; 94 × 139 mm. No. 004714338. Courtesy of National Library, Jerusalem. 2.11 Der Vortrupp (The Advanced Troops). Cover illustration for Deutsche Zeitschrift für das Menschentum unserer Zeit 7, No. 24, 2 December 1919. In George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 96. 2.12 Phillip Rupprecht, Money is the God of the Jews. In Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom). (Nuremberg: Verlag Der

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List of Figures Stürmer, 1938/9), 42. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016 by the Katz Family. E. M. Lilien, Ex Libris E. M. Lilien [Hebrew], 1909, etching, P74.09.2452. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. E. M. Lilien, Sketch for Ex-Libris Dov (Boris) Schatz, n.d., India ink over graphite and white gouache, P83.04.5534. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. E. M. Lilien, Die Vertreibung aus dem Paradies (The Expulsion from Paradise), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. I (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1908), 40–41. E. M. Lilien, Plakat für das Berliner Tageblatt (Poster for the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt), 1899. Bruno Paul, Das Weib vor, hinter und auf dem Rade (Women before behind and upon the wheel), Jugend Vol. 1, No. 21, 23 May 1896, 335. Inv.-Nr. 45740 Z (SGS00027185). Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ diglit/jugend1896_1/0326/image. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, accessed 28 June 2018. Bruno Paul, Das Brotkörbchen (The Little Bread Basket). Cover for Simplicissimus Vol. 2, No. 35, 27 November 1897, 273. Inv.-Nr. Simpl. 1279 (SGS00025047). Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://www.simplicissimus.info/index.php?id=12. Courtesy of Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft, accessed 28 June 2018. E. M. Lilien, Lilien, Mein schönstes Fräulein, darf Ich’s wagen … (My fair young lady, May I dare …), aus der Jugend, Georg Hirt Verlag, n.d. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 44. E. M. Lilien, Künstlerpostkarte‚ “Die Kommenden” (An Art Postcard for “Die Kommenden”), 1899–1900, zincograph, B41.08.1075. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. E. M. Lilien, Ex Libris Anselm Hartog, 1899, zincograph, B07122. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. E. M. Lilien, Ex Libris, des Künstlers, c. 1898, zincograph, B44.12.1996. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner. Aubrey Beardsley, Suggested Reform in Ballet Costume, 1895. Aubrey Beardsley, original cover design for The Yellow Book, 1895. Alphonse Mucha, poster design for Job cigarette papers, 1896.

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Alphonse Mucha, poster design for Job cigarette papers, 1894. Gustav Klimt, Nuda Veritas, Ver Sacrum, 1898. E. M. Lilien, front page of Mai-Festzeitung (May Day Newspaper), 1899. E. M. Lilien, Helene with Night Crème, or Morning Reading, c. 1909, etching (red), P74.092455. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. E. M. Lilien, I Need No Aid, 1911, etching, P74.09.2483. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. E. M. Lilien, Frau Magnus at Her Writing Desk or Portrait of His Motherin-law, c. 1909, etching, P74.09.2424. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. E. M. Lilien, Otto Magnus Reading by the Light of the Lamp or Portrait of His Father-in-law, c. 1909, etching, P74.09.2432. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. Nahida Remy, c. 1985, The Jewish Woman, trans. by Louise Mannheimer (Cincinnati: C. J. Krehbiel, 1895), 4. Epigraphs, Nahida Remy, The Jewish Woman, trans. by Louise Mannheimer (Cincinnati: C. J. Krehbiel, 1895), 6. Gustav Moreau, Salome Dancing before Herod, often known as Salome Tattooed, 1874, oil on canvas, 92 × 60 cm. Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris. Alphonse Mucha, La Samaritaine, 1897, colour lithograph. Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax, 1893. Oscar Kokoschka, Pietà (Poster for Mörderer, Hoffnung der Frauen [Murderer, Hope of Women]), 1909, lithograph. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Straße, Berlin (Street, Berlin), 1913, oil on canvas, 120.6 × 91.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA. Public domain. Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1901, oil on canvas, 84 × 42 cm. Österreichische Galerie, Belvedere, Vienna. Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil, silver and gold on canvas, 138 × 138 cm. Neue Galerie, New York. Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer II, 1912, oil on canvas, 190 × 120 cm. Private Collection. Max Liebermann, Simson und Delila (Samson and Delilah), 1901–02, oil on canvas, 151.2 × 212 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Lovis Corinth, Salome II, 1899–1900, oil on canvas, 127 × 147 cm. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.

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4.11 Max Liebermann, Der Zwölfjährige Jesus im Tempel (The TwelveYear-Old Jesus in the Temple), 1879, oil on canvas, 149.6 × 130.8 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. 4.12 Portrait of Else Lasker-Schüler, 1907, black and white photograph. Public domain. 4.13 ChanukkaLichter (Chanukah Lights), Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 883–84. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/ Digitale Sammlungen Judaica /http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ cm/periodical/pageview/2584878, accessed 4 May 2018. 4.14 Gedichte von Else Lasker-Shüler, Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 931–32. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica //http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/ periodical/pageview/2584902, accessed 4 May 2018. 4.15 Die Flötenspielende Else Lasker-Schüler as Fakir von Thebes, c. 1910. Frontispiece of Mein Herz (My Heart), 1912. Photo by Becker and Maaß. ARC. Ms. Var. 501 13 01. Courtesy of the Else Lasker-Schüler Archive, Archives Department, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. 4.16 Egyptian Relief from the tomb of Rij (Ria). ÄM 7278, relief. Courtesy of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung. 4.17 Elsa Lasker-Schüler, Die Lÿrische Missgeburt (The Lyrical Miscarriage or Freak), 1900. Ricarda Dick, Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder, 118. Courtesy of Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin. 4.18 Elsa Lasker-Schüler, Ganzfigur im Linksprofil, auf dem Arm eine Stadtminiatur (A large figure in left profile, a miniature city on her arm), 1912. Ricarda Dick, Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder, 15. Courtesy of Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin. 4.19 Elsa Lasker-Schüler, Abigail III/ehemaliger Prinz von Theben (Abigail III, Old Boy Prince of Thebes), between February and May 1913, pencil, ink, chalk on squared paper, 119 × 95mm, with inscriptions at lower right and bottom, ‘For Prince of Thebes.’ Ricarda Dick, Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder, 199. Courtesy of Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin. 4.20 Lasker-Schüler, Die Judischen, between February and May 1913. Ricarda Dick, Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder, 19. Courtesy of Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin. 5.1a Title Page, Pracht Bibel, 1894 edition, Karlo Vegelahn, Bibel Archive, 12 March 2014. Available at: http://www.bibelarchiv-vegelahn.de/bibel/ Fuerst_Julius-Leipzig-000_small.jpg, accessed 16 June 2014.

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List of Figures 5.1b Rebekah wird als Braut geschmückt (Rebecca as the adorned bride) from the Pracht Bibel, c. 1874. Courtesy of Eric Chaim Kline. 5.2 Simeon Solomon, The Mother of Moses, 1860, oil on canvas, 59.7 × 48.3 cm. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington. Bequest of Robert Louis Isaacson, 1999. Object No. 19999–1. http://emuseum.delart.org:8080/ emuseum/view/objects/asitem/items$0040:8619. 5.3 Maurycy Gottlieb, Christ Preaching at Capernaum, oil on canvas, 110 × 80 cm. National Museum of Warsaw, Warsaw. Collection no. MP 431. 5.4 William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1854–55, oil on canvas, 141 × 85.7 cm. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham. Public domain. 5.5 Friedrich Williams Kleukens, Esther. In The Book of Esther, c. 1908. Insel-Verlag, Leipzig. XXIX S: 2 ganzseitige Holzschnitte mit Golddruck. Gedruckt als erstes Buch der Ernst Ludwig Presse, Darmstadt. Courtesy of Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin. 5.6 Gustave Doré, Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, Sainte Bible, 1865, n.p. 5.7 Gustave Doré, Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law, Sainte Bible, 1865, n.p. 5.8 Gustave Doré, The Pharisee and the Publican, Sainte Bible, 1865, n.p. 5.9 Horace Vernet, Judah and Tamar, 1840, oil on canvas, 129 × 97.5 cm. The Wallace Collection, London. 5.10 J. James Tissot, Adam and Eve Driven from Paradise, c. 1896–1902. Collection of The Jewish Museum, New York. 5.11 J. James Tissot, The Plague of Locusts (Exodus 10:13), c. 1896–1902. Collection of the Jewish Museum, New York. 5.12 E. M. Lilien, Sprüche Salmos, das Sohnes Davids, des Königs von Israel (The Proverbs of Solomon, The Son of David, The King of Israel), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1912), 12–13. 5.13a E. M. Lilien, Daniel, Das Buch Daniel (The Book of Daniel), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1912), 264. 5.13b E. M. Lilien, Arab Figure in an Abbaya, photograph, 1906, TAMA No. 88. Courtesy of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tel Aviv. 5.14a E. M. Lilien, Illustration for Die Psalmen (The Book of Psalms), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VI (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1909), 109.

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5.14b E. M. Lilien, The Thinker (Samaritan High Priest Amram Ben Itzhak), photograph, 1906, TAMA No. 135. Courtesy of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tel Aviv. 5.15a E.M. Lilien, Illustration from Die Psalmen (The Book of Psalms), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VI (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1909), 21. 5.15b E. M. Lilien, Jew from Yemen, photograph, 1906, TAMA No. 28. Courtesy of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tel Aviv. 5.16 Drawing class at the Bezalel School, photograph, 1906. Courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. 5.17 E. M. Lilien, Esther, Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1908), 236. 5.18 E. M. Lilien, Esther, Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1908), 254. 5.19 Maurycy Gottlieb, Jewish Women from the East, c. 1878, oil on wood, 20.7 × 15.6 cm. Anonymous private collection, Israel. 5.20 E. M. Lilien, Portrait of Helene Lilien with Hat, 1909, etching in redbrown. P74.092460. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. 5.21 E. M. Lilien, Study for a Carpet, dedicated to Mr and Mrs David Wolffson, 1906, oil chalk and graphite on canvas, 185 × 305.5 cm, B88.027. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner. 5.22 Drawing of Xerxes, after relief in Persepolis. After A. B. Tilda. Studies and Restorations of Persepolis and other Sites of Fars II, 54, Figure 6. Courtesy of the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East, Rome. 5.23 E. M. Lilien, Rahab, Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. I (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1908), 502. 5.24 Hans (Jan) Collaert II, Rabab, c. 1591. Engraving after Marten de Vos, c. 1581. Plate 8 in the series Icones Illustrium Feminarum Veteris Testamenti (The Celebrated Women of the Old Testament), consisting of twenty engravings (plus frontispiece) by Hans or Adrien Collaert and Carel van Mallery, published in Antwerp by Phillips Galle (1537–1612). 5.25 E. M. Lilien, Rahab von Jericho (Rahab of Jericho), Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p. 5.26 E. M. Lilien, Rahab die Jerochinitan (Rahab the Jerochinian), Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries,

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List of Figures Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p. 5.27 E. M. Lilien, Miriam, Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. I (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1908), 187. 5.28 E. M. Lilien, Ruth, Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1912), 206. Etching, c. 1911, P74.09.2476. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. 5.29 E. M. Lilien, Photographs of sitters for his biblical illustrations, 1906. TAMA No. 87 and TAMA No. 91. Courtesy of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tel Aviv. 6.1 The Kaiser and Kaiserin at the Tomb of King David in Jerusalem. Photograph from a personal collection compiled by the Kaiserin and presented by her to Hugh, 5th Earl of Lonsdale. Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London, http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/ object/205018343, accessed 19 March 2014. 6.2 Garabed Krikorian (before 1914), cabinet portrait of the photographer’s niece and friend from Germany in local dresses kept at the studio for customers (Armenian Patriarchy, Jerusalem). Unknown photographer at the Armenian Convent (before 1914), Unknown female tourist in male Bedouin dress with accessories, dry-gelatin glass negative, modern print. Yeshayahu Nir, The Bible and Its Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land 1839–1899, 125. Courtesy of The National Library, Jerusalem. 6.3 Title Page, Ost und West, with list of sub-editors. Ost und West Issue 9, September 1901, 883–84. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.unifrankfurt.de/cm/periodical/pageview/2584441, accessed 4 May 2018. 6.4 Advertisement for Russian readers, Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 957–58. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/ Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ cm/periodical/pageview/2584920, accessed 4 May 2018. 6.5 Postcard of the 1896 painting by Lesser Ury, Jerusalem, c. 1920, published by the Deutsch-Israelitischer gemeindebund, Berlin. Courtesy of Kedem Auction House, Ltd. Available at: https://www.kedemauctions.com/content/eight-jewish-postcards-%E2%80%93-publisheddeutsch-israelitischer-gemeindebund-berlin, accessed 4 May 2018.  6.6 E. M. Lilien, Cover illustration, Ost und West, 1901–1906. 6.7 E. M. Lilien, Logo for Leo Winz & Co., Kunstverlag Phönix, Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 955. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek

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List of Figures Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlunen. ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/preview/2584914, accessed 4 May 2018. E. M. Lilien, Cover illustration, Lieder des Ghetto, 1903. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 121. Vignette by Lilien appearing on the last page of every issue of Ost und West Issue 1, January 1901, 297–98. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlungen. ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/2608726, accessed 4 May 2018. Alfred Nossig, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), Ost und West Issue 1, January 1901, 5. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/ Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ cm/periodical/2608151, accessed 4 May 2018. Samuel Hirszenberg, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), Ost und West Issue 10, October 1902, 661–62. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/http://sammlungen.ub.unifrankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/2586159, accessed 4 May 2018. Notice on the Jüdischer Verlag, Ost und West Issue 1, January 1902, 65–66. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/ periodical/2585060, accessed 4 May 2018. E. M. Lilien, Vater und Sohn, Ost und West Issue 12, December 1904, 817–18. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Kunstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 141. E. M. Lilien, Ex-libris Maxim Gorki, 1902. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Kunstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 96. E. M. Lilien, Le-Metim ‘al kidush ha-shem be-Kishinov (Dedicated to the Martyrs of Kishinev), Den Märtyrern von Kishinew, 1903. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Kunstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 137. E. M. Lilien, Väter und Söhne, Ost und West Issue 12, December 1904, 813–14. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/ periodical/2591181, accessed 4 May 2018. 3 Jüdische Frauentypen von Cochin in Indien (3 Jewish female types from Cochin in India), Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 933–34. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale

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List of Figures Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/ periodical/2584903, accessed 4 May 2018. 6.18 Francis Galton, Photographs of Jewish Londoners, 1891. In Maurice Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (London; New York; Melbourne: The Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1911), 66–7. On the right are the original photographs of Jewish students at a London school. On the left Galton superimposed the original photographs to produce a multiple exposure that created just four ‘types’ of Jews. 6.19 Maurice Fishberg, Photographs of a Polish Jew, a Galician Jew and a Russian Jewess. In Fishberg, The Jews, A Study of Race and Environment (London; New York; Melbourne: The Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1911), 115. 6.20 Postcard, Jude aus Jemen (Jew from Yemen), c. 1920s. Courtesy of Barbara Simon. 6.21 Postcard, Kopf einer Jüdin (Head of a Jewess [from Jerusalem]), c. 1920s. Courtesy of Barbara Simon. 6.22 Jewish ornamentation from Syria? Parchment found in the Cairo Genizah, David Baron Günzburg, L’Ornament Hébreu (The Hebrew Ornament) (Berlin: Cavalry, 1905), 20. Courtesy of J.C.S.,Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlung Judaica/http://sammlungen.ub.unifrankfurt.de/freimann/content/pageview/265871, accessed 4 May 2018. 6.23 Horace Vernet, Judith mit dem Haupte des Holofernes (Judith with the head of Holofernes), Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 693–94. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/ periodical/pageview/2584467, accessed 4 May 2018. 6.24 Jean-François Portaels, Jüdin aus Tangiers (Jewess from Tangiers), Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 905–06. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/ pageview/2584889/, accessed 4 May 2018. 7.1 E. M. Lilien, Liebeswerben im Frühling (Courting in Spring). In Lied der Lieder (Song of Songs), Ferdinand Rahlwes, ed., Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol.VI (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1909), 309. 7.2 E. M. Lilien, Ein Garten ist meine Braut (In My Garden Is My Betrothed). In Lied der Lieder (Song of Songs), Ferdinand Rahlwes ed., Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol.VI (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1909), 312. 7.3 E. M. Lilien, Liebesfrühling (Spring Love). In Lied der Lieder (Song of Songs), Ferdinand Rahlwes, ed., Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol.VI (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1909), 318.

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E. M. Lilien, Prinzessin Sabbat (Princess Sabbath), Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p. E. M. Lilien, Harfenspielerin (Harp Player). In Morris Rosenfeld, Lieder Des Ghetto, trans. Berthold Feiwel, with illustrations by Ephraim Moses Lilien (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1903), 107. Kolomon Moser, Allegorie Ver Sacrum (An Allegory for Sacred Spring), Ver Sacrum Vol. 1, January 1898, 5. Indian ink and watercolour on paper, 41.9 × 16.5 cm. Bruno Paul, Der Münchener Jugend Brunnen (The Munich Fountain of Youth), Simplicissimus Vol. 10, 5 June 1897, 76. Pencil and wash on paper, 38.1 × 60.4 cm. Inv-Nr. Simpl. 1250 (SGS00027187). Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://www.simplicissimus.info/uploads/tx_lombkswjournaldb/ pdf/1/02/02_10.pdf, Courtesy of Deutsche ForschungsGemeinschaft, accessed 28 June 2018. Lovis Corinth, Drawing, Jugend Vol. 2, No. 28, 11 July 1896, 456, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1896_2/0035/ image, accessed 27 June 2018. Marie Stüler-Walde, Auf Flügelnd des Gesanges (On Wings of Song), Jugend Vol. 1, No. 21, 22 May 1897, 337, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uniheidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1897_1/0331/image, accessed 27 June 2018. Hans Christiansen, Cover illustration, Jugend Vol. 2, No. 48, 26 November 1898, 795, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg. de/diglit/jugend1898_2/0379/image, accessed 27 June 2018. Bernhard Pankok, Jugend Vol. 1, No. 21, 22 May 1897, 39, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1897_1/0042/image, accessed 27 June 2018. Ludwig von Zumbusch, Cover, Jugend Vol. 2, No. 40, 2 October 1897, 669, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Colour lithograph. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg. de/diglit/jugend1897_2/0217/image, accessed 27 June 2018. E. M. Lilien, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), 1898. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 41.

7.5

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7.7

7.8

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List of Figures 7.14 Page of advertisements, Jugend Vol. 1, No. 22, 29 May 1897, 366, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1897_1/0361/ image, accessed 27 June 2018. 7.15 Marcus Behmer, Title page, Salome, 1908. In Hedwig Lachmann, Salome (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1908). Courtesy of Suhrkamp/Insel Verlag 7.16 Henry Van de Velde, Cover, Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch fur Alle und Klein (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and for None), 1908. Double-page ornamental title, printed in purple and gold, after designs by Henry van der Velde, text printed in black and gold, type designed in 1900 by G. Lemmen. Courtesy of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 7.17 E. M. Lilien, Cover, Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p. 7.18 E. M. Lilien, Artist’s name with surrounded by flourishes, Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p. 7.19 Marcus Behmer, Salome. In Hedwig Lachmann Landauer, Salome, 1908. Courtesy of Suhrkamp/Insel Verlag. 7.20 Marcus Behmer, Der Wunsch (Desire). In Hedwig Lachmann Landauer, Salome, 1908. Courtesy of Suhrkamp/Insel Verlag. 7.21 T. T. (Thomas Theodor) Heine, Poster for Simplicissimus, 1896, colour lithograph, 79 × 59 cm. 7.22 T. T. (Thomas Theodor) Heine, Judith (Munich: Hans von Weber, 1908). In Timothy W. Hiles, Thomas Theodor Heine: Fin-de-Siècle Munich and the Origins of Simplicissimus (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 210. 7.23 T. T. (Thomas Theodor) Heine, Halbe Unschuld: Demi-vierge (Half Innocent: Half-Virgin), 1895. In Timothy Hiles, Thomas Theodor Heine: Fin-de-Siècle Munich and the Origins of Simplicissimus (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 206. 7.24 T. T. (Thomas Theodor) Heine, Judith, (Munich: Hans von Weber, 1908). In Timothy Hiles, Thomas Theodor Heine: Fin-de-Siècle Munich and the Origins of Simplicissimus (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 209.

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List of Plates 1 Grave of Helene and Ephraim Moses Lilien, Braunschweig, (Brunswick). Reproduced from a photograph. Courtesy of Owen Watkinson, 2018. 2 E. M. Lilien, The Magnus-Lilien home at 3 Wolfenbütteler Straße 3, Braunschweig (Brunswick), 1913, etching, P74.09.2500. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. 3 E. M. Lilien, Logo of Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, c. 1906, ink and gouache on cardboard, B03496. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Peter Lanyi. 4 Israeli stamps from 1977, commemorating Lilien’s art from the Fifth Zionist Congress of 1905. http://www.boeliem.com/content/1977/209.html, accessed 5 September 2009. Courtesy of Boelim Stamps, Israel. 5 Broken Fingaz Graffiti Collective, Homage to E. M. Lilien, Kazimierz, Kraków, 2014. Photograph by author 6 E. M. Lilien, Vom Ghetto nach Zion (From Ghetto to Zion) or Congresscarte (Congress Card), 1901, India ink over graphite and white gouache, B51.11.2917. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner. 7 Members of the Democratic Fraction (?), at the Fifth Zionist Congress, 1901, Basel. No. 002643746. Courtesy of the National Library, Jerusalem. 8 Phillip Rupprecht, Money is the God of the Jews. In Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom). (Nuremberg: Verlag Der Stürmer, 1938/9), 42. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016 by the Katz Family. 9 E. M. Lilien, Ex Libris E. M. Lilien [Hebrew], 1909, etching, P74.09.2452. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. 10 E. M. Lilien, Sketch Ex-Libris for Dov (Boris) Schatz, n.d., India ink over graphite and white gouache, P83.04.5534. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. 11 E. M. Lilien, Plakat für das Berliner Tageblatt (Poster for the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt), 1899.

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12 Bruno Paul, Das Weib vor, hinter und auf dem Rade (Women before behind and upon the wheel), Jugend Vol. 1, No. 21, 23 May 1896, 335. Inv.-Nr. 45740 Z (SGS00027185), Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1896_1/0326/image, Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany accessed 28 June 2018. 13 Bruno Paul, Das Brotkörbchen (The Little Bread Basket). Cover for Simplicissimus Vol. 2, No. 35, 27 November 1897, 273. Inv.-Nr. Simpl. 1279 (SGS00025047). Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://www.simplicissimus.info/index.php?id=12. Courtesy of Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft, accessed 28 June 2018. 14 Alphonse Mucha, poster design for Job cigarette papers, 1896. 15 E. M. Lilien, Helene with Night Crème, or Morning Reading, c. 1909, etching (red), P74.092455. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman. 16 Alphonse Mucha, La Samaritaine, 1897, colour lithograph. 17 Oscar Kokoschka, Pietà (Poster for Mörderer, Hoffnung der Frauen [Murderer, Hope of Women]), 1909, lithograph. 18 Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1901, oil on canvas, 84 × 42 cm. Österreichische Galerie, Belvedere, Vienna. 19 Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil, silver and gold on canvas, 138 × 138 cm. Neue Galerie, New York. 20 Max Liebermann, Simson und Delila (Samson and Delilah), 1901–02, oil on canvas, 151.2 × 212 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. 21 Max Liebermann, Der Zwölfjährige Jesus im Tempel (The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple), 1879, oil on canvas, 149.6 × 130.8 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. 22 Simeon Solomon, The Mother of Moses, 1860, oil on canvas, 59.7 × 48.3 cm. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington. Bequest of Robert Louis Isaacson, 1999. Object No. 19999–1. http://emuseum.delart.org:8080/emuseum/view/objects/ asitem/items$0040:8619. 23 Maurycy Gottlieb, Christ Preaching at Capernaum, oil on canvas, 110 × 80 cm. National Museum of Warsaw, Warsaw. Collection no. MP 431. 24 William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1854–55, oil on canvas, 141 × 85.7 cm, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham. Public domain.

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25 E. M. Lilien, Sprüche Salmos, das Sohnes Davids, des Königs von Israel (The Proverbs of Solomon, The Son of David, The King of Israel), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1912), 12–13. 26 E. M. Lilien, Study for a Carpet, dedicated to Mr and Mrs David Wolffson, 1906, oil chalk and graphite on canvas, 185 × 305.5 cm, B88.027. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner. 27 Jewish ornamentation from Syria? Parchment found in the Cairo Genizah, David Baron Günzburg, L’Ornament Hébreu (The Hebrew Ornament) (Berlin: Cavalry, 1905), 20. Courtesy of J.C.S.,Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/ Digitale Sammlung Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/freimann/content/ pageview/265871, accessed 4 May 2018. 28 Kolomon Moser, Allegorie Ver Sacrum (An Allegory for Sacred Spring), Ver Sacrum Vol. 1, January 1898, 5. Indian ink and watercolour on paper, 41.9 × 16.5 cm. 29 Bruno Paul, Der Münchener Jugend Brunnen (The Munich Fountain of Youth), Simplicissimus Vol. 10, 5 June 1897, 76. Pencil and wash on paper, 38.1 × 60.4 cm. Inv-Nr. Simpl. 1250 (SGS00027187). Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://www.simplicissimus.info/ uploads/tx_lombkswjournaldb/pdf/1/02/02_10.pdf. Courtesy of Deutsche ForschungsGemeinschaft, accessed 28 June 2018. 30 Hans Christiansen, Cover illustration, Jugend Vol. 2, No. 48, 26 November 1898, 795 – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1898_2/0379/image, accessed 27 June 2018. 31 Henry Van de Velde, Cover, Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch fur Alle und Klein (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and for None), 1908. Double-page ornamental title, printed in purple and gold, after designs by Henry van der Velde, text printed in black and gold, type designed in 1900 by G. Lemmen. Courtesy of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 32 E. M. Lilien, Cover, Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p.

Foreword It is an honour to write a brief foreword to Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation at the German Fin de Siècle: Women in the Art of Ephraim Moses Lilien by Lynne M. Swarts. E. M. Lilien (1874–1925) is one of the most significant Jewish artists of modern times. Best known for his pen-and-ink drawings, Lilien also was a talented photographer and motion-picture cameraman. In the late nineteenth century and up through the first decades of the twentieth, his graphics immeasurably stimulated fascination in the Zionist cause and supplied Jewry with realistic and imaginative portrayals of themselves, which aroused great interest – and more than occasionally, thrills. With intense creativity, verve, and complexity, he fixed the gaze of his viewers on unequivocally Jewish subjects, informed them of Zionism’s aspirations, and vastly enriched nationalism’s range of possibilities for Jews. Above all, he demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt that Theodor Herzl’s fledgling national endeavour had a vibrant artistic vision in its conceptual arsenal. Beyond Zionism, Lilien illustrated some of the most intriguing, beautifully produced books in the German Jewish cultural orbit that allowed for figural representations. Perhaps it is not surprising that there is a good deal of ongoing comment centred on E. M. Lilien. A man of humble, East European origins, he faced significant challenges in the first wave of secular Jewish artists to breach the mainstream. Lilien nevertheless strongly influenced the course of modern Jewish history through his drawings, such as the postcard image for the Fifth Zionist Congress, and photography, notably the much-reproduced portrait of Herzl on the balcony of his suite at the Three Kings Hotel in Basel, during the foundational Zionist Congress (1897). He might have forged a notable national role for himself (mainly as a photographer) in post-1918 Austria, had it not been on the losing side of the Great War. Beginning some four decades ago, Lilien was (and continues to be) investigated mainly in the context of Zionist politics. In the last several years, however, unusually perceptive scholars, scattered throughout the world and in diverse disciplines, have offered fresh perspectives on his colourful life and achievements. Chief among them is the cultural and literary scholar, Mark Gelber. Yet a seminal dimension of Lilien’s body of work remains largely unexcavated: the notable portion of his images featuring Jewish women. In Jewish Studies and art historical scholarship, there has been limited treatment of Lilien’s portrayals of women, and no attempt at an overview or comprehensive exploration of the half of Jewish humanity over which Lilien exercised serious concern. Such a vast lacuna, however, invites Swarts’s opportunity: this book is the first, and authoritative, word on a significant and previously overlooked subject. The work before you is truly exceptional: it comprises a substantial contribution to the history of art, modern Jewish history, and its nationalist incarnations. Highly original and critical in the best sense, it should elicit great interest in a number of disciplines and subfields. Swarts’s interpretation spans history, genealogy, literature,

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art history, cultural studies, and women’s studies. She has illuminated, with force and eloquence, the distinctive visions of E. M. Lilien, illustrated here in a manner that fabulously highlights and complements her trenchant analysis. Swarts argues, in contrast to most writing about Lilien, that the Jewish women in his oeuvre merit focused consideration because they were neither disparaged, ‘antifeminist femme fatales, nor gendered, westernised, male orientalist fantasies.’ On the contrary, Lilien’s images of Jewish women stem from a proactive ‘inner search for roots, authenticity, and Heimat,’ expressing the simultaneity of his self-apprehension as ‘Asiatic and Westerner, occidental and oriental at the turn of the twentieth century in Central Europe.’ Among Swarts’s strikingly original contentions is that Lilien’s imagination of Jewish women, compared to the creations of non-Jewish artists, renders them as sensuous, modern, and radiating a palpable ‘energy and power.’ These gave Lilien’s audience ‘an alternative representation of the European Jewish woman’, which stood in contrast, as well, to typical texts and images of women in other Zionist media. Lilien’s art furthermore exhibited the possibility for Jewish women to ‘embrace their sexuality’ and transform a typically misogynist portrayal of ‘a sexually dangerous woman’ into something quite different: woman as the guardian and possessor of her ‘own personal liberation’. Readers will appreciate that this is an extraordinarily enlightening and incisive book, providing truly novel and compelling perspectives on E. M. Lilien, which richly deserves our attention. Michael Berkowitz University College London

Acknowledgements Through the process of writing this book, I met many wonderful people who have helped shape and develop my work. I offer all of them my heartfelt thanks for their gracious assistance and generosity of spirit. I must first thank the Australian Academy of the Humanities for their Publication Subsidy Scheme grant, which allowed me to undertake the permission for so many of the images that appear in this book. Without this grant my book would never have been possible. Special thanks goes to Dr Cindy McCreery, without whose infectious encouragement and expertise this book would never have come to fruition. Similarly, Professor Michael Berkowitz urged me to write this book, was gracious enough to write my Foreword and understood exactly what my research was about. Professor Richard I. Cohen, offered advice and support during a crucial stage in my research, sensitively suggesting the help of my talented editor, Dr Sharon Assaf. During this journey, many other colleagues were happy to read and critique parts of my work, and I thank them for their time and thoughtful responses, particularly Professors John Docker, Konrad Kwiet, Mark Ledbury, and Robert Aldrich. A special mention goes to Professor A. Dirk Moses, who originally saw that my project might have potential. I thank the Sir Zelman Cowen University Fund, which sponsored my final research trip to Israel as an Exchange Fellow at the Hebrew University. At the Hebrew University Art History Department, I thank Dr Lola Kantovsky and her Post-Graduate ‘writing history’ class. Their enthusiastic question and answer session reminded me of the reason we all begin our research in the first place. Thanks also goes to the staff at the Centre for Jewish Art, who helped to make my stay at the Hebrew University a little more haimish. This includes the director, Dr Vladimir Levin, Dr Sergey R. Kravtsov, and Dr Anna Berezin. As an Exchange Fellow, I also met with many Lilien scholars, including Professors Mark Gelber, Haim Finkelstein, Yigal Zalmona, and Amitai Mendelsohn and I thank them all for being such affable and generous hosts. On other research trips, I received assistance in a variety of ways, from suggestions on appropriate texts to read, people to see, and artists to include, to stimulating discussions; I am grateful to all the people involved. In Germany, this includes Chana Schütz, Barbara Hahn, Dr Mirjam Zadoff, and staff at the Jewish Museum, Berlin, including Ulrike Sonnemann, Theresia Ziehe, and Inka Bertz. I acknowledge the assistance of the librarians Dr Christian Hermann, Karl-Frieder Netsch, and Eva Rothkirch, as well as Eric Chaim Kline. In Israel, I also thank Ruthi Ofek, Emily D. Bilski, the curatorial staff at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art including Ahuva Israel, Irith Hadar, Ruth Feldmann as well as the library staff. I gratefully acknowledge the staff in the Prints and Drawing Department

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at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in particular, curator Ronit Sorek, who so patiently answered all my questions. In New York City, I want to thank all the staff at the Center for Jewish History for their assistance, including Renate Evers, Michael Simonson, and Renata Stein in the Leo Baeck Institute, New York. Thanks also goes to Professor Marion Kaplan and Professor Atina Grossman for giving generously of their time and suggesting appropriate texts. I am ever thankful for the help from the living relatives of Ephraim Moses Lilien: Tom and Sue Peters, the children of Lilien’s daughter Hannah, who were so obliging with information regarding Lilien’s life, his wife Helene, and the LilienMagnus biographical information; Chava Givoni, the daughter of Lilien’s son, Otto, who graciously allowed me into her home and carefully answered numerous email questions regarding her remembrances of her father and grandfather; and last but not least, Lilien’s two relatives in Sydney, Australia, cousins Nic Witton and Barbara Simon, who both were eager to help find out more about their Uncle Otto’s father. Barbara allowed me to view her original Lilien drawings and prints, and special thanks goes to her relative in Braunschweig, Jürgen Bartels, who generously carried out some detective work for me. I thank the research library staff at the University of Sydney, who have patiently put up with endless enquiries over the years, particularly Rena McGrogan, Michelle Harrison, and Aleksandra Nikolic. Much of this work could not have been done without support and encouragement from other colleagues, as well as friends and family. Thank you so much to all those over the years who encouraged me and listened to all my gripes or who read parts of my manuscript: Dr Avril Alba, Dr Shelia Christofides, Alyssa Dar, Dr Emmanuelle Guenot, Dr Penny Nash, Marie Mackenzie, Greg Murrie, Dr Paul Monaghan and my friends Dr Debby Bachmeyer, Rachel Han, Dr Jane Hunter, Tina Powis, Ellen Roger, Dr Margit Schad in Berlin, Clare Sneddon, Prue Walker, and Liz Wilson. My family must receive the final thanks, including my supportive parents, Adrienne and Maurice Swarts, my loving husband Dr Don Perlgut, and our children Joel and Chana, who both grew into young adults during this journey. Lynne Swarts, Sydney, 10 October, 2019.

List of Abbreviations

Bar-Am, PwL

Micha and Orna Bar-Am, Painting with Light, the Photographic Aspect in the Work of E. M. Lilien. Tel Aviv: Dvir Publishing, 1991.

Brieger, EML

Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien, Eine künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhunderwende. Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922.

Brunotte, Ludewig and Stähler, Orientalism

Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler, eds., Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2017.

Gilman, ‘Salome’

Sander Gilman, ‘Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess.’ In The Jew in the Text. Edited by Tamar Garb and Linda Nochlin, 97–120. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.

Kalmar and Penslar, OJ

Orientalism and the Jews. Edited by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005

Lilien, EMLsW

Ephraim Moses Lilien, E. M. Lilien, sein Werk, mit Einer Einleitung von Stefan Zweig. Goslar: J. Jager und Sohn, 1903.

Lilien, Briefe

Ephraim Moses Lilien, Briefe an seine Frau, 1905–1925. Königstein: Jüdischer Verlag Athenäum, 1985.

Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’

Paul Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism, the Ostjuden and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self- Affirmation.’ In Studies in Contemporary Jewry. Edited by Johnathan Frankel, 96–139. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Rahlwes, Bibel

Ferdinand Rahlwes and Ephraim Moses Lilien, Die Bücher der Bibel, 3 vols. Braunschweig: Westermann, 1908–1912.

Rosenfeld, Lieder

Morris Rosenfeld, Lieder des Ghetto, trans. Berthold Feiwel, with illustrations by Ephraim Moses Lilien. Berlin: S. Calvary, 1903.

OW

Ost und West

Stanislawski, Zionism

Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Biographical Timeline: Ephraim Moses Lilien and His Family 1874

Born 23 May, in Drohobycz, Austrian Galicia, to Jacob Ha Cohen (1854–1907), a wood-engraver and Keila (Caroline) née Langermann (1855–before 1920). Eldest of six children. Other siblings: Reisel Lilien (1876–76, aged 5 months), Marcus Lilien (1879–1938), Ruchel Lilien (1880–82), Juda Lilien (1882–83), Minna Dichter (1885– New York 1972), Hania Lilien (1889–1939).

c. 1886

Begins Realschule in Lwów (Lemberg; today Lviv, Ukraine).1 Financial constraints force him to abandon his high-school studies after only two years and take up work as a sign painter.

1890

With funding from relative, Ignace (Ignacy) Lilien (1897–1964), he moves to Kraków to study in the Kunstschule (now Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts) under Jan Matejko (1838–93), one of Poland’s greatest contemporary artists and nationalists.2 He leaves after two years due to lack of funds and returns to Drohobycz.

1892

Wins first prize in competition honouring Polish poet, writer, and nationalist Kornel (Cornelius) Ujeski (1823–97).

1894

Uses prize money to travel to Vienna. Applies to the Academy of Fine Arts in hope of studying with Christian Griepenkerl (who later taught Egon Schiele), but is rejected and moves to Munich.

1896

Wins prize in nature-photography competition sponsored by new periodical Jugend, a showcase for the work of radical avant-garde artists. Aptly named Jugendstil after the journal, the style becomes the German equivalent of the French Art Nouveau movement. Lilien works for Jugend for three years and for the socialist publication Süddeutsche Postillion. German actress Minnie Hauck hears about his photographic accomplishments and commissions him to photograph her in Lucerne. He befriends artist Marie Luise Karoline Adelheid Stüler (b. Eberswalde, Ukermark near Berlin 1868–1904). Marie and Lilien have a son, Alexander Stüler (b. Munich 1896–Bayersoien 1974).

1898

Illustrates his first book, Der Zöllner von Klausen (The Tax Collector of Klausen) by Johann von Wildenradt.

1899–1900

Sent on assignment by Jugend and Süddeutsche Postillion to Berlin. Illustrates his second book Juda (1900), a collection of ballads by

Biographical Timeline: Ephraim Moses Lilien and His Family

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Borries von Münchhausen, which helps launch his career as an illustrator. Co-chairs the opening of the first poster exhibition in Berlin in 1899. His drawings for Jugend are included in the collective exhibit of the Association of German Illustrators at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1899. Has his first solo show in Leipzig.3 1901

Attends the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel as a delegate. Designs the poster From Ghetto to Zion for the event and with Martin Buber organises the first modern exhibition of Jewish artists featuring twelve of his works (out of forty-eight works in the exhibition). Takes the iconic photograph of Herzl leaning on the balcony overlooking the River Rhine at the Drei Könige (Three Kings) Hotel in Basel.

1902 Founds Jüdische Verlag (Jewish Press) with Buber and Berthold Feiwel. Publication of his third book of illustrations, Lieder des Ghetto (Songs of the Ghetto), in collaboration with Feiwel who translated the Yiddish text of Morris Rosenfeld into German. Travels to Russia with writer Maxim Gorki (1868–1936), to illustrate his proposed book Zbornik. 1903

Sent as a representative to the Sixth Zionist Congress. Publication of the first monograph of Lilien’s oeuvre, with foreword by Stefan Zweig (1881–1942).

1905

Begins a correspondence with art student Helene Magnus of Braunschweig, Germany.

1906

Visits Palestine for the inauguration of the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem. He is appointed as a teacher of art and assistant to the director, Boris Schatz, but stays for only six or seven months. He marries Helene in Berlin.

1907

Signs a contract with the Westermann publishing house in Braunschweig to illustrate a new German-language edition of Bible stories. Birth of son Otto in Charlottenberg, Berlin.

1908

Produces his first etchings. Publication of first volume (Volume I) of Bible illustrations.

1909

Exhibitions of his work in Vienna and the City Museum in Braunschweig. Publication of the second volume (Volume VI) of Bible illustrations.

1910

Second trip to Palestine accompanied by his wife.

1911

Birth of daughter Hannah Lilien, in Charlottenburg, Berlin.

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Biographical Timeline: Ephraim Moses Lilien and His Family

1912

Publication of the third volume (Volume VII) of Bible illustrations, in several editions of the Lutheran Bible as well as in other versions of the Bible.

1914

Third trip to Palestine. Returns to Berlin at the outbreak of First World War.

1915

At age forty-one, volunteers for the Austrian army. His job is to escort convoys to the Eastern European front.

1916

Drafted into the Austrian Military Press Corps as a war photographer.

1917

As a member of the Office of Information of the Austrian Army, makes fourth and final trip to Palestine, as well as Turkey and Syria.

1918

Returns to Berlin after the war. Resides in CharlottenburgWilmersdorf, Berlin.

1920

Moves to Wolfenbütteler Straße 3, Braunschweig (BT.2, BT.3). Registers in Braunschweig on 1 June 1920, becoming a national of Braunschweig. (Lilien had been an Austrian national until then.)

1924

Opening of exhibition marking Lilien’s fiftieth birthday. Chaim Weizmann, leader of the Zionist movement, delivers the inaugural address.

1925

Dies on 17 July at Badenweiler, a spa resort, and is buried at the Friedhöfe Helmstedter Strasse, Braunschweig (BT.1).

Addendum: Helene left Braunschweig in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, for England, and eventually settled in Denmark where she died in 1971. Hannah, a scientist, left Germany sometime before the Second World War. She married Bernard Peters and lived in Denmark. They had two children, Tom Peters and Susan Peters. Otto immigrated to Palestine in 1937 where he was an expert in printing techniques. He lived in Rehovot with his wife Lore. Otto joined the British Royal Air Force in 1940 as a photographer. Otto and Lore had two children, Hannah Lilien-Kipnis and Chava Givoni.

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xxxi

BT.1  Grave of Helene and Ephraim Moses Lilien, Braunschweig (Brunswick). Reproduced from a photograph. Courtesy of Owen Watkinson, 2018.

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BT.2  The Magnus-Lilien home at 3 Wolfenbütteler Straße 3, Braunschweig (Brunswick). Reproduced from a photograph. Courtesy of the Centre for Jewish Art, Braunschweig.

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BT.3  E. M. Lilien, The Magnus-Lilien home at 3 Wolfenbütteler Straße 3, Braunschweig (Brunswick), 1913, etching, P74.09.2500. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

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Notes 1 For this information, see Ekkard Hieronimus, ‘E. M. Lilien, Leben und Werk,’ in Lilien, Breife, 10. See also the biographical information in Bar-Am, PwL. 2 Sergey R. Kratsov, ed., Thoughts of a Polish Jew: To Kasieńka from Grandpa Artur Lilien-Brzozdowiecki (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016), 57. 3 Brieger, EML, 48–61.

Introduction

If Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that of the vanquished, we might ask that knowledge must indeed present a fatefully linear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which fell by the wayside – what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic. —Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

Finding blind spots Ephraim Moses Lilien was the first major Zionist artist. His construction of a Jewish and national art produced an aesthetic high point, albeit brief, in the flowering of cultural Zionism, an important breakaway movement of early Zionism at the turn of the twentieth century.1 From the publication of his first Jewish illustrations in Juda (c.  1900) to his creation of heroic Jewish biblical figures (between 1908 and 1912), Lilien’s male imagery formed the focus of most of the historical, cultural, and aesthetic analyses of his artwork. In the attempt to understand and historicise his images of the ‘New Jew’, scholars have ignored Lilien’s ‘new Jewish woman’, an image he consciously developed as a counterpart to his new Jewish man. What has largely ‘fallen by the wayside’, to quote Adorno, is any serious consideration of Lilien’s images of the female partner to this important metaphor of the ‘new Jew’ or ‘new Hebrew’.2 This book examines Lilien’s representation of the Jewish female body at the fin de siècle, arguing that his depictions of women were a significant part of his oeuvre. It was often Lilien’s images of women, rather than men, that reflected the precarious position of Central European Jews who were caught between identification with the ‘alien’, ‘exotic’, ‘barbaric’ East, and the ‘civilised’ West. Certainly, a few scholars have discussed Lilien’s representations of the alluring and erotic femme fatales or focused on his later biblical landscapes.3 However, it is his renderings of the strong, muscular, male Jew that have been used, particularly from the 1990s onwards, as an important trope informing much of the discussion around the construction of Zionism, Jewish identity, and political emancipation in fin-desiècle European Jewish history.4 In this gendered narrative, Lilien constructed a ‘new [male] Jew’ or ‘new Hebrew’ that was no longer the stereotypical intellectual debating in cosmopolitan Berlin coffee houses or the pale Yeshiva student poring over religious

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texts. Rather, the ‘new Jew’ motivated by Lilien’s vision of a socialist utopia was tanned and muscular from physical work as an agricultural labourer. In fact, Lilien’s representations of the muscular Jewish male body foreshadowed the halutz (pioneer settler) and the tzabar (native-born Israeli citizen) forty years before these Zionist body types became part of the Israeli national myth in 1948.5 Since this book presents Lilien’s art thematically rather than chronologically, this chapter begins with a brief overview of his life, cultural milieu, and masculine imagery. Only then can we consider the important questions regarding his representation of women and their significance.

Ephraim Moses Lilien: A concise biography Lilien was born in 1874 in Drohobycz, a small multicultural town in the province of Galicia,6 which, at the time, was part of the eastern Austrian-Hungarian Habsburg Empire. His lifetime spans the period from German Jewish emancipation (1871) through the turbulent years of the fin de siècle, when he produced his major work, and includes the First World War, the Balfour Declaration, and its aftermath. His artistic production provides a remarkable case study of the problems faced by Germanspeaking Jewry in Central Europe during this period. In the years following Austrian and German unification, and particularly in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europe’s Jews struggled with the effects of increasing antisemitism and assimilation.7 Both predicaments were the by-product of a complex interaction with modernity, and would eventually lead to the same outcome: the near extinction of European Jewry.8 Lilien’s construction of the ‘new Jew’ was a national answer to Jewish difference. He developed his Zionist vision as a crucial strategy of resistance to the problems of Jewish citizenship and Jewish alterity.9 Lilien’s artistic vision integrated Max Nordau’s late-nineteenth-century concept of the regenerated ‘muscular Jewish gentleman’ with Martin Buber’s proposal for a spiritually inspired renewal of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Übermensch’.10 Buber’s ‘Jewish Renaissance’ was a specifically German, modernist vision that privileged art, specifically the visual arts, over literature. Nordau’s ‘muscular Jewry’ was directly influenced by Theodor Herzl’s political Zionism. Lilien creatively blended Buber’s and Nordau’s ideas in his youthful and rebellious Jugendstil illustrations, the German equivalent to Art Nouveau.11 This heady combination helped bring his art to the attention of many Jewish German modernists eager to create a new Jewish and national aesthetic for the modern age.12 By 1903, only three years after the publication of his first book of illustrations with their specifically Jewish vision, Lilien’s art had become so popular that a book on his oeuvre was already in print.13 Stefan Zweig, the Austrian-born Jewish writer and journalist (1881–1942), wrote the foreword to the collection.14 The two met for the first time in Berlin when Zweig was just nineteen years old and not yet famous.15 In 1906, Lithuanian-born Boris Schatz (1867–1932) set up the first Jewish national art school, the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, in Jerusalem, for which he used Lilien’s design as the logo (Fig. 1.1).16 He also employed Lilien as a teacher. To this

Introduction

3

day, Lilien’s revival of iconography associated with Judaism, such as the Magen David (the Shield or Star of David), the menorah (the seven-branched candlestick), and the cherubim (the winged angels who guard the mishkan or tabernacle), remains a major part of his legacy at Bezalel.17 He had a significant influence on the early Bezalel teachers and students, especially Shmuel Ben-David (Bulgaria, 1884–1927), who was born in Sofia, and like Schatz, had studied art there, Ze’ev Raban (b. Łodź, Poland 1890–1970) and Ya’akov Stark (b. Kraków, 1881–1915), who all appropriated Lilien’s stylistic renderings and symbols.18 Likewise, his prophetic construction of the ‘new muscular Jew’ continues to reverberate in the Israeli psyche and appears on stamps, book covers, and Passover Haggadot throughout the Jewish world (Figs. I.2, I.3, and I.4).19 In Kazimierz, Kraków, Israeli street artists decorated the side of a three-storey building with a homage to Lilien in 2014 (Fig. I.5).20

Figure I.1  E. M. Lilien, Logo of Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, c. 1906, ink and gouache on cardboard, B03496. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Peter Lanyi.

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Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation

Figure I.2.  Israeli stamps from 1977, commemorating Lilien’s art from the Fifth Zionist Congress of 1905. http://www.boeliem.com/content/1977/209.html, accessed 5 September 2009. Courtesy of Boelim Stamps, Israel.

Introduction

5

Figure I.3  Book cover, Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). Courtesy of Cornell University Press.

Figure I.4  E. M. Lilien, Abraham’s descendants will be like the stars (Genesis 15). In The Family Participation Haggadah, ed. David Dishon and Noam Zion (Jerusalem: The Shalom Hartman Institute, 1977), 77. Courtesy of the Shalom Hartman Institute.

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Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation

Figure I.5  Broken Fingaz Graffiti Collective, Homage to E. M. Lilien, Kazimierz, Kraków, 2014. Photograph by author.

Introduction

7

Among his friends and colleagues were many Jewish intellectuals who came to prominence during this era. Besides Zweig, these included future president of the state of Israel Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952), well-known British Jewish statesman Israel Zangwill (1864–1926), as well as Buber, Herzl, and Nordau. He also befriended and collaborated with many non-Jewish writers, including the German neo-Romantic poet Borries von Münchhausen (1874–1945), the Lutheran pastor Ferdinand Rahlwes (1864– 1947), and the Russian socialist and poet Maxim Gorki (1868–1936).21 By the time of the First World War, Lilien had published two more books of illustrations, thereby securing his fame.22 Lilien died in the spa town of Badenweiler in 1925 and was buried in the birthplace of his wife Helene Magnus, who came from an accomplished and acculturated German Jewish family. Lilien made four trips to Palestine. Helene accompanied him on one of these trips and on another he went as a war photographer with the Austrian Army. Helene and Lilien had two children. Otto was born in 1907 and Hannah in 1911.

Gender blind spots Finding the gender blind spots in Lilien’s construction of the ‘New Jew’ is central to this book. Given the impact of this image on German Jewish consciousness in the fin de siècle, the figure of the ‘new Jewish woman’, developed by Lilien between 1897 and 1914, is equally worthy of inquiry. At first glance, Lilien’s portrayals of the ‘new Jewish woman’ seem to mimic the dominant late-nineteenth-century anti-feminist view of women as passive, sensual, and erotic.23 His first representations, from around 1896, primarily depict women as provocative, naked femmes fatales. By 1900, his imaging of the female body had morphed into a distinctly more modern type of woman, a female partner for his new (male) Jew. This ‘new Jewish woman’ gazes directly at the viewer, projecting an image of a strong, independent woman in control of her destiny.24 Was she still a dangerous femme fatale, or was she a courageous biblical hero, ‘exotic’ Oriental, or modern Zionist woman?25 In view of Lilien’s creation of the new Jewish male, this book sets out to trace the diverse, distinctive representations of the new Jewish woman that emerged in Lilien’s oeuvre at the fin de siècle in Germany, and what impact these images had on the collective German Jewish consciousness. In addressing these issues, two crucial contexts need to be considered: the intellectual and the socio-cultural. In regard to the first, this book questions whether the idea of a ‘new Jewish woman’ was ever part of the discussion among German Jewish nationalists at the fin de siècle regarding the creation of a ‘new Jewish body’ in corporeality, mind, and spirit – the so-called ‘muscular Jew’. That is, were the ideas behind Lilien’s creation of the image of the new Jewish woman the same as those he pursued for the new Jewish man? Were these ideas intended to similarly defend the female Jewish body against modern antisemitic projections of weakness and otherness? Were antisemitic notions regarding the female Jewish body different from the ones aimed at the male body? Alternatively, were Lilien’s images of the ‘new woman’ a reflection of general European male fantasies driven by the growing anti-feminist, modernist sensibility intrinsic to fin-de-siècle European art and culture? Is this the reason Lilien’s work is no

8

Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation

longer championed, because these images are an embarrassing reminder of the latenineteenth-century white, male, European antifeminism that was intrinsic to Zionism? Most importantly, how was the white, male, anti-feminist sensibility that was central to Lilien’s use of an oriental style similar to or different from the work of French or British orientalists, whose anti-Eastern, pro-Western stance was criticised by Edward Said among others in his pioneering work Orientalism?26 Within the socio-cultural context, the book enquires about the reception of these images and ideas by Jews in Imperial Germany and in the German-speaking countries of Central Europe. To what extent did Lilien’s new Jewish woman actually exist in Imperial Germany? What other contemporary images of the modern, forthright Jewish woman were there in the literary sources, and in works by other male or female artists of the period? What do these gendered visual representations of the Jewish female body tell us about the place and role of real Jewish women in German society, in German Jewish society, or in the Zionist movement at the turn of the twentieth century and after?27 Most of the research on Zionist aesthetics and the corporeal body during this period is the work of male scholars, and focuses on men.28 Recent work on Jewish women has helped to dispel the one-sided scholarship on Zionist aesthetics, but a more complete analysis on the partner to Lilien’s new male Jew, the new Jewish woman is still required.29 Treating the questions posed by this book will fill an important gap in the scholarship on the representation of the modern Jewish woman in fin-de-siècle Germany. By concentrating on Lilien’s construction of German Jewish orientalism, a specifically German and Jewish creation, this book addresses the impact of orientalist scholarship on the construction of German Jewish identity at the fin de siècle. This idea positioned many acculturated German Jews somewhere between Western secularism, assimilation, and cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and a more nationalist and/or religious identification with Jewish particularity and the culture of the East, on the other. This book also examines the impact of gender on the construction of a German Central European Jewish identity, and on Zionism at the fin de siècle, which has largely been viewed from the vantage point of Jewish men and constructed around the political discourse of Jewish emancipation. By doing so, this book offers a more nuanced discussion of the intersections between antifeminism, antisemitism, and Jewish orientalism, and the possible impact of these relations on the representation of Jewish women by Jewish artists during this period.30 Finally, to my knowledge, this is the first English-language book on Lilien’s work to consider his female imagery and to a lesser degree his male imagery, through the lenses of gender, identity, and orientalism.

A transdisciplinary approach An integrative approach that combines the disciplines of intellectual and cultural history with issues of gender and Jewish history informs this book. The importance of visual culture or images is crucial to this approach because the visual forms a key part of the cultural history of the fin-de-siècle period. Subsequently, this book integrates

Introduction

9

Lilien’s images of women into the intellectual history and cultural milieu of the period, using a visual methodology, in order to create a coherent analysis of Lilien’s oeuvre. A rich and diverse array of visual sources, including book illustrations, etchings, posters, illustrated magazines, and photographs, in addition to paintings, found their way into this research project, because the ‘popular’ arts (as opposed to the ‘fine arts’) were distributed to a wide audience at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in Germany.31

The importance of visual culture as historical evidence If one takes ‘culture’ to indicate a ‘whole way of life’, the wider anthropological and sociological meaning given to the field by Raymond Williams, then visual culture is an important and fundamental way to gather information about society.32 Scholars claim that through culture we observe ‘long term and deep social change take root’, as well as opposition to change.33 In fact, researches in different fields also place great importance on the visual dimension. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), perhaps one of the first cultural historians, wrote that works of art were ‘witnesses of past stages of the development of the human spirit … through which it is possible to read the structures of thought and representation of a given time’. 34 Peter Burke, a cultural historian, refers to the ‘historical anthropology of images’. He understood that images, just like any text, have a part to play in the cultural construction of society, arguing that they are testimonies to past ways of seeing and thinking.35 Art historians have always placed a premium on images as texts. For instance, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock approach images as a way of exposing the gendered nature of the worlds within which the artist and their images are located: the world of the artist, the patron, the characters presented, or the intended or actual viewers.36 Images can also enhance or elucidate questions pertaining to intellectual history, a link made by a few intellectual historians.37 Visual culture can indeed help reveal past ways of seeing and thinking, and this view is central to the methodology of this book. Visual culture is also profoundly important to the understanding and reconstruction of Jewish history. Accordingly, scholars of European Jewish history have begun using images in their studies of the past. In 2004, Shalom Sabar declared that he had been trying for years to convince colleagues ‘of the significance of works of art as human documents, as they contain much evidence about the past’. 38 As Stephen Whitfield observed, the tendency among Jewish historians in the past had been to avoid the use of images that may have a religious origin as: ‘the Jewish approach traditionally focuses on the texts rather than images since their use, according to strict interpretation violates the Second Commandment’. 39 Whitfield draws on the myth of ‘the artless Jew’, the idea that Judaism was, at least in comparison to Western Christian art, ‘artless’ because of its strict adherence to halakha (Jewish Law). This notion, now vigorously contested within modern European Jewish history and art history, is no longer regarded as valid, although it may partly explain the lack of attention paid to Lilien’s images of women.40 Further studies of European Jewish history employing visual culture are needed.41

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Notes 1

For contemporary sources on Lilien at the turn of the twentieth century, see Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien (Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d); Lilien, EMLsW; Rosenfeld, Lieder; M. S. Levussove, The Art of an Ancient People: The Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1906); Rahlwes, Bibel; Brieger, EML; Lilien, Briefe. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1974), 151. 3 Milly Heyd, ‘Lilien and Beardsley: To the Pure All Things Are Pure’, Journal of Jewish Art 7 (1980): 58–69; E. M. Lilien: Zeichnung Für Bücher, Ausstellung Vom 15. Oktober Bis 20 November 1981 (Munich: Galerie Hasenclever, 1981); Mark H. Gelber, ‘The Jungjüdische Bewegung: An Unexplored Chapter in German-Jewish Literary and Cultural History’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 31, no. 1 (1986): 105–19; Haim Finkelstein, E.M. Lilien in the Middle East, Etchings (1908–1925) (Beersheba: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Avraham Barom Art Gallery, 1988); Oz Almog, Gerhard Milchram, and Erwin A. Schmidl, E. M. Lilien, Jugendstil, Erotik, Zionismus: [Eine Ausstellung Des Jüdischen Museums Der Stadt Wien, 21. Oktober, 1998 Bis 10. Jäner, 1999 Und Des Braunschweigischen Landesmuseums, 21. März Bis 23. Mai,1999] (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 1998); Haim Finkelstein, ‘Lilien and Zionism’, Assaph 3 (1998): 195–216; Gilya Gerda Schmidt, The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress, 1901: Heralds of a New Age (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003). 4 Stanislawski, Zionism; Todd Samuel Presner, ‘Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard Muscles’, Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 2 (2003): 269–96; Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni, eds., Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). 5 Paradoxically, Lilien’s figuring of a new, muscular, and heroic Jewish male was based on a Christianised, Eurocentric Aryan body lodged in the mythologies of Classical Greek antiquity that were designed ultimately to eradicate decadence, degeneration, and any trace of ‘Semitism’. Because Jewish nationalism imitated these Aryan bodies, some scholars have claimed that Zionism internalised antisemitic stereotypes. For this, see Jacques Kornberg, Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 6 For more on Drohobycz, see Ezra Mendelsohn, Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 1–2. 7 On late-nineteenth-century antisemitism, see chapters 5 and 6. Antisemitism, spelled without the hyphen, is now common practice among most scholars. Anti Semitism, coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879, described Christian hostility towards Jews. Marr inserted the hyphen as he believed the Jews to be members of the ‘Semitic’ race, though the use of the hyphen made anti-Jewish hatred a more modern and acceptable subsection of race theory. As Emil Fackenheim pointed out in 1977, the idea that there is a ‘Semitic’ race is absurd as there is no such thing, only a ‘Semitic’ group of related languages. For the discussion of this term, see Emil Fackenheim,

Introduction

11

‘Post-Holocaust Anti-Jewishness, Jewish Identity and the Centrality of Israel’, in World Jewry and the State of Israel, ed. Moshe Davis (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 11. See also Yehuda Bauer, ‘In Search of a Definition of Antisemitism’, in Approaches to Antisemitism: Context and Curriculum, ed. Michael Brown (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1994), 23–34. For more on antisemitism, see Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism: From Voltaire to Wagner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Robert S. Wistrich, Antisemitism: A Long Hatred (New York: Schocken 1994); Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Late Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010). 8 Bernard Wasserstein, On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).The first term used to describe the response to Jewish emancipation was integration, which generally meant an end to segregation and referred to the integration afforded Jews when permitted to leave the ghetto and reside alongside their host society. For a definition of assimilation and integration, see Marion A. Kaplan, ‘Review: The “German-Jewish Symbiosis” Revisited’, New German Critique 70, Special Issue on Germans and Jews (Winter, 1997): 183–90. Kaplan states that assimilation often meant, ‘what we call acculturation today, an acceptance of cultural norms while maintaining a cultural content in familial and Jewish communal life’. Today, acculturation is understood to mean becoming a fully fledged member of one’s host society by embracing national and cultural differences, such as language and dress, without abandoning ties that preserve one’s Jewish identity. The terms assimilation and acculturation are further complicated by the knowledge that assimilation after 1933 was a failure. I generally use acculturation instead of assimilation. 9 For a further discussion of the experience of modernity among German Jewry following the unification of Germany in 1871, see chapter 1. 10 On Max Nordau (1849–1943) and Martin Buber (1878–1965), and the creation of the cultural Zionist movement, see, in particular, chapters 2 and 6. For information on the nineteenth-century models for the ‘New Jew’ or ‘New Hebrew’, where three different types are cited, see Anita Shapira, ‘The Fashioning of the New Jew’, in Major Changes within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Ninth International Historical Conference, ed. Yisrael Gutman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996), 430–31. 11 Art Nouveau was the first truly modern and international art movement that covered not only painting and architecture, but also the applied or decorative arts. The use of the French term Art Nouveau (new art) in England is traced to the German art dealer Samuel Siegfried Bing’s Paris gallery by that name, Maison de l’Art Nouveau (House of New Art). In Germany, the style became known as Jugendstil, after the Munich journal Jugend, which covered the work of the new young artists. For more on Jugendstil and Art Nouveau, see chapter 2. 12 On Herzl (1860–1904) and political Zionism, see Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 88–100. 13 Münchhausen, Juda. For a detailed discussion of the creation and reception of Juda, see chapter 2. 14 Lilien, EMLsw. See also chapter 2. In the 1920s and 1930s, Zweig’s work was extraordinarily popular. He was forced to leave Europe in 1933, and his last book, the

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22 23

24

Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation autobiographical The World of Yesterday, was published posthumously after his death together with his second wife Lotte, by suicide in 1942 in Brazil. Zweig describes his meeting with Lilien and states that Lilien was the first eastern European Jew he had ever encountered and his Judaism was ‘unknown to him’. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 17. On Schatz see Boris Schatz, Boris Schatz His Life & Work: Monograph (Jerusalem: B’nai Bezalel, 1925); Yigal Zalmona, Boris Schatz (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House Ltd., 1985) [Hebrew]. See Margaret Rose Olin, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), particularly the chapter ‘Jewish Art as Visual Redemption’, 99–126; Michael Brenner, ‘The Return of the Nation to Its Land’, in Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History, ed. Michael Brenner (Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 159–60; Stanislawski, Zionism; Presner, ‘Clear Heads’, 269–96. On the modern national art movement in Israel, see Gideon Ofrat, One Hundred Years of Art in Israel (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2005), 21–27 and Dalia Manor, Art in Zion: The Genesis of Modern National Art in Jewish Palestine (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005). In 1977, three of Lilien’s well-known works were made into Israeli commemorative stamps. For book covers with Lilien’s imagery see Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). For images in Passover Haggadot see Abraham, Look up into the Sky and Count the Stars if You Can: So Many Your Descendants Shall be, c. 1912–1919, and The Jewish May, 1903, in The Family Participation Haggadah, ed. David Dishon and Noam Zion (Jerusalem: The Shalom Hartman Institute, 1977), 77, 172–73. The mural was created by the Haifa-based Israeli graffiti art collective Broken Fingaz as part of the Jewish festival of Kraków in July 2014, https://brokenfingaz.com/works, accessed 9 March 2018. The mural was painted on the side of a building named after the Bosak family, a Jewish family that lived in the residence for four hundred years until the Second World War. On Borries von Münchhausen and his collaboration with Lilien on Juda, see chapters 1, 2, and 3. On Rahlwes’s collaboration with Lilien on Die Bucher der Bibel, see chapter 4. Lilien met with Gorki in 1902 to create the illustrations for Gorki’s poem Zbornik (an anthology of Jewish poems in Russian translation). For this, see Joseph Gutmann, Jerusalem (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1976), 11–12; Schmidt, The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress, 184. Lieder des Ghetto (Songs of the Ghetto), 1903 and Die Bücher der Bibel (Books of the Bible), 1908–1912. Interest in the femme fatale dominated the examination of late-nineteenth-century art by feminist art historians in the 1980s and early 1990s. See for instance Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991). The concept of the gaze, often the essentialising ‘male gaze’, has become part of art historical discourse. This discourse began with John Berger’s second essay on the representation of women as objects of male desire. See John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Introduction

25 26 27

28 29

30 31

32

13

(London: Penguin, 1972). ‘The gaze’ was later popularised by Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures, ed. Laura Mulvey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14–30. See also Stephen Kern, The Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Culture, 1840–1900 (New York: New York University Press, 1996). These categories inform the chapters of this book. For a discussion on Said and orientalism see chapter 1. On other scholars regarding orientalism see pages 22–25. I use the term ‘gender’ in the Foucauldian way as Joan Wallach Scott originally used it and as Denise Riley has articulated the use of the word ‘woman’. This means that gender is an analytical tool to help one think critically about how the meaning of sexed bodies is produced in relation to one another, how these meanings are deployed and changed, and how issues of power and rights played into definitions of Jewish masculinity and femininity at the fin de siècle. On the history of the terms women and gender see Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: Still a Useful Category of Analysis’, Diogenes 57, no. 1 (February 2010): 7–14. I am referring to the scholarship by Stanislawski, Zionism; Presner, Muscular Judaism; and Brenner and Reuveni, Emancipation through Muscles. On Lilien’s female images, see Heyd, ‘Lilien and Beardsley’. On Lilien and Zionist art history see ‘Lilien: Between Herzl and Ahasver’, in Theodor Herzl, Visionary of the Jewish State, ed. Gideon Shimoni and Robert S. Wistrich (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnus Press, 1999). On the Fifth Zionist Congress artists, see Schmidt, The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congres. On the modern national art movement in Israel and orientalism, see Manor, Art in Zion: The Genesis of Modern National Art in Jewish Palestine and ‘Orientalism and Jewish National Art: The Case of Bezalel’, in Kalmar and Penslar, OJ, 101–16. Efforts to interrogate the gendered narrative of the Zionist enterprise began with Michael Berkowitz, ‘Transcending Tsimmes and Sweetness’: Recovering the History of Zionist Women in Central and Western Europe, 1897–1933’, in Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture, ed. Maurie Sacks (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1995), 41–62, and David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). It was Paula Hyman who suggested that more effort is needed to interrogate the ‘one-sided scholarship’ of Zionist aesthetics. Paula Hyman, ‘Does Gender Matter? Locating Women in European Jewish History’, in Rethinking European Jewish History, ed. Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman (Oxford and Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009), 54–71. Hyman (ibid., 65) discusses some of these notions. On the proliferation of images in Wilhelmine Germany see Robin Lenman, ‘Imperial Germany: Towards the Commercialization of Culture’, in German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Rob Burns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 30–37. At that time, architecture, painting, and sculpture were considered high art, while ‘popular’ or ‘practical’ arts were considered ‘low’ art. Popular or practical arts included embroidery, pottery, jewellery, design in general, from garden to interior, to furniture, fashion, photography, and graphic design. Robert Burns, ‘Introduction’ in ibid. Raymond Williams was a Marxist critic whose book Culture and Society (1956) laid the foundation for cultural studies. His ideas

14

33 34 35

36

37

38 39 40

41

Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation on the meaning of culture and another 109 important words formed the basis for Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1976). Angela McRobbie, ‘Revenge of the 60s’, Marxism Today, January 1992, 25. Lionel Grossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 361–62. Ibid., 185. He advocates the investigation of the actual response to images rather than their predicted response by studying contemporary texts such as devotional handbooks, journals of travellers, or descriptions of the behaviour of groups viewing films or political events. See Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994); Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1998). Also see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). He argues that images need to take into account the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, and sociology in order to better understand the relationship between images and people. Michael Baxandall asserts the importance of what he calls ‘the period eye’, an analytical approach that attends to both the historical background of works of art and their formal composition (including line, shape, texture, balance, and rhythm). He quotes the fifteenth-century playwright Feo Belcari who said: ‘The Eye is called the first of all gates/Through which the Intellect may learn and taste. The ear is second, with the attentive Word/That arms and nourishes the Mind’. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 153. Hadassah Magazine, December 2004, 33. Ibid. Stephen Whitfield is Professor of American Civilisation at Brandeis University. For the development of texts dealing with Jews and the visual arts in European History, see these excellent catalogues: Emily D. Bilski, ed., Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun, Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005); Carol Ockman et al., Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (New York and New Haven: Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, 2005); Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (San Francisco: University of California Press, 2011); Karen Levitov, Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore (New York: The Jewish Museum, 2011). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp also argue that further work needs to be done if the arts is ‘to figure more fully in Jewish studies and the Jewish experience more fully in the arts disciplines’. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jonathan Karp, eds., The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 1.

1

‘We Put All Our Hope in Him’: Ephraim Moses Lilien and His Oeuvre

He experienced Zionism on his own body, internalised it completely. Precisely because he belongs to the young generation, he is one of us … His book Juda and his Hebrew ex libris earned our full admiration, and we put all of our hope in him. — Martin Buber, ‘Address on Jewish Art’

In 1912, at the height of his fame, thirty-eight-year-old Ephraim Moses Lilien drew a black and white self-portrait in which he depicted himself in full evening dress absorbed in his work at his drawing table. The self-portrait was probably based on a photograph taken in 1902. To emphasise the importance of his work as an artist, his hands, holding an ink bottle and pen, are at the centre of the composition. The other tools of his trade – a compass, brushes, drawing utensils, empty water containers  – lie scattered around his work surface. Resting on an easel behind him is his most recognised artwork, the Congresskarte (Congress Card), which he created for the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901 (2.6). A little more than a decade later, the Galicianborn Lilien portrayed himself as a respectable and well-off professional, the epitome of the cultured German Bürger (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2).1 At the time Lilien drew this self-portrait, he was the most important and prolific artist of the Jewish national art movement. Martin Buber, the movement’s central figure and guiding light, had pronounced Lilien’s illustrations the ‘hope’ of the entire fledgling movement for how perfectly they reflected the Jewish regeneration in the visual as well as the literary arts.2 His bold black-and-white graphic Jugendstil drawings and etchings feature ornamental borders filled with swirling plant and flower motifs and images of naked women influenced by the work of Aubrey Beardsley and Gustav Klimt.3 The German Jewish public first became enamoured with Lilien for his series of illustrations that appeared under the title Juda published around 1900.4 The illustrations revealed a distinctly nationalist vision of a modern Jewish utopia outside fin-de-siècle Germany. By 1914 and after the publication of two more books, Lieder des Ghetto (Songs of the Ghetto, 1903) and three volumes of the Die Bücher der Bibel (The Books of the Bible, 1908–1912), Lilien’s fame as an accomplished artist was complete (Fig. 1.3). ***

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Figure 1.1 E. M. Lilien, Selbsportrait (Self-Portrait) with Vom Ghetto nach Zion in background, 1912. Oz Almog, Gerhard Milchram, and Erwin A. Schmidl, E. M. Lilien, Jugendstil, Erotik, Zionismus [eine Ausstellung des Jüdischen Museums der Stadt Wien, 21 Oktober, 1998 bis 10 Jäner, 1999 und des Braunschweigischen Landesmuseums, 21 März bis 23 Mai,1999] (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 1998), 21. Photograph by I. Simon. Courtesy of the Braunschweig Landesmuseums.

Figure 1.2 Photograph of Ephraim Moses Lilien at his desk, 1902. Probably from the German Jewish Press. From the Schwadron Portrait Collection. No. 002780928. Courtesy of the National Library, Jerusalem.

Ephraim Moses Lilien and His Oeuvre

17

Figure 1.3 E. M. Lilien, Das Stille Lied (The Silent Song), Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien (Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d.), n.p.

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Lilien’s oeuvre encompasses photographs, drawings, illustrations, bookplates, and etchings. This book focuses on the artist’s images of the Jewish male and female heroes that appeared in Juda, Lieder des Ghetto, and Die Bücher der Bibel.5 Lilien drew his inspiration for them from two major sources: the Holy Land, known during the nineteenth century as the ‘cradle of civilisation’, and the Hebrew Bible, where the literary narrative of the ancient Jewish people unfolded. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, increasing numbers of Europeans began travelling to the Middle East on a quest to identify the locations and authenticate the narratives of the Bible, the sacred religious text for both Christians and Jews.6 Many documented their accounts, particularly the British and French, who toured the region in increasing numbers from the 1830s onwards.7 The fields of archaeology and religion eventually joined forces in an effort to confirm the truth of the biblical narratives. In 1865, a group of British churchmen and Christian biblical scholars established the first exploration fund dedicated to the material past of the Levant. The British initiative led to similar ones from Germany, France, and America.8 In addition to being scientific missions, these expeditions promoted the self-interest, political ambitions, and colonial conquest of their respective national sponsors. The development of Jewish nationalism paralleled the growing interest in orientalist scholarship and archaeology that emerged in Germany during the late nineteenth century. Lilien, who made his first visit to the Holy Land in 1906, was so inspired by its distinctive geography and people that his illustrations began to focus on these two features: the landscape and its inhabitants. This chapter considers Lilien’s oeuvre in the context of the post-Holocaust study of German history and German art, where Jewish history and art history take into account the German Jewish interest in the East, the Orient, and orientalism. Recent scholarship on the intersection of German Jewish studies and gender, antisemitism, and colonial history suggests that a re-examination of Lilien’s interest in the entangled histories of the Jewish oriental past and their fin-de-siècle occidental experience deserve further study.9

Lilien’s images in historical context On 29 October 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm II, in a long gold-threaded veil attached to his spiked imperial army helmet, rode on a white stallion into Jerusalem, a city sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, accompanied by dozens of Prussian and Turkish cavalrymen.10 The Illustrated London News and Chicago Daily Tribune reported that he and Kaiserin Augusta Victoria visited the holy shrines and ancient sites of the city, presented a plot of ground to the German Catholics for the erection of a new church, and visited the Protestant church near the Holy Sepulchre.11 In the Kaiser’s race for imperial power, the Bible and the new science of archaeology provided two useful avenues to strengthen German prestige, national identity, and political ambition.12 The Levant held material remains of the past that could be acquired for Berlin’s newest museum, the Pergamon, originally established to house artefacts from Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in Anatolia in the 1870s, itself a monument to

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Germany’s rising national power.13 Germany’s drive for colonial conquest in the Near East came as a shock to the British and the French, who had also been cultivating their own spheres of influence in the region at the same time.14 Further heightening fears that Germany might be attempting to establish a protectorate over the Holy Land was the fact that the Kaiser’s visit to Jerusalem was preceded by a stop in Constantinople, where he met with the Ottoman sultan Abdul-Hamid II.15 Theodor Herzl and his Zionist colleagues closely followed Wilhelm II’s colonial pursuit for antiquities, prestige, and regional expansion, hoping for an opportunity to discuss their role in any newfound German foothold in the Near East.16 Since the publication of Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896, the Zionist leadership under Herzl was aware that it would need the help of imperial powers in order to achieve its goal of securing a homeland for the Jews in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. For its part, the new Jewish movement might help strengthen European civilisation in the region. According to Herzl, ‘If his majesty the Sultan were to give up Palestine, we could, in return, undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should form there part of a wall of defence for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism’.17 The Zionist newspaper Die Welt commented on Herzl’s meeting with the Kaiser in Constantinople before he sailed for Jerusalem that, a ‘Germany in the East would bring a new flowering to the people of ancient Palestine’.18 Herzl’s use of the civilising rhetoric of European colonialism and the universal, humane, and cosmopolitan ideals of German Bildung (the cultivation of education, high morals, and ethics) in contrast to the apparently ‘barbaric’ forces in the East reflected the often contradictory and fraught position of contemporary German-speaking Jewry.19 Finding themselves between the perceived influences of the West (secularism, assimilation, and cosmopolitanism) and the confluences of the East (religious identification, Jewish particularity, and apparent lack of culture), Jewish nationalists like Herzl claimed that all Jews should at least be able to live ‘as free men on our own soil and die peacefully in our own homes’.20 Herzl’s desire to meld Western Enlightenment tradition with the ancient history of the Jewish people in the East echoed many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European Jewish biblical scholars’ engagements with the Orient. An array of Central European Jewish academics, journalists, artists, novelists, and poets shared a similar fascination with the East.21 This relationship between the East and West in the German Jewish imagination also informed his images of women, which remained the focal point for much of Lilien’s Jewish oeuvre.22

Contested issues Problems of German history and art history Post-Second World War German historians and art historians have had a problematic relationship with the study of German history and German art, not least because both disciplines have had to come to terms with the cataclysmic past of twentieth-century

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Germany.23 Art historians such as Hans Belting adopted the Sonderweg (special path) theory of German history, which was intent on tracing the origins of Nazi ideology to Germany’s social, political, and intellectually conservative institutions and mentalité in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.24 For Belting, the complex problems of Germany’s art history were traceable to its divided heritage in the political events of the Reformation, where clear divisions emerged between Catholic and Protestant artists. He asserted that feelings of inadequacy next to the supposed more significant artistic traditions of Italy and France had lasting consequences for German art.25 For instance, Albrecht Dürer’s attraction to Venetian painting and Max Liebermann’s for the French Impressionists had called into question these artists’ Germanic status.26 Their art hence acquired an internationalist aspect in contradistinction to German nationalist art. Following in the footsteps of Belting, other art historians such as Françoise ForsterHahn acknowledged the intertwining of German art and nationalism as having stemmed from the relatively late German unification, compared with the other major European powers of Britain and France.27 The 1871 German unification had heightened the desire for a common national and artistic identity, and it had found it in the distinctly German artistic heritage of late-medieval and early-Renaissance woodcuts.28 Tension between German nationalism and cosmopolitan internationalism arose in the fin de siècle at the same time as German Jews were becoming increasingly visible in the worlds of business and culture. The prominence of German Jews in the fields of journalism, publishing, and in the arts as patrons, gallerists, and collectors fuelled the modernist schism so that modernism itself was equated with the ‘Jewish spirit’ and Jewish domination of modern commerce.29 This aggressive patriotic rhetoric often merged the antisemitic ideas of Werner Sombart in Modern Capitalism (1902), and The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1913), which singled out the Jews as the sole perpetrators of the evils of capitalism, with the Franco-phobic message of Henry Thode (1857–1920), who was a prominent German art historian. Like Max Nordau, who pinned the source for his early anti-modernist ideas on France, these antisemites pointed to the French origins of the ‘decadence’ of modern culture.30 The tension at the fin de siècle between nationalism and cosmopolitan internationalism eventually led to the equating of modernism with ‘degenerate’ or ‘foreign’ ideas culminating in the ‘degenerate art exhibition’ of 1937, where Max Liebermann and many other Jewish artists were labelled traitors and enemies of Nazi Germany.31 For Jewish artists at the turn of the twentieth century, this schism led many to question their multiple or hybrid German Jewish identity at a time when the possibility of an unprecedented and fruitful German Jewish relationship still seemed possible.32 Many Central European Zionists, including Herzl, Nordau, and Lilien, were deeply involved in the artistic, literary, political, and philosophical movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As ardent cosmopolitans, they turned to Jewish nationalism in reaction to the problems of antisemitism and assimilation at the fin de siècle.33 The Sonderweg theory, which traced the rise of Fascism to Germany’s past, continued under later émigré historians such as Fritz Stern and George Mosse. Attempts to integrate social, political, and intellectual history with cultural history remained marginal in Germany until the 1990s, because cultural history, unlike social or political history,

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was viewed as an inadequate way to discuss the calamitous history of twentieth-century Germany.34 Historians in both Jewish and German studies have begun to redress this gap. David Sorkin’s 1987 landmark text The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780– 1840 explores the German Jewish engagement with German culture by situating German Jewish cultural achievements within the social, political, and intellectual history of Germany, particularly the literature of the Enlightenment and classicism under Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), Friedrich Schiller (1788–1805), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Sorkin’s reassessment of German Jewry’s attachment to High German culture or to the universal, humane, and cosmopolitan ideals of Bildung made German Jewry a separate and ‘distinctive subculture who were nominally assimilated’ into German culture when compared to Gentile society.35 The idea that all German Jews read only Schiller and Goethe has also been reconsidered over the last decade, as interest in popular culture has grown steadily worldwide. David Brenner’s book on the popular press, German-Jewish Culture before the Holocaust: Kafka’s Kitsch, and Jonathan Hess’s Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German Jewish Identity are important models for research, though they deal more with literary than with visual culture.36 Brenner’s argument that German Jewish literary culture enabled Jews to balance multiple or hybrid identities also applies to visual culture.

Jewish art at the Fin de Siècle In addition to the theoretical problems associated with Germany’s past, the methodical stealing, hoarding, and destruction of the material culture of Europe’s Jews by the Nazi regime in Germany from 1933 to 1945 meant that much of German Jewish visual culture was lost.37 This loss of Jewish visual culture after the Shoah was not only the result of looting or misappropriation of art created by Jewish artists before 1933, but was also due to a lack of serious interest in Jewish art as a valid discipline in the Western art academy.38 Outside of Israel, this interest did not develop until the 1990s with the publication of the pioneering book The Jew in the Text (1995).39 There was often an assumption, which began with the advent of modernity, that Judaism was ‘artless’, at least in comparison with Western Christianity, because of its strict adherence to the biblical prohibition in the second commandment regarding idol worship. Judaism was perceived as an aniconic religion, a religion against icons or imagery.40 Research over the course of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries in the fields of archaeology and Jewish texts has proven that from antiquity onwards, Judaism was not averse to visual imagery. However, at the fin de siècle, there was no apparent evidence to prove otherwise.41 Acculturated German Jews such as Martin Buber and Lilien had no choice but to accept the basic premise of there being no history of Jewish art, even as they sought to redress the apparent vacuum of modern Jewish art in their own day.42 Antisemites like the German musician-turned-philosopher Richard Wagner, noting the increasing presence of Jews in the arts in Germany and particularly in German music by the mid-nineteenth century, were quick to claim the endemic lack among the Jews of artistic abilities or sensibilities.43 As Wagner argued:

22

Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation The sensory capacity for sight belonging to the Jews was never such as to allow them to produce visual artists; their eyes are preoccupied with matters much more practical than beauty and the spiritual content of things … To the best of my knowledge we knew nothing of a single Jewish architect or sculptor in our own times; as for painters of Jewish origin, I must leave it to experts in the field to judge whether they have created anything real in their art. It is most probable however that these artists are no different in attitude towards their visual art than modern Jewish composers are to music.44

Wagner’s assertion that Jews were without art was based on two nineteenth-century historical misconceptions: that Jewish art did not exist because Jewish law forbade the making of images, and that Judaism was not a race or group brought together through a common language, culture, and mythology, like the modern French or German nations.45 Wagner’s claim reinforced the views of eighteenth-century German Romantic nationalists like Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, who proclaimed that the Jews did not fit into models of modern (political) national identity because they had neither land nor country. Without a nation, a museum, or a collection of artworks, Jews had no visible history.46 The cornerstone of Western art historiography in the nineteenth century was the notion that national identities, determined by race and culture, were at the heart of collections within all national museums. Mimicking Wagner and nationalist sentiment, latenineteenth-century museology confirmed that Jews were non-existent within the discourse of modern art history.47 These misconceptions were sustained by the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century, there was no Jewish art (as opposed to art by Jews) to be seen in modern national museums anywhere in Europe. This thinking changed in 1894, with the discovery of the richly illuminated Sarajevo Haggadah, which offered evidence of medieval Jewry’s artistic legacy.48 It indicated that medieval Jews had an artistic heritage to rival their Christian neighbours. Out of these findings grew an embryonic academic interest in the history of Jewish art and Judaica. The very first book on Jewish art, by Hungarian Jewish scholar David Kaufmann in 1898, focused on the Sarajevo Haggadah.49 The discovery in British Palestine during the 1920s of ancient synagogues with mosaic floors featuring figurative art (such as the Beth Alpha synagogue mosaic floor near Tiberius) provided further evidence of the ancient roots of Jewish art. The 1930s discovery of the wall paintings in the ancient synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria added more proof of an ancient Jewish figurative art tradition, and raised the idea among Jewish scholars, that Jewish iconography preceded and influenced the development of Christian art.50

Orientalism and the East in the German Jewish imagination The importance of Judaism and Jewish art in the development of orientalist scholarship was also overlooked until the 1990s. Before Edward Said published Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), the term ‘orientalism’ had referred to the scholarly

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study of the languages and culture of the Orient. Said argued that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in British and French visual culture, orientalism became ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the East’.51 Although he was not the first to allege that Western scholarly knowledge about the East (or academic orientalism) was tainted by the spectre of colonialism, Said was by far the most famous and widely read among scholars who became known as the anti-orientalists, who believed the West ‘deliberately “orientalised” the Orient’.52 Thus, orientalism in the West became a trope for the way the West constructed images of the Orient or the oriental Eastern ‘other’. After Said, orientalism in the West became a derogatory term referring to the hegemonic European representation of the East produced mainly by orientalist scholars to justify European colonial domination over this region.53 Critics of orientalism appeared throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Many of these scholars contended that orientalism as a monolithic or homogenous European discourse, in the Foucauldian sense of discourse theory, was misplaced.54 Robert Irwin argued that Said had misunderstood or misrepresented the history of orientalist scholarship, while others were concerned that Said’s monolithic ‘West’ was creating another binary view, what Sadik Al-Am has called ‘ontological orientalism in reverse’.55 Feminist scholars of the 1990s such as Billie Melman no longer agreed with the 1980s feminist analysis in which passive or over-sexualised oriental women were a symbol of the feminised East.56 Melman challenged the way Said’s assumptions on gender and class affected politics and culture. Similarly, in her discussion of female British and French orientalist writers, Lisa Lowe asserted that women and the working class were also Europe’s internal ‘other’ long before European contact with and representation of the Orient.57 More recently, Srinivas Aravamudan’s Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (2012) criticised Said’s approach to the negative attributes of orientalism during the eighteenth century. Aravamudan adopts a more positive and pluralistic approach to the influence of the Orient on English and French writers.58 The writings of other feminist scholars, such as Rheina Lewis, Jill Baliieu, and Mary Roberts, on the cross-cultural interactions between Western and Eastern artists and writers have also contributed to cementing the idea that orientalism is not a one-sided debate but a dialogue triangulating the complexities of cross-cultural connections, as post-colonial theorists other than Said had already begun to postulate.59 Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the ambivalence of colonial subjects in The Location of Culture (1994) also helped reformulate attitudes regarding Said’s binary view of the West versus the East. Bhabha’s post-colonial theory argues that colonial subjects were both attracted to and repelled by colonial rule and culture. He states that the colonial subject mimics the worldview of the coloniser but at the same time resists it, creating a new type of hybrid subject/identity and culture. The ambivalence on the part of the colonised ‘other’ towards colonialism is not clear-cut, adding a complexity to the problem of how post-colonial ‘others’ envisage themselves and their political, social, cultural, and intellectual identities.60 German literary scholars such as Nina Berman and Todd Kontje, and German historian Suzanne Marchand have also criticised Said’s

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dismissal of German orientalists when so many significant Austrian and German biblical scholars were the pacesetters in oriental studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.61 Since the early years of the twenty-first century, orientalism has been about the articulation of differences that are heterogeneous and complex, including gender, class, geographical region, and sexual preference, as well as nation and race.62 A recent area of the scholarship on orientalism interrogates the ‘Jewish roots of Orientalism and the place of Jewish people in this discourse’.63 Ivan David Kalmar and Derek Penslar’s Orientalism and the Jews (2005) and Paul Mendes-Flohr’s ‘Orientalism, the Ostjuden and Jewish Self-Affirmation’ both argue that Jews have always been part of Occident and Orient.64 Kalmar and Penslar revisit the ideas first raised by Mendes-Flohr, who dealt with the connections between orientalism and Jewish culture in Germany circa 1900. Mendes-Flohr’s essay remains essential to any discussion on German Jewry and cultural Zionism, the creative ideology at the centre of this book. Kalmar and Penslar assert that Jews have ‘almost always been present whenever occidentals talked about or imagined the East’,65 and that orientalism in the West – the Christian West – has ‘always been not only about the Muslims but also about the Jews’.66 They argue that Said tied together Western imperialism and the West’s relationship to Islam while forgetting about the Jews’ place in this relationship. Said’s dismissal of German orientalism meant that important oriental scholarship by German Jews such as Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and the Hungarian Jew Ignaz Goldziher was often disregarded. Their study of the East was not a negative exercise based on imperial domination, but a multifarious and celebratory scholarly study of the languages and culture of the Orient.67 By leaving Jews out of the nineteenthcentury debates on orientalism, Said’s argument meant that Jews were often perceived as contemporary figures within Europe but only as historical figures outside of Europe and the European imagination. As alien ‘Asiatics’ and German-speaking Orientals, Central European Jews in the nineteenth century often inhabited a realm between Occident and Orient.68 The Eastern European Jew, who appeared less assimilated and more connected to his ancient Jewish past, often represented this Oriental ‘other’. Yet, when one travelled east to the Holy Land, the Jews there were considered both contemporary to the Holy Land and historical figures. Consequently, for most fin-de-siècle Central European Jews – religious, Zionist, or otherwise – the East was located in the eastern region of the Mediterranean, the Land of the Bible, not in Russia or Galicia, where Eastern European Jews lived.69 Martin Buber was one of the first to articulate that European Jews were historically European and oriental, and thus uniquely placed to mediate between East and West.70 Jews were positioned as ‘self and other, as both inside and outside Western culture’.71 Jews have often been painted as white and European, as though they belonged to the camp of the oppressor caught in the ‘Manichean categories’ of Eastern victim and Western European oppressor.72 As Julie Kalman asserts, with few omissions, ‘scholarly work on the history of East and West continues to be written according to an ahistorical teleology, whereby a long story of Western domination over the Eastern

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world culminated in the events of 1948 and the creation of Israel.’73 Certainly, European Jews often adopted many of the colonialist and racist attitudes that informed Western thought and practice, particularly during migration to Palestine in the 1920s. Within early Zionism and German Jewish oriental scholarship, however, Arabs and Islam were not the arch-rival.74 Lilien’s adoption of orientalism as a useful style for German Jewish Zionist aesthetics, particularly for his female and biblical images, and Buber’s attempt to unite Eastern and Western European Jews through a program of cultural renewal in the magazine Ost und West, confirms the resonance of the East or the Orient as a symbol of personal and political identity in the German Jewish imagination at the fin de siècle. Re-reading Lilien’s images of women in light of the contemporary debates among German Jewish orientalist scholars who understood that the modern European Jew was located somewhere within the dialectic of Europe and the Orient gives Lilien’s orientalist images a deeper meaning.75 These internal tensions are central to deciphering Lilien’s depictions of women. Jews were located both inside and outside Western culture, which often complicated the attainment of a positive German Jewish identity at the fin de siècle.

On diasporic identity: Transnationalism and multiple or hybrid identities As David Brenner argued in German-Jewish Culture before the Holocaust, all modern Jews operate both within and outside Europe’s national borders. Jewish life: ‘since the onset of Emancipation and the Enlightenment, has become truly multiple … to be a Jew in the modern West, means to be at once a Jew and also something else’.76 Jewish identity is in this sense emblematic of modern identity and vice versa. Multiple identities were already a necessary part of modern Jewish life at the fin de siècle. Maintaining or balancing multiple or hybrid identities was mediated by popular and secular culture, which became the complex site of identity formation.77 In this way, Brenner’s ideas (and those of Judith Butler, Arjun Appadurai, and Homi Bhaba) forecast the increasing late-twentieth-century phenomenon of transnationalism.78 Transnationalism, or the development and consequences of transnational processes such as mass migration, economic expansion, and the globalisation of capitalism, has led to the idea that people from diverse ethnic, religious, social, economic, or genderbased groups can transcend national borders or nation-states because of their social or economic interconnectivity.79 Yet, transnationalism is not a new phenomenon. For many fin-de-siècle German Jewish European intellectuals and artists like Lilien, straddling different worlds and hybrid or hyphenated identities was part of daily life. Lilien could be a secular Austrian, German, Ostjude, cosmopolitan artist, and nationalist at different moments or at the same moment in time. Many Germanspeaking Jews like Lilien served as examples of what historian Frederic Grunfeld identified as Grenzjuden, marginalised Jews on the borders of European culture who were simultaneously within and outside German Jewish culture. This position gave many German Jews, Lilien included, an ‘extraordinary vantage point from which to survey the European cultural landscape’.80

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The German Jewish sociologist Georg Simmel used similar words in his 1908 essay ‘Der Fremde’ (The Stranger) to describe someone who is outside the group, but also able to ‘attain a positive and specific kind of participation’.81 The stranger was a person who was simultaneously near and far.82 As ‘strangers’, Jews crossed socio-cultural boundaries, national borders, and the East–West divide by combining different identities in any way possible, often, like Lilien, with family members spread across different countries. This position provided an unparalleled transnational or international perspective to participate creatively in modern culture. ***

For a more complete picture of the Central European Jewish woman, it is necessary to conduct further research. Like the shadows in the grainy photographs of a W. G. Sebald novel, visual representations of Jewish women in pre-Weimar Germany may then emerge, more whole and in sharper focus.83 As Paula Hyman argues, ‘The exploration of models of masculinity in European Zionism has … highlighted the impact of fin-de-siècle antisemitism on the Zionist construction of the “New Jew.” … the role of women in European Zionism has yet to figure in any significant way in histories of Zionism in Europe’.84 Alison Rose’s recent work on Jewish women in fin-de-siècle Vienna and her discussion of Viennese and Austrian Zionism helps to redress the balance.85 Paula Hyman’s plea for a further examination of Jewish women’s roles in European Zionism requires a re-reading of Lilien’s oeuvre that takes into account his female representations.

Notes 1 2

3

The Jewish middle class viewed this status as redemptive. On the Jewish German Bildungsbürgertum, see later discussion on page 19, note 19 See Martin Buber’s ‘Address on Jewish Art’, in The First Buber, Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber, ed. Gilya Gerda Schmidt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 57. See below for a discussion of the importance of the visual arts in the cultural Zionist movement. Jugendstil was the major German modernist and international style of the fin-de-siècle period, akin to the French Art Nouveau. On Art Nouveau in France, see Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). On Vienna’s avant-garde, see Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On German art and modernism, see Francoise Forster-Hahn, ‘Introduction’, in Imagining Modern German Culture, 1889–1910, ed. Francoise Forster-Hahn (Washington, DC; Hanover, NH: National Gallery of Art; University Press of New England, 1996), 9–35; Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890–1937: Utopia and Despair (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Robin Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany, 1850–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial

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5 6

7

8

9

10 11

12 13

14

27

Germany (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980); Michael Buhrs et al., eds., The Munich Secession, 1892–1914 (Munich: Minerva Hermann Farnung, 2008). For more on Jugendstil, see chapter 2. ‘Bilder von Congress’, Die Welt, Nr. 2, 10 January 1902, 12. Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien (Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d). There is no date for this book of illustrations, but all evidence points to 1900. His photographs were examined extensively in Bar-Am, PwL. His bookplates have not been explored in detail. The desire to confirm the historic ‘truth’ of Scriptures often has been traced, particularly in studies of French and British orientalism, to Chateaubriand’s Itinéraires de Paris á Jérusalem, et de Jérusalem á Paris (1810–1811). Also see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 171–74. In this chapter, see the section ‘Orientalism and the East’, which deals with the term orientalism to describe the German Jewish interaction with the East or Orient. Susan Pollock and Reinhard Bernbeck, Archaeologies of the Middle East: Critical Perspectives, Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). Also see Yeshayahu Nir, The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land 1839–1899 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1985); Nissan Perez, Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839–1885) (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988). The British fund was known as the British Palestine Exploration Fund. Soon after the German Deutsche Palästina Verein was established in 1877–78 followed by the French Ècole Biblique et Archéologique of the Dominican order in 1890, and the American Schools of Oriental Research in 1900. Adel H. Yahya, “Archaeology and Nationalism in the Holy Land” in Pollock and Bernbeck, Archaeologies of the Middle East: Critical Perspectives, 66–70. For a recent perceptive discussion on the need for further exploration of the entangled histories of gender, antisemitism, orientalism, and occidentalism, particularly in regard to Germany, see Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism. This book is the first to focus on the function of gender and sexuality in literary and artistic transformations of orientalist images in Germany and addresses imaginative and aesthetic rather than sociological questions. Neil Asher Silberman, Digging for God and Country: Exploration of Archeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917 (New York: Knopf, 1982), 161. ‘The German Emperor in Turkey. New German Church at Jerusalem’, The Illustrated London News, 29 October 1898. The Kaiserin was the maternal granddaughter of Princess Fedora of Leiningen, half-sister of Queen Victoria. See also ‘Kaiser Now at Jerusalem. Germany’s Emperor Makes Triumphal Entry to Holy City through Jaffa Gate’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 October 1898, 3. Pollock and Bernbeck, Archaeologies of the Middle East: Critical Perspectives, 1–6. The Kaiser Friedrich Museum opened in 1904 and within a few years, its director, Wilhelm von Bode, was already planning a new museum dedicated to ancient architecture and Middle Eastern and Islamic art, housing all the new works acquired from these digs. This museum became the Pergamon Museum and opened in 1910. The terms ancient Near East, Near East, and Far East are legacies of the European, especially British, French, and German colonial involvement with the Middle East. This

28

15

16

17 18 19

20 21

Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation term is used interchangeably with other nineteenth-century terms such as the Levant or Holy Land. On modern-day entities and practice, the term Middle East is used. See Pollock and Bernbeck, Archaeologies of the Middle East: Critical Perspectives, 3. The Kaiser started his journey in Constantinople on 13 October 1898. While there, he met with Theodor Herzl before moving on to Palestine and Syria. He returned to Germany in late November 1898. During this time, Wilhelm was engaged in securing the building of the Berlin–Baghdad railway. Herzl followed the Kaiser’s tour journeying from Turkey to Palestine with four German-speaking companions. Among them were the lawyer Max Bodenheimer, Moses Schnirer, a physician and vice president of the Zionist Inner Action Committee, and David Wolfsohn, his loyal financial adviser. See Desmond Stewart, Theodor Herzl (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974); Klaus Polkehn, ‘Zionism and Kaiser Wilhelm’, Journal of Palestine Studies 4, no. 2 (Winter 1975): 76–90; Raphael Patai, ed., The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, trans. Harry Zohn, 5 vols. (New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960). On imperial power and Jewish national liberation see Ned Curthoys, ‘Diasporic Visions, Taboos and Memories: Al-Andalus in the German Jewish Imaginary’, in Being Arab: Arabism and the Politics of Recognition, ed. Christopher Wise and Paul James, Arena Journal 33–34 (2009): 110–38. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (Translated 1896) (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 30. Die Welt, 28 October 1898, cited in Polkehn, ‘Zionism and Kaiser Wilhelm’, 79. (Note: This is not the modern German publication of the same name.) Bildung, the educational cultivation of the individual’s full personality, was influenced by the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Paul Mendes-Flohr defined Bildung as a ‘cultural and social space that regarded matters of religion or religious background to be utterly irrelevant to one’s qualifications to enter that space … It was an inclusive vision of a neutral society’. German Jews were attracted to Bildung as it promised that education would provide an open and equal footing in society. See Paul Mendes-Flohr, ‘The Ethic of Bildung in Imperial Germany’, in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 23. The historian Frederic Grunfeld identified the phenomenon of being marginalised Jews or Grenzjuden on the borders of European culture, who were simultaneously both within and without German Jewish culture. See my later point on this phenomenon: ‘A Note on Diasporic Identity’. Frederic V. Grunfeld, Prophets without Honour: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World (London: Hutchinson, 1979). See also Bilski, Berlin Metropolis, 5. Herzl, ‘Conclusion’, The Jewish State, 157. I am referring to Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and Ignaz Goldziher, Jewish scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement who used scientific methods to analyse Jewish tradition. Susannah Heschel, ‘Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft Des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy’, New German Critique 77 (Spring–Summer 1999): 61–86; John Efron, ‘Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze’, in Kalmar and Penslar, OJ, 81–93. This list includes the cultural Zionists Buber and Lilien, as well as non-Jewish literary figures such as Gustave Meyrink (1868–1932). For more on these ideas, see chapters 5 and 6. Also see two recent books on the German Jewish interest in the East. John

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Efron’s book on the allure of the Sephardic East as an aesthetic worth emulating in John Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016) and Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism. 22 Discussed in chapters 4, 5, and 6. 23 Hans Belting, The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship, trans. Scott Kleager (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Barbara McCloskey recently confirmed Belting’s views. She also writes about the problematic relationship between Germany and art theory, which was historically a German creation. See Barbara McCloskey, ‘Wither the Study of German Art?’, German Studies Review 35, no. 3 (2012): 480–84. Belting wrote his essay in German in 1992. It was translated in 1998 with a new English introduction. 24 For the beginnings of the Sonderweg historiography, see Fritz Fischer, Griff Nach Der Weltmacht: Die Kreigzielpolitik Des Kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1961). Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Berg Press, 1973). 25 Belting, The Germans and Their Art, 13–17. 26 On Dürer’s travels to Vienna, see ibid., 51. On the foreign avant-garde and the controversy over the nature of Germanness see ibid., 63–69. 27 Forster-Hahn, ‘Introduction’, 10–11. 28 Ibid.; Robin Reisenfeld, ‘Cultural Nationalism, Brücke and the German Woodcut: The Formation of a Collective Identity,’ Art History 20, no. 2 (June 1997): 289–312. 29 Publishers Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920) and Leopold Ullstein (1826–1899); journalists and writers Karl Kraus (1877–1936), Theodor Herzl, and Nahida Remy (1849–1928); and art collector and gallerists Herwarth Walden (1879–1941) and cousins Bruno (1871–1941) and Paul Cassirer (1871–1926). Forster-Hahn, ‘Introduction’, 13. In Berlin alone, Jewish publishers of newspapers and journals such as Mosse and Ullstein rose from 412 or 8 per cent of the profession in 1895 to 712 in 1908, an increase by 76 per cent in numbers. Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 231. Herwarth Walden (Georg Lewin) (1878–1941), who lived and worked in Berlin, was only one of many Jewish private collectors and gallery owners in Central Europe. His wife, the well-known poet and artist Elsa LaskerSchüler, is discussed in chapter 4. 30 Thode’s ruminations on how French art might destroy the ‘true’ German art and spirit were later used in the creation of the cultural policies of the Third Reich, particularly in reference to ‘degenerate art.’ For the connection between German modernism, Jewishness, foreign art, and degenerate art, see Marion F. Deshmukh, ‘Politics Is an Art: The Cultural Politics of Max Liebermann in Wilhelmine Germany, 1889–1910’, in Imaging Modern German Culture, ed. Francoise Forster-Hahn, 165–83; Margaret Olin, ‘From Bezal’el to Max Liebermann: Jewish Art in Nineteenth-Century Art Historical Texts’, in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine Soussloff (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1999). For Thode’s criticism of Liebermann’s art, see Henry Thode, Böklin und Thoma: Acht Vorträge über neudeutsche Malerei (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätbuchhandlung, 1905), 101, cited in ibid., 28. 31 Forster-Hahn, ‘Introduction’, 28. On the degenerate art exhibition, see Olaf Peters, Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937 (New York: Prestel,

30

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33

34 35

36

Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation 2014). As Peter Schjeldahl writes, it was Joseph Goebbels who announced, some months before the exhibition opened, that a ban on art criticism was put in place as the entire discipline was ‘a legacy of the Jewish influence’, Peter Schjeldahl, ‘The AntiModernists: Why the Third Reich Targeted Artists’, The New Yorker, 24 March 2014, 96. The idea of a German Jewish dialogue or symbiotic relationship was created postfactum after the Second World War, where the love affair between the Jews of Germany and non-Jewish Germans was understood, in the wake of the Shoah, as one-sided. Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Germany’s Jews as pariah or parvenu, and Gershom Scholem’s classic essay about the relationship between Germany and the Jews from the period of the Haskalah under Moses Mendelssohn up to 1933, has now become part of German Jewish historiography. On these myths, see Enzo Traverso, The Jews and Germany: From the Judeo-German Symbiosis to the Memory of Auschwitz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Also see Marion A. Kaplan, ‘Review: The “German-Jewish Symbiosis” Revisited’, New German Critique 70, Special Issue on Germans and Jews (Winter 1997): 183–90. The claims by some in the Scholem camp that the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement was part of the problem because they believed in (and indeed created) dialogue with their Protestant counterparts are also part of this ongoing discussion. See Gershom Gerhard Scholem, Jews and Judaism in Crisis (Detroit: Schocken Books, 1976); Dan Diner, ‘Negative Symbiose: Deutsche Und Juden Nach Auschwitz’, Babylon 1 (1986): 9–20; Christian Wiese, Wissenschaft Des Judentums und Protestantische Theologie Im Wilhelminischen Deutschland. Ein Schrei Ins Leere? (Tübingen: Mohr Sieback, 1999); Henry Wasserman, ‘The “Wissenschaft Des Judentums” and Protestant Theology: A Review Essay’, Modern Judaism 22, no. 1 (2002): 83–98. For more information on Zionism and its relationship to the intellectual, cultural, and political milieu at the fin de siècle see in particular Stanislawski, Zionism. Also see Lynne Swarts, ‘The Merging of the Cosmopolitan and the National: Discovering the Beginnings of the National Response to Art and Modernity at the Fin de Siecle’, Australian Association of Jewish Studies Journal 19 (2005): 188–209. Suzanne L. Marchand and David F. Lindenfeld, Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 6–9. See Ritchie Robertson’s review of Jonathon Hess’s latest book titled Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German Jewish Identity (2010), in Ritchie Robertson, ‘Middlebrow German Culture’, H-Judaic September (2010): 1–3. https://www.h-net. org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=30617, accessed 24 February 2018. David Brenner, German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust: Kafka’s Kitsch (New York: Routledge, 2008); Jonathan Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). For more on the German Jewish experience of modernity following the unification of Germany in 1871, see Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Grunfeld, Prophets without Honour; Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985); Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789–1939 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Marion A. Kaplan, Jewish Daily

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Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Bernard Wasserstein, On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012). 37 On the looting and restitution of stolen art works by the Nazis, see the website of the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), containing a bibliography on Second World War era art lootings featuring among others Lynn Nichols, Rape of Europa (Toronto: Knopf, 1994) and Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum (New York: Basic Books, 1998). These books helped bring the issues of Nazi looting and restitution to the public’s attention and motivated many victims or their heirs to begin a claim for restitution at the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), http://www.ifar.org/provenance_guide.php., updated 2013, accessed 22 October 2013. 38 In Israel, Mordechai Narkiss in the 1950s and his son Bezalel in the late 1960s continued the interest in Judaica and Jewish art, begun in the early decades of the twentieth century in Central Europe. Bezalel Narkiss founded the Index of Jewish Art in 1974 and the Centre for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1979. http://web.nli. org.il/sites/NLI/English/digitallibrary/cja/about_cja/Pages/about_cja.aspx. 39 The Jew in the Text was the first to reveal how cultural representations of the Jew, and the way Jewish identity was envisaged, are often embodied or situated within the text itself. Tamar Garb and Linda Nochlin, eds., The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995). For the history of Jewish art before the 1990s, see the later discussion on David Kaufmann and n. 41. 40 See Kalman P. Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 41 Research over the last century in the fields of archaeology and Jewish texts has proven that from antiquity onwards, Judaism was not averse to visual imagery. The discovery of illustrated medieval illuminated manuscripts in 1894 by David Kaufmann, as well as mosaic floors near Tiberius in the 1920s and wall paintings in the ancient synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria in the 1930s added more evidence of an ancient Jewish figurative art tradition. See later discussion and ns. 49, 50, 51. 42 Buber coined the term Jüdische Renaissance in an article in Ost und West before the 1901 Congress, where he advocated Jewish renewal as a way for the Jewish people to participate more fully in European modernity. See discussion on this below. On Buber and the cultural Renaissance see Margaret Rose Olin, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). 43 See Ezra Mendelsohn, Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 63–70. 44 Das Judentum in Music (1850), cited in Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual, 27. According to Bland, Wagner also suggested in the same article that they were a threat to Western music. 45 Olin, Nation without Art, 3–31. 46 Ibid., 35. 47 Ibid., 6–8. 48 The Sarajevo Haggadah is an illuminated medieval manuscript written around 1350 in Barcelona that contains the text for the Passover Seder (the order of the service). The manuscript surfaced in Sarajevo in 1894 and was sold to the National Museum. It is now owned by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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49 David Kaufmann, Die Haggadah Von Sarajevo: Eine Spanisch-Jüdische Bilderhandschrift Des Mittelalters (Vienna: A. Hölder, 1898). A few years later important texts that documented other early medieval illuminated manuscripts included Moses Gaster, Hebrew Illuminated Bibles of the IXth and Xth Centuries (London: Printed by Harrison and Sons, 1901) and Baron David Günzburg and Vladimir Stassof, L’ornament Hebreu (Berlin: Cavalry, 1905). After 1933, the interest in Judaica and Jewish art, begun by Kaufmann in Central Europe, moved to Israel and the United States. On this, see Olin, ‘Kaufmann’s Legacy’, in Nation without Art, 95–98. 50 Unfortunately, the discovery of fresco paintings by the Franco-American team headed by Clark Hopkins at Dura-Europos glossed over their Jewish artistic merit and iconography; hence, the major art historical text on the synagogue by Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert Kessler is titled: The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art. The fact that the discoveries were made during the Nazi rise to power may have contributed to this biased interpretation. Kurt Weitzmann and Herbert Kessler, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1990). For more on the development of Jewish art, particularly in Berlin in the 1920s, see the pioneering work of Rachel Bernstein Wischnitzer (1885–1989). 51 Said, Orientalism, 1–3. 52 Hsu Ming Teo, ‘Orientalism: An Overview’, Australian Humanities Review, no. 54 (May 2013): 1. 53 Ibid. 54 Aijaz Ahmed, ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’, Studies in History 7, no. 1 (1991): 135–63. 55 Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (New York: The Overlook Press, 2008). 56 Perhaps exemplified by the article by Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, Art in America 71, no. 5 (1983): 11–31. This article was taken to task by the secular humanist scholar Ibn Warraq in his book Defending the West (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007). See Ibn Warraq, ‘Linda Nochlin and the Imaginary Orient,’ New English Review (June 2010): 1–9. In this article, a revised chapter from his 2007 study, he suggests that her attitudes are a rather arbitrary, heterogeneous simplification of the real world from which these paintings come. Also see Melman’s groundbreaking study Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). Here, she points out that Western women were actively involved in creating and shaping European ideas of the East, challenging Western male assumptions. 57 Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 58 Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (London: University of Chicago Press, 2012). See also John Docker, ‘The Question of Europe: Said and Derrida,’ in Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, ed. Ned Curthoys and Debjani Ganguly (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 263–90. 59 Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1996); Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds., Orientalism’s Interlocuters: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002); Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist

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60 61

62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69

70

71

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Art and Travel Literature (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008). On Homi Bhabha see Homi Bhabha, ‘Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in The Politics of Theory, ed. Francis Barker (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), 194–211. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 121–31. See for example Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolnonismus Und Moderne: Zum Bild Des Orients in Der Deutshsprachigen Kultur Um 1900 (Stuttgart: M & P/Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1997); Todd Curtis Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004); Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (New York: German Historical Institute; Cambridge University Press, 2009). Said did not include the investigation of German orientalist scholarship because he did not consider Germany to have engaged in colonial projects and therefore to have been complicit with colonialism. For more on German orientalism, see chapters 5 and 6. Beaulieu and Roberts, Orientalism’s Interlocuters, 17. According to Hsu Ming Teo, the arguments regarding the Jewish roots of Orientalism are still a recent phenomenon. See Hsu Ming Teo, ‘Orientalism: An Overview’, Australian Humanities Review, no. 54 (May 2013): 9. Kalmar and Penslar, OJ; Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’. Later republished as a chapter in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). Mendes-Flohr points out that Buber specifically states this thesis. See chapters 5 and 6. Kalmar and Penslar, OJ, xiv. Ibid., xiii. Efron, ‘Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze’, 80. Also see Ammon RazKrakotzkin, ‘The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective’, in Kalmar and Penslar, OJ, 162–81; Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. For a recent discussion on the entangled histories of orientalism, German history, gender, and the Jews as Asiatics and Orientals also see Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism. The tensions between what exactly constituted the East in the Central European Jewish imagination remained unclear and ambiguous. For a discussion of these tensions whereby Eastern European Jews in Russia and Austrian Galicia were seen as part of the cultural and spiritual revival of Eastern values, see chapter 6. On the Sephardic heritage as an allure for German Jews see Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. See further discussion on this in chapters 5 and 6. For Buber’s idea on the importance of Eastern European Jews in the regeneration of the Jewish people, see MendesFlohr’s discussion on the ‘Jew as Oriental’ in Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions, 85–88. For the consideration that Jews are uniquely placed to mediate between the East and West, see Dirk Moses, ‘The Contradictory Legacies of German Jewry’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 54 (2009): 41. Brian Cheyette, ‘White Skin, Black Masks: Jews and Jewishness in the Writings of George Eliot and Frantz Fanon’, in Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Benita Parry, and Judith Squares (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1997), 124.

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72 Ibid. 73 Julie Kalman, ‘Going Home to the Holy Land: The Jews of Jerusalem in NineteenthCentury French Catholic Pilgrimage’, Journal of Modern History 84, no. 2, The Jew in the Modern European Imaginary (June 2012): 366–67. 74 For this idea see in particular Michael Berkowitz, ‘Rejecting Zion, Embracing the Orient: The Life and Death of Jacob Israel De Hann’, Kalmar and Penslar, OJ, 109. 75 Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘The Zionist Return to the West,’ 163. 76 Brenner, German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust: Kafka’s Kitsch, 5. 77 Ibid. 78 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990); Arjun Appadurai, Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 79 Michael Peter Smith and Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006). 80 Grunfeld, Prophets without Honour, 50. 81 Georg Simmel, Die Fremde (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 1. 82 For this, also see Bilski, Berlin Metropolis, 5. 83 W. G. Sebald has been credited posthumously with starting the literary discussion on the German trauma of the Second World War and the national debate about collective versus personal memory. In particular, his novel Austerlitz (2001) discusses wartime memory, the Shoah, and identity. See Christine Anton, ‘Repositioning German Identity’, German Monitor 72 (2010): 1–25. 84 Paula Hyman, ‘Does Gender Matter?’ 65. 85 Alison Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 140.

2

‘No Longer Art Speaking but Culture’: Lilien, Zionism, and Male Aesthetics

Lilien has created a solid individuality that no one can rip from him. Only he can supersede and outdo this, for here it is no longer art speaking but culture. —Stefan Zweig, E. M. Lilien, Sein Werk Zweig’s observation about Lilien’s art tapped into the importance that Bildung held for many of Germany’s Jewish Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle class), for whom ‘secular salvation through culture’ was a principle of enlightened German society.1 Yet, Lilien’s illustrations for Juda revealed a distinctly nationalist vision of a modern and Jewish utopia outside of fin-de-siècle Germany. A vision quite different from the secular redemption that was promised to the Jews of Germany following unification in 1871 and the experience of modernity and political emancipation during the Kaiserreich that followed.2 This chapter traces the development of Lilien’s images from Juda to his Jewish national vision, surveying his creation of explicitly heterosexual, muscular male images in the construction of a new and dynamic national Jewish identity. In the process, his images of men merged Buber’s concept of Jewish cultural renewal with Nordau’s theory of Muskeljudentum. Under Lilien’s draughtsmanship, these two concepts melded into positive affirmations of Jewish identity for the rising middle class of Germany’s growing Jewish cosmopolitans and assimilationists.3 Lilien retold the narrative of national identity in terms of old-new heroes: powerful, strong, manly men, as muscular and physically fit as their athletic Teutonic brothers. These new corporeal bodies claimed progressive socialist and utopian readings of modern Jewish life, incorporating the return to authentic Jewish labouring or tilling of the soil in the Biblical homeland of Zion or Eretz Israel. His model of Jewish manliness, developed at the fin de siècle, was a form of cultural resistance, a crucial strategy in the struggle to overcome the twin dilemmas of Jewish ‘otherness’ or alterity: antisemitism and assimilation. This strategy was not a wholesale rejection of assimilation, but rather a reformation of modern Jewish identity. In fact, the recent historiography on Lilien focuses less on his Zionist iconology and more on his construction and imaging of the new male Jew.4

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Lilien, gender, nation-building, and the body politic Many of the seminal works on the history of the body tend to focus on the history of the male body in order, perhaps, to demonstrate the relationship between the ideal corporeal body, the creation of nation-states and the importance of political emancipation.5 Michel Foucault’s genealogies of power/knowledge that envisaged the body and sexuality as cultural constructs rather than natural phenomena did not specifically discuss the role gender played in this process.6 His work on the body and power led to a more general interest among historians in the relationship between sexuality, power, and nation-states, while also stimulating extensive feminist interest.7 One of the first historians to address the representation of the Jewish body in European culture was George Mosse, in his work on normative and aesthetic models of the body in nineteenth-century Europe. Mosse argues that normative models of respectability began in the eighteenth century and won over the middle class by suggesting that sexual restraint and wide physical differences between males and females were part of normal and respectable behaviour. He reasons that sexual deviance, such as homosexuality, had become linked to racial deviance in the nineteenth century and both were linked to antisemitism and the rise of fascism, bolstering the force of nationalism and sexual respectability by the twentieth century.8 It was Sander Gilman’s The Jew’s Body that contemplated the perception of difference between the Jewish male body and the Western Christian homogenised, white, male body.9 Gilman examines the link between degenerate illnesses such as syphilis and circumcision, prostitution, and the incidence of hysteria among Jews, questioning many of the scholarly assumptions about Freud and his Jewish identity.10 Largely interested in the relationship between illness, sexuality, and race in the creation of psychoanalysis, Gilman asserts that the male Jew was often perceived as both diseased and as ‘a type of female’.11 Gilman’s work stimulated further research, yet the interest in the Jewish body mainly developed in the literature surrounding the creation of a ‘muscular male Jewry’.12 This bias can be attributed to the interest of male historians in the classical Greek male body – healthy, fit, and muscular – that personified the concept of ‘beauty’ latent in (male) historiography from Johann Winckelmann (1717– 1768) onwards, and seen as a counter to the growing antisemitic projections about the decadent Jewish body at the fin de siècle.13 Daniel Boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Jewish Man also concentrates on how male nationalists or Zionists mimicked the normative masculine stereotypes of nineteenth-century Europe. Boyarin proposes that early Central European Zionists mimicked and then inverted these stereotypes in a bid to resist antisemitism and assimilation, and along the way invented Jewish masculinity. He suggests this work was an example of Homi Bhabha’s post-colonial theory of mimicry in action.14 Though still contentious, Boyarin states that the action of mimicry and inversion was carried out because the Jewish male at the fin de siècle was seen as effeminate and emasculated, and Zionist strategy became one of resistance and defiance.15 Boyarin’s post-colonial understanding of Bhabha’s mimicry and resistance

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is consistent with contemporary feminist discourse. Feminist philosophers such as Jana Sawicki also suggest that Foucault’s theories (particularly on ‘docile bodies’, discussed in Discipline and Punish) do not go far enough in explaining how traditional emancipatory politics based on power could be resisted or overcome.16 Like Gilman and Mosse, Boyarin discusses the female body, but these three scholars concentrate on the relationship between the male Jewish body and European antisemitism.17 Ultimately, literature on the representation of the Jewish body at the fin de siècle specifically favours the representation of the Jewish male body over the female body, or incorporates women’s bodies as if they are men. This favouritism is problematic if gender was a critical category for analysis.18 Lilien’s strong, muscle-bound, biblical heroes or warriors are part of this European historiography that favoured the development of Zionism as an example of male body culture. Lilien’s early images of the new Jew, both male and female, became part of the iconography associated with the national character of the new state of Israel as the new Jewish man and bronzed, virile halutznik (pioneer). His images remain important visual representations for the study of fin-de-siècle Jewish alterity. What was it about his images that so enthralled his German-speaking audience, both Jewish and non-Jewish?

Juda and the creation of the New Jew Lilien first came to the attention of the German public with Juda, his second book of illustrations. Until then, Lilien’s early life in Drohobycz, a growing multicultural centre at the base of the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine, seemed to Lilien far removed from the cosmopolitan art world developing in fin-de-siècle Berlin, where he would eventually settle. At the time of his birth, Drohobycz had a population of nearly twenty thousand, although his art and life, like that of his older, more famous Jewish townsman and fellow painter, Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879), has completely disappeared from the town’s historical memory.19 On a trip home in 1913, Lilien created an affectionate etching of the Drohobycz marketplace, which by this time was a centre of the petroleum trade (Fig. 2.1).20 In his later years, he often travelled back to Drohobycz to visit his mother Keila (née Langermann), after his father Jacob, a wood turner, died in 1907. Lilien drew a portrait of his father that appeared as Lieder der Arbeit (The Song of Work) in his illustrations for Lieder des Ghetto (1903) (Fig. 2.2). As the title suggests, the portrait depicts him as a weary Galician carpenter worn down by hard physical work. It is also a hymn to his father’s labour of love: the art of woodturning, with the decorative border featuring the shaved timber curls left by a wood planer. Lilien grew up in a household of meagre means, though in the 1870s it was not entirely the poverty-stricken ‘colourless world’ mentioned by Zweig.21 Lilien was the oldest of seven children, of whom three died before the age of three.22 His brother Markus became a wood turner like his father, his sister Minna left for New York, and Hania, the youngest, a schoolteacher who never married, was shot while trying to save her nephew and niece (Markus’s children) in an SS round-up.23

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Figure 2.1  E. M. Lilien, Market Place at Drohobycz, 1913, etching, P74.09.2498. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Lilien’s father could not afford to send him to the local gymnasium for longer than two years, and with his artistic talents already evident, he apprenticed with a local sign-maker.24 With the help of wealthier relatives, Lilien re-enrolled at the Realschule in Lwów (Lemberg) and was able to study in Kraków at the Kunstschule (now known as the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts) under the ageing Jan Matejko (1838–1893), one of Poland’s greatest contemporary artists and a fierce nationalist.25 Lilien would have been a first-hand witness to the national revival of Polish history painting that had taken place under Matejko. He was perhaps influenced by Matejko’s use of props, costumes, and strong narrative retelling of Polish history, such as his cycle of

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Figure 2.2  E. M. Lilien, Lieder der Arbeit, 1903. In Morris Rosenfeld, Lieder des Ghetto, trans. Berthold Feiwel, with illustrations by Ephraim Moses Lilien (Berlin: S. Calvary,1903), 25.

paintings commemorating the History of Civilisation in Poland and the introduction of Christianity, the glorification of Polish national heroes, such as Copernicus and the kings, queens, and saints of Polish history. Unfortunately, antisemitism was a part of the Kunstschule, as the artist Gottlieb had already discovered in 1873/4 when he was a student.26 Matejko delivered a well-documented antisemitic diatribe there in 1882.27 After two years of grinding poverty in Kraków, Lilien abandoned his studies and returned to Drohobycz, where he supported himself by signwriting and painting portraits.28 In 1892, Lilien won first prize in a competition praising the Polish writer Kornel Ujeski. With the prize money, he travelled to Vienna in 1894, like so many other Galician Jews. There, he applied unsuccessfully to the Academy of Fine Arts.29 He had hoped to study under Christian Griepenkerl, who later taught Egon Schiele. This second attempt to study at an art school, and his subsequent rejection, led him to Munich, a vibrant literary and artistic cultural centre at the time.30

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Following his desperate flight from Drohobycz in search of an art education, Lilien’s first book of illustrations – for Johann von Wildenradt’s novel Der Zöllner von Klausen – was a coup for a young man who had landed in Munich as an impoverished, untrained artist.31 Published in 1898, Lilien’s artwork remonstrates against the maltreatment of the peasantry and reflects his newfound understanding of socialism, gained while working at the satiric Munich newspaper Süddeutscher Postillion. The newspaper was edited by Eduard Fuchs (1870–1940), a political activist with socialist and Marxist convictions. Lilien’s sojourn in Munich, where he created illustrations for the new art journal Jugend, gave him a taste for politics and the bohemian life.32 The style of Lilien’s illustrations for Wildenradt’s book were reminiscent of medieval woodcuts, and appealed to a popular folkloric, even nationalist sentiment, in keeping with the socialist and artistic rhetoric prevalent in Munich at the time.33 Lilien’s second book was, on the surface, completely different. Juda (c. 1900) was a collection of Hebrew ballads written by the non-Jewish German poet and neoRomantic, Borries von Münchhausen (1874–1945), in collaboration with Lilien. For the first time, Lilien depicts a new type of Jewish male. This new Jew is upright, handsome, trim, physically fit, and explicitly heterosexual. Lilien’s illustrations and Münchhausen’s poems produced one of the most positive portrayals of a Jew in German literature since the German enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729–1781) depictions in The Jews (1749) and Nathan the Wise (1779). Lessing based his depictions on his friend, the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Juda, a fictitious account of an ancient Jewish hero who lives a romantic life in his ancestral land, was written for both a Jewish and non-Jewish audience. Like Lessing’s Nathan the Wise written over a hundred years earlier, this was a rare commodity in fin-de-siècle Germany. Yet, the völkisch, nationalist sentiment of Wildenradt’s novel and the collaboration with a non-Jewish writer seemed already part of Lilien’s modus operandi. Juda, unlike Lilien’s illustrations for Wildenradt’s novel, created great excitement among acculturated German Jews who were unaccustomed to positive and modern images of themselves or the narratives of their heritage produced for the entire non-Jewish German-speaking world to see.34 In its first three years of publication (1900, 1901, and 1902), Juda was printed three times in Berlin, and between 5,000 and 6,000 copies were sold. If the Jewish population in Berlin was around 100,000 between 1900 and 1902, then more than 12 per cent of the Berlin-Jewish reading public may have bought or seen his images.35 This estimate takes into account cafes, reading rooms, and libraries where a possible further thousand copies of the book circulated. By 1910, an additional 6,000 copies had been printed, indicating that, once again, more than 12 per cent of the Berlin Jewish reading public alone had bought or read his book.36 By 1920, five years before Lilien died, an additional 24,000 copies were printed, confirming Juda’s enduring popularity. As Stefan Zweig eagerly proclaimed, ‘Juda is an unusual mixture of the poet and the draughtsman. For the book is a document not only of the most perfect works of German folk book art but also the first chapter in the history of a nationally conscious art’.37 Germans must have been dazzled by the beautiful illustrations, created in the most contemporary style of the day, which continued to expound the tradition of German

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book art with detailed decorative margins and individual vignettes. In the frontispiece to Juda, Lilien proudly proclaims his Jewish identity, writing his full name in Hebrew, ‘Ephraim Moses, son of Yaakov the Cohen Lilien, Loyal Sons of Zion’ (Fig. 7.21). In the most well-known illustration from these ballads, Das Stille Lied (Fig. 1.2), Lilien single handedly fashioned a modern, and Jewish artistic style. It is a new interpretation of Jugendstil for a very different audience. Juda, the male hero of the story, kisses his female lover. The two bodies dissolve into an erotic sensual embrace. Juda’s cloak, with its flat, decorative botanical patterns, swirls around them, conveying their passionate, ‘exotic’, or ‘oriental’ love. In case the audience misses the point, at bottom, next to the woman’s feet are fecund images of fruit, ripe for the picking, while to the right two affectionate turtledoves perch on a ledge under a canopy made from the flowering bowers. What was groundbreaking for many Jewish Germans, including Buber, was not just the style of the image, but the subject matter. For his Jewish German audiences, the kiss was not a generic Germanic kiss, but a specifically Jewish kiss. Juda, appropriately attractive and looking a little like Theodor Herzl, kisses his female, and probably, Jewish lover. The emphasis on good looks and normative sexual behaviour was part of the Zionist body aesthetics that confirmed the acculturated Jewish and Germanic approach to strong heterosexual, manly comportment. The emphasis on a strong, muscular, Jewish body was a reaction to antisemtic Rassenkraft or pseudo-scientific racial theories of the day that constructed different racial bodies along a teleology from white superiority to black inferiority.38 The Jew’s body, as Sander Gilman confirmed, was racially inferior, ugly, and feminine, while the Jewish face was frequently depicted as having a large prominent nose, ‘fleshy and overly creased lips’, ‘curly, thick black locks of hair’, and ‘antelope eyes’.39 Lilien’s use of the face of the founding ‘father’ of Zionism as a prototype for the construction of positive Jewish male imagery signalled the rising popularity of Herzl’s political Zionist doctrine that conceived of a new race of Jewish people to counter the growing antisemitic projections about the Jewish body. Lilien was fascinated by him. Lilien, who often supplemented his income as an artist and illustrator by taking photographs, snapped the now iconic photograph of his hero attending the First Zionist Congress in 1897 (Fig. 2.3).40 Leaning on the balustrade of the Three Kings Hotel in Basel, Herzl looks out over the Wiese River, a tributary of the Rhine, gazing towards Zion. This photograph has appeared repeatedly in Zionist pamphlets and books to the present day. Lilien based many of his biblical and imaginary heroes on the real-life figure of Herzl, whose fashionably shaped beard and dark eyes also inspired his depictions of Adam and Moses (Figs. 2.4 and 2.5).41 Lilien was not alone in his fascination with Herzl’s features. Herzl’s good looks met with widespread approval. Western Jewry, despite internal differences over Zionism, saw him as a gifted leader, a new Moses to lead their people to a new land. Herzl was often called, both seriously and in jest, ‘the King of Zion’. Zweig first met Herzl in his office in Vienna, where Herzl was the feuilleton editor of the Neue Freie Presse. The year was 1901, just before the Fifth Zionist Congress. Zweig described his meeting with him thus:

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Figure 2.3  E. M. Lilien, Theodor Herzl on the balcony of the Three Kings Hotel, Basel, Switzerland, 1901.

Figure 2.4  E. M. Lilien, Moses Zerbricht die Tafeln (Moses Breaking the Tablets), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. I (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1908), 224.

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Figure 2.5 E. M. Lilien, Moses, 1922. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 81.

Theodor Herzl rose to meet me, and unwittingly I realized that the ironic witticism ‘the King of Zion’ had some truth in it. He actually looked regal with his broad high forehead, his clear features, his long, black, almost blue-black, priestly beard, and his dark brown, melancholy eyes. The ample, somewhat theatrical gestures that he employed did not appear to be artificial because they were part of his natural majesty, and the occasion was not one which particularly required his being impressive. Even at his old desk, covered with papers, in this narrow editorial office with its one window, he appeared like a Bedouin sheik of the desert, and a flowing white burnoose (a long hooded cloak) would have been as fitting as his carefully tailored black cutaway, obviously fashioned along Parisian lines. After a short, deliberate pause – he liked these small effects … he had probably studied them at the Burgtheater – he extended his hand with condescension and yet not without friendliness. Motioning to the chair next to him, he asked, ‘I think that I have heard or read your name somewhere. Poetry isn’t it?’ I had to admit it. ‘Well’ he said, leaning back, ‘what have you brought me?’42

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Reviews of Juda Reviews of Juda appeared in a number of German-language newspapers and journals, including the heterogeneous Neue Freie Presse and the German Jewish journal Die Welt. Zweig was Lilien’s friend and one of the first to comment. Zweig later became an accepted, albeit rare example of positive Jewish integration. His comments in 1903 reflected that enthusiasm: [I]n his verses the images glisten like rubies, illuminated by the suggestive pathos of the Psalms and Biblical poems, the monumental strength of the Old Testament and the dark ecstatic rhythms of its songs are rejuvenated in these sonorous verses  … [Lilien] paraphrases the poems and clothes them with the decorative unity illuminated by the silver star of Zion. Entwined in thorns, the old implements and forgotten emblems, symbols and badges of a proud past come to life in a modern form. And the national idea is given ornamental shape.43

Zweig concludes that, ‘Lilien has created a solid individuality which no one can rip from him. Only he can supersede and outdo this, for here it is no longer art speaking but culture’.44 Martin Buber praised Lilien’s work in Die Welt, saying it was the first evidence of ‘the coming of a Jewish art’.45 In an extensive review of Juda in Die Welt, Robert Jaffe, a Zionist poet writing under the pseudonym Max Aram, also praised the book, claiming it was ‘the first evidence of a new Jewish modern romantic art’ that united modern, cosmopolitan European art with traditional völkisch-Jewish characteristics in a specific work of art. For Jaffe, Juda was an example of how young acculturated Jews, thwarted in their attempts to assimilate, were returning to the powerful expressions of their own Jewish ‘Volkkultur’. Jewish culture was a way of preserving Jewish nationality in the Diaspora.46 This movement of young Jewish Germans interested in Jewish culture became synonymous with cultural Zionism under Martin Buber and was termed the ‘Jungjüdische Bewegung’.47 Alfred Werner suggests the enthusiasm generated by Juda was because ‘Zionists of 1900 were overwhelmed upon being confronted with a work that so flaunted Jewishness’.48 It is less clear what non-Jewish Germans thought. We do have one enticing line from the non-Jewish German historian and writer Felix Dahn (1834–1912), who in his review of Juda in the journal Das Literatur Echo wrote: ‘Were I a Jew, I would be an enthusiastic Zionist’.49 Why were Jewish Germans so ecstatic over Lilien’s images of modern Jews in Juda? Werner’s suggestion, that the blatant ‘flaunting’ of ‘Jewishness’ had never been seen in Jewish art, remains valid. Margaret Olin and others have since corroborated this view. There was a general ignorance among European Jewry concerning the artistic heritage of ancient Judaism, due to the belief that the injunction against making graven images prevented Jewish people from producing any figural images – animal or human – in their art. Martin Buber and the Jewish nationalists were determined to change this assumption, even though we now know it was founded on a lack of knowledge.50

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Martin Buber and the importance of Jewish art Buber is known for instigating the resurgence of interest in Jewish mysticism, resulting in the groundbreaking book on the philosophy of dialogue, Ich und Du (I and Thou; 1923). However, he also had a deep knowledge and interest in the visual arts.51 As the first to pronounce the imperative of Jewish renewal, Buber gave an emotional speech at the opening of the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901 on the importance of Jewish art and Jewish aesthetics. During this Congress, Lilien and Buber staged the first modern Jewish art exhibition. Along with Boris Schatz and Lilien, Buber also helped instigate the first Jewish national art school in Ottoman Palestine in 1906.52 In his ‘Address on Jewish Art’, Buber reminded his audience of the importance of Jewish art: Jewish Art is a great educator … and it is essential for us as Zionists that our Volk will regain this living perception … for only fully developed, complete human beings can be full Jews capable and worthy of creating a new homeland … No language is as urgent, as suggestive, as the language of art: there is no language that can reveal the nature of life and the nature of truth as can the language of art … As our most wonderful cultural document, our art will witness to the outside that a new Jewish culture is beginning to emerge.53

For Buber, the creation of a modern, secular Jewish art form, like French or German art, demonstrated the modernity of the Jews to their non-Jewish German neighbours. Jewish art as a cultural endeavour, like Persian art, Indian art, or the art of Islam, should be taken seriously. Jewish art would finally exist in the lexicon of modern Western art historiography. Buber’s ideas on a cultural rebirth of Judaism had been influenced by the writings of Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937), who wrote of a Kulturmacht (cultural power) of Judaism in a 1903 pamphlet. In his seminal work, Die Jüdische Moderne (The Jewish Modern; 1896), Birnbaum offered a racialist view of Zionist ideology constructing nationality on race: ‘The solid foundation of nationality is always and everywhere a racial one’.54 This view must have influenced Buber on the character of Jewish modernism. Mark Gelber suggests that Birnbaum’s views were so important that they were responsible at exactly this moment for Buber’s ‘conversion’ to Zionism.55 Buber’s Congress address coincided with the opening of the first Jewish art exhibition containing forty-eight works by eleven artists, including painters, sculptors, and illustrators of Hebrew texts.56 Drawing on the works of eleven artists, the same number that exhibited in the Berlin Secession movement was a way to emphasise the connection between Jewish modernism and German modernism.57 Many artists who were Jewish by birth but whose art did not necessarily reflect Jewish themes, such as Eduard Bendemann, Josef Israels, and Max Liebermann, were included in the exhibition. Artists with more obvious Jewish themes included Lesser Ury, Hermann Struck, Maurycy Gottlieb, Yehuda Epstein, and Alfred Nossig.58 Twelve of the works were by Lilien.59 Two of these, Passah (Passover) or Golus (Exile) and Jesaia (Isaiah), were from Juda, displayed at the exhibition along with the Congresskarte (Fig. 2.6). All

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three images reveal Lilien’s emerging stock trade in Jewish iconography: the thorny rose bush, the Galut (Diaspora) Jew depicted stereotypically as old, poor, religious, and Eastern European in traditional dress with the rising sun of Zion in the background. The Congresskarte created to advertise the Congress to delegates figured prominently in Lilien’s 1912 self-portrait (Fig. 1.1). It was the first Congresskarte by a well-known artist. Herzl had personally commissioned the artwork. Until then, Congresskarten had been the work of volunteer staff and amateur artists at the Zionist headquarters.60 Lilien’s drawing From Ghetto to Zion (1901) directly envisages the new Zionist creed: out of the old world of Galut will emerge the new world of Zion (Eretz Israel). His nationalist style was recognisable. An androgynous Aryan-looking angel drawn in the Jugendstil style with a Star of David adorning his raiment points with his left hand towards Zion, the direction of the rising sun. The angel rests his right hand on the shoulders of an old, bearded Diaspora Jew sitting passively, surrounded by a prickly bush. In the distance, a ‘new Jew’, dressed in the traditional clothes of the ghetto, tills the soil. In the lower right corner, wheat – one of the seven species of agricultural produce that symbolises the Land of Israel’s fertility – waves in the breeze. In case the viewer misses the Zionist symbolism connecting creation of the new Jew with the creation of a new land, Lilien gives a liturgical legitimacy to this new ideology by including a quote from the morning prayer promising the return of the Jews to Zion: ‘Our eyes will behold your return to Zion in mercy [or compassion]’. This quote was used many

Figure 2.6  E. M. Lilien, Vom Ghetto nach Zion (From Ghetto to Zion) or Congresscarte (Congress Card), 1901, India ink over graphite and white gouache, B51.11.2917. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner.

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times by early Zionist thinkers, starting with Rabbi Alkalai in the 1840s, in an attempt to link nationalist thinking with Jewish liturgy. No Jewish artist before or since has appropriated the prayer in just such a symbolist way.61 Lilien’s postcard cleverly merged Zionist thinking with modern aesthetics and was included in a commemorative stamp in Israel in 1977, to promote a similar nationalist agenda (Fig. I.2).62 Designed to coincide with the Zionist Congress, the Jewish art exhibition was intended to engage the audience at the Congress in a feeling of nationalist pride. It was also aimed at reconnecting them with what was assumed to be a ‘lost’ sense of aesthetics.63 Lilien’s image of a new people for a new land (as compared to the symbolism of the old Diaspora shtetl Jew) reflected Buber’s emerging ideas on Jewish art in his article for Ost und West, written just days before his speech at the Congress. Buber wrote that a Renaissance of Jewish culture would create ‘a free way of life’ and ‘an internal home’. He urged his readers to invest as much energy into walking, and singing and working as in the analysis of intellectual problems and to take pride and joy in a healthy and perfect body … The movement [would] remove the dust and cobwebs of the internal ghetto from the soul of our people and allow Jews to peek into heart and nature, to teach them to call birds and stars their brothers and sisters … through training of vivid seeing and through concentration of our creative powers, the movement [would] reawaken the gift of Jewish painting and sculpting.64

For Buber, the pursuit of a healthy body and the importance of work and physical activity were as important as the cultivation of the mind. He shared Lilien’s prophetic vision of Nordau’s Muskeljudentum.65 Buber argued that a more complete or holistic spiritual renewal was possible through an emphasis on visual culture, specifically Jewish painting and sculpture. With more than a hundred years of hindsight, Buber’s arguments seem at best naive and at worst imbued with the racialist thinking of Wagner. Buber’s assumption that ‘the gift of Jewish painting and sculpture’ had been sadly lacking among the Jewish people only reinforced nineteenth-century racialist ideology that suggested the Jewish people had no tradition of Jewish art. Jewish art had been around as long as Jews had. The difficulty for Buber, and all European Jews, was to reconcile a history of intense oppression and discrimination whereby the making of art was severely hampered by the lack of both training and patronage, particularly from the Middle Ages onwards. The impediments were so severe that many Jews did not begin to recover as artists until the ghetto gates came crashing down with the emancipation of the Jews under Napoleon in the 1790s. The sudden, intense period of Jewish participation in the modern era, beginning with Baruch Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn, was a way for acculturated Jews to make up for fifteen hundred years of non-participation in European cultural production.66 At best, Buber’s vision of the Jewish people as needing to wipe away ‘the dust and cobwebs of the internal ghetto’ is permeated with the thinking on physical culture, degeneracy, racial hygiene, and the moral development that was endemic at the fin de siècle.67 Like the Jewish body politics of Nordau, Buber

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hoped that such an innovative and creative endeavour among Jewish artists and modernists themselves would help to subvert anti-Jewish and increasingly antisemitic stereotypes that were spreading among non-Jewish German and European colleagues. Buber’s Jewish Renaissance was to be a kind of ‘visual redemption’, one that he hoped would help to create an entirely new type of Jew, and in the process a new type of Jewish community.68 Thus, art could demonstrate both the spiritual and physical renewal of the Jewish people, as well as display the new and emerging modern secular Jewish identity of German-speaking Jews to the non-Jewish world. At the time of the Fifth Zionist Congress, Buber helped establish a group of young Jewish writers and artists who wholeheartedly believed in his cultural renewal program and who called themselves the Democratic Fraction (Fig. 2.7). This group was the first self-proclaimed faction within the Zionist movement. Like Buber, it was less interested in the pragmatics of creating a Jewish state than in creating and promoting Jewish culture. It was instrumental in creating the first German Jewish modern publishing press dedicated to disseminating the artwork and ideas of Jewish artists. The Jüdischer Verlag continued to exist until 1933.69 In an effort to win over the intelligentsia to the cause of cultural Zionism, one of its first publications was the 1902 Jüdischer Almanach.

Figure 2.7  Members of the Democratic Fraction (?), at the Fifth Zionist Congress, 1901, Basel. No. 002643746. Courtesy of the National Library, Jerusalem.

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The Almanac – published again two years later – was dedicated to art and literature, and included numerous artworks and articles by the writers, critics, and artists who frequented the cafés and bohemian circles of Berlin. Some members of Berlin’s salon culture, not known for their Zionist leanings, felt close enough to their Zionist brethren to contribute to a specifically Jewish and modern magazine. These contributors included Magnus Hirschfeld; the well-known sex researcher, Stefan Zweig, celebrated Jewish artists Joseph Israels and Max Liebermann; as well as less prominent Jewish artists such as Lilien, Hermann Struck, and Lesser Ury.70

The articulation of Max Nordau’s Muskeljudentum (muscular Judaism) Lilien’s next major series of illustrations heralded another collaboration with a poet, this time the writer Berthold Feiwel (1875–1937) from Moravia, who was also a cultural Zionist and member of the Democratic Fraction. Lieder des Ghetto (Songs of the Ghetto) was a translation by Feiwel of the Yiddish poetry of the socialist and ‘poet laureate of the labour’ movement, Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923).71 Ironically, Rosenfeld’s original book was a hymn to the ‘ghetto’ Jew now living in the slums of New York City’s Lower East Side and working in factory sweatshops. Rosenfeld had socialist leanings akin to Lilien’s. In Lieder des Ghetto, Lilien’s images continued to reflect his newfound selfconfidence in the Jewish Jugendstil style invented for his Juda illustrations. In the illustration Die Erschaffung des Menschen (The Creation of Mankind) (1903), he depicts the Genesis story of the creation of mankind [sic] using the same toned, muscular Jewish male body (Fig. 2.8).72 The journey from boyhood to manhood is visualised by Adam’s growth from a boy into a mature, strong, and virile adult. This unusual image of adults with angel wings as Adam’s four guardian angels, with one in particular bearing an unusual facial similarity to Herzl, was not how Rosenfeld’s poem describes the young man’s transformation into an adult.73 Lilien’s fascination with the fin-de-siècle ideal of muscular manly beauty may explain his fascination with the Jewish angels’ toned bodies, but does not explain his oblique use of the angels themselves.74 Lilien had at last constructed a new type of Jewish male that was strong, dignified, and iconic. As if by osmosis, he was able to amalgamate his Buber-inspired nationalist Jugendstil seen in Juda and Die Erschaffung des Menschen into a new socialist and Zionist articulation of Max Nordau’s emerging ‘Jewry of Muscle’ or Muskeljudentum. Nordau was an enigmatic figure, an assimilated Hungarian-born German-speaking Jew who became an unusual advocate for German Jewry. In art historical circles, he is more widely known as the writer of the disturbing critique of fin-de-siècle society titled Degeneration (Entartung). The book ridiculed the art, music, and literature of the fin de siècle – including Impressionist painting, the Wagner cult, and the novels of Zola. The degeneration of modern European society was, according to Nordau, due to its continuing indulgence in effeminate and sexually deviant activities such as homosexuality and its reliance on living in an urban metropolis. According to Nordau, this modernist ‘state of decadence’ was also reflected in the general population of Europe, especially in the French population, which courted socialism and anti-militarism.75

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Figure 2.8  E. M. Lilien, Die Erschaffung des Menschen (The Creation of Mankind) or Die Erschaffung des Dichters (The Creation of the Poet), 1903. In Morris Rosenfeld, Lieder des Ghetto, trans. Berthold Feiwel, with illustrations by Ephraim Moses Lilien (Berlin: S. Calvary,1903), 116–17.

Nordau’s ideas on degeneracy paralleled the thinking of medical professionals in the fields of psychology and neurology, who connected organic mental and physical illnesses of the modern body to the ills of contemporary society, especially the stresses and strains associated with modern urban life.76 Nordau blamed the new technology-enhanced speed of trains for shattering men and women’s nerves, a view adapted from the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot’s ideas on the pathology of degeneracy. Indeed, before becoming a cultural commentator, Nordau had been a practising physician, specialising in nervous and mental illnesses.77 Nordau considered Charcot’s studies on neurasthenia, or the weakness of the nervous system, to be extremely important. He was also influenced by his other mentor, the Jewish Italian criminologist César Lombroso.78 At the Pitié-Salpêtriére Hospital in Paris, Charcot considered neurasthenia to be the first sign of medical degeneracy, which he postulated was precipitated by the stresses and strains of modern urban life.79 Nordau and other clinicians from the 1880s onwards were fascinated by this malady, relating its onset to drugs, alcohol, or other complications of city life. Nordau’s idea of degeneracy or Entartung was related to nervousness, something he considered to be a mass sickness or even an epidemic within modern society.80 The ‘hero’ of his 1887 novel Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts (The Malady of the Century) was a degenerate neurasthenic whom Nordau later described as the prototype of fin-de-siècle man, devoid of will and energy and with the mentality of a pessimist.81 Paradoxically, Nordau’s ideas on degeneracy mirrored the antisemitic, pseudo-scientific racial theories of the time that linked inherent Jewish characteristics to some underlying physical and mental abnormalities.82

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Perhaps, the most derogatory images of this pathology of degeneracy at the fin de siècle were the cartoons associated with the decade-long Dreyfus affair. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew, was charged with selling military secrets to Germany, which at the time was France’s most hated and powerful enemy. Commencing on 15 October 1894, the events surrounding Dreyfus’s court-martial, trial, conviction, public degradation, and eventual pardon after incarceration on Devil’s Island became known as the Dreyfus Affair. It was the most politically charged antisemitic event of the decade, and highlighted the potentially traitorous position of Jews who served in the French military.83 In these cartoons, the Jewish body is portrayed as the sick, urban, degenerate ‘carrier’ of unhealthy modernist traits, the very opposite of the healthy, virile, purely French nationalist body. The image of the Jew as ugly, fat, pigeon-toed, bandy-legged, hooked-nosed dwarves is captured to the left of centre in an 1898 cartoon from the right-wing journal L’Antijuif Française Illustrè (Fig. 2.9). The depiction of ‘three little Jews’ dancing and tugging at the coat tails of the Prime Minister of France, Eugéne Henri Brisson, implied that the real instigators of unrest and disorder were these barely human troublemakers.84 Nordau, who had scarcely mentioned Jews in Degeneration, conceived of a hypermasculine Jewish male, modelled on the ‘Aryan’ ideal, as a strategic counter to the disturbing and racist theories on the gendered Jewish male. Five years after the publication of Degeneration, Nordau became both a Zionist and an advocate for a new type of Jewish masculinity which he envisaged would be the salvation of modern Jewry. His ‘conversion’ to Zionism corresponded with the First Zionist Congress in 1897, where he gave a speech that paralleled Theodor Herzl’s perceptions on modern Jewish emancipation: the assimilation of Jews into German and European society was an illusion. He berated the

Figure 2.9  L’Antijuif Francais Illustrè, September 1898. Exact whereabouts unknown.

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French Revolution and the modern emancipation of Jewry that gave the Jew ‘the right of discharging all the duties of a citizen, but the nobler rights which [were] granted to talent and energy were absolutely denied him’.85 After 1894, Nordau’s awareness of the Dreyfus case, of latent French antisemitism, and of Western antisemitism in general, together with his encounter with Herzl (a fellow Hungarian), led him to conclude that resolving the fruitlessness of assimilation was the key to German Jewry’s future.86 Like Buber, who converted to Zionism so that German-speaking Jews could prove their cultural proclivity as a national and spiritual community to the non-Jewish world, Nordau wished to prove that European Jews were participants in the modernist rhetoric of nationalist politics. Although Nordau had alluded to the creation of a new kind of Jewry (the ‘Muscular Jew’) at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, it was not until 1903 that his reference to a new type of Jewry became clearly apparent.87 Nordau first used the term ‘Muscular Jewry’ (Muskeljudentum) in an article for the second issue of Die Jüdische Turnzeitung (The Jewish Gymnastics Journal), wherein he mentioned that the Jews of the ghetto would become ‘deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men’ (Fig 2.10).88 These new modern Jews would be proud of their body and their nationality. As Nordau added: ‘[For] no other people will gymnastics fulfil a more educational purpose than for us Jews. It shall straighten us in body and in character. It shall give us self-confidence as it is … We completely lack a sober confidence in our physical

Figure 2.10  Postcard for IVRIA, Association of Jewish Academics, Vienna, 1907. Postcard Collection, colour; 94 × 139 mm. No. 004714338. Courtesy of National Library, Jerusalem.

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prowess’.89 Nordau endorsed gymnastics as a Jewish sport, linking the name of the first Jewish German gymnastics club with Shimon Bar Kokhba, who became known in modern Zionist discourse as the heroic Jewish figure who had fought the Roman Hellenists in the first century CE. Like Friedrich Jahn (1778–1852), who had created the German Gymnastics movement to revive and re-invigorate German military strength in 1811, Nordau believed a hundred years later that the degeneration of the modern Jewish body was due to a lack of physical exercise (Fig. 2.11). The prospect that gymnastics as a form of physical culture would regenerate both the Jewish people and the Jewish male was so exciting and emotional that spectators in August 1903 wept when they saw the first exposition of Jewish gymnasts at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, staged to mark the creation of the League of Jewish Gymnasts.90 What has concerned many Jewish scholars is that Nordau, Lilien, and Buber must have internalised the negative and pathological interpretations of Jewish manhood put forward by antisemites at the time. What seems so troubling about the late-nineteenth-century representations of the degenerate Jewish body is how little this image of the Jewish troublemaker changed over time. Forty years on, when Nazi propaganda was at its height, Ernst Heimer’s racist German cartoon for

Figure 2.11  Der Vortrupp (The Advanced Troops). Cover illustration for Deutsche Zeitschrift für das Menschentum unserer Zeit 7, No. 24, 2 December 1919. In George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 96.

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Figure 2.12  Phillip Rupprecht, Money is the God of the Jews. In Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom). (Nuremberg: Verlag Der Stürmer, 1938/9), 42. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016 by the Katz Family.

children drawn in the 1930s includes the same disfigured Jewish body as the ‘little French Dreyfusards’ (Fig. 2.12).91 Daniel Boyarin attempts to resolve this internal antisemitism by pointing out that Zionism was a project aimed to invert the stereotypes of the Jewish male as weak, sickly, and effeminate by ‘transforming Jewish men into the type of male they admired namely, the ideal “Aryan” male. If the political project of Zionism was to be a nation like all other nations, on the level of reform of the Jewish psyche it was to be men like all other men’.92 Zionists mimicked the normative masculine stereotypes of nineteenth-century Europe and then inverted them in a bid to resist antisemitism and assimilation – along the way inventing Jewish masculinity.93 The dressing up of Zionism in the clothes of normative masculinity was seen as a cure for the disease of ‘Jewish gendering’ as well as the salvation for the political ills of the Jewish people. Nordau’s concept of a ‘Muscular Jewry’ seemed at the time

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to be the best cure of all. Lilien’s Zionist artworks depicting strong, heroic, muscular Jewish male bodies visualised Nordau’s Muskeljudentum as if made to order. Lilien’s genius lay in his manipulation of the decorative and ornamental style of Jugendstil– modern, rebellious, and defiantly radical – into a cry for Jewish nationalism, using Nordau’s aesthetics of the ideal body.94 No wonder his synthesis of Jugendstil aesthetics with Zionist ideology caused a reviewer of the exhibition to call Lilien ‘the darling of the public’.95

The confirmation of [male] Zionist aesthetics When Buber discussed the art of each participant in the Fifth Zionist Congress exhibition, he reserved his highest praise for Lilien. According to Buber, Lilien had recognised meaning and value of our old themes and appropriated them. He experienced Zionism on his own body, internalised it completely. Precisely because he belongs to the young generation, he is one of us … His book Juda and his Hebrew ex libris [plates] earned him our full admiration, and we put all of our hope in him.96

Lilien became obsessed with the visual transformation or regeneration of the Jewish people, and his creation of the strong muscled Jewish male appeared in every series of major works and illustrations from that moment up until approximately 1912. In 1909, he remade his own ex libris, titled Ex Libris, E.M. Lilien, as if to reemphasise this transformation (Fig. 2.13).97 This time he included a self-portrait wherein he envisaged himself as a Jewish warrior, perhaps because the warrior’s shield has the Magen David emblazoned on it. In the background are the walls and gates of what looks like Jerusalem. Here, Lilien’s artistic ego shines through, intimating that he is the King David of the modern era, the metaphoric re-builder of a New Jerusalem. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Lilien was so in demand as an illustrator that he worked on several projects simultaneously.98 After his illustrations for Lieder des Ghetto, Lilien undertook a commission for the stained glass windows in the B’nai Brith Lodge in Hamburg in 1904, and in 1906, spent over six months at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem with Boris Schatz creating the foundational courses for art classes and design workshops.99 During this period, Lilien created a bookplate for Schatz where he depicts him as a strong, bare-chested hero with pronounced musculature revealing bulging biceps, taut abdomen, and slim waist (Fig. 2.14). In the biblical narrative (Exodus 35: 30-34), Bezalel was singled out by God to create the mishkan (tabernacle, or portable sanctuary for the worship of God). Here, Schatz/Bezalel holds the ancient artisan’s tool while above him loom two muscularlooking cherubim or guardians of the tabernacle. Yigal Zalmona writes that Lilien and Buber were both Freemasons because Freemasonry accepted Jews.100 Zalmona suspects that Schatz wears a symbolic ancient mason’s apron heralding his importance

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Figure 2.13 E. M. Lilien, Ex Libris E. M. Lilien [Hebrew], 1909, etching, P74.09.2452. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

Figure 2.14 E. M. Lilien, Sketch for Ex-Libris Dov (Boris) Schatz, n.d., India ink over graphite and white gouache, P83.04.5534. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

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in Freemasonry as the Grand Master builder of the tabernacle.101 If Lilien depicted himself as the symbolic re-builder of a New Jerusalem, then Schatz was the example of this in modern-day Palestine. As Lilien’s popularity grew, he developed a plan to create a monumental new series of illustrations of all the Bible stories, Jewish and Christian, in the hope that nonJewish audiences as well as many acculturated Jewish Germans would understand that the New Testament was full of Jewish characters.102 In one work from his Book of the Bible (Die Bücher der Bibel), titled The Expulsion from Paradise, Archangel Gabriel, naked and looking again like Herzl, points with his head, in true prophetic form, to the way out of Europe, out of the German Jewish ‘paradise’. Is he instead pointing towards a modern Zion? (Fig. 2.15) Re-reading Lilien’s artwork in light of this rich history of modern European body culture provides a deeper understanding of his creation of a Muskeljudentum, which amalgamated Nordau’s articulation of a muscular ‘new Jew’ with Buber’s declaration for a Jewish renewal through an emphasis on a German modernism and Jewish art. Lilien’s images presented a new type of male Jew, a ‘muscular manly Jew’ to rival the current late-nineteenth-century ‘regenerative’ discourses of race science, physical fitness, hygiene, eugenics, colonialism, and militarism. His images concentrated on the cultivation of an ideal body type lodged in classical Greco-Roman models of normative manliness. This white, European, Aryan model of masculinity represented everything that was healthy, normal, and superior about Western civilisation. The body politics of modernity together with pan-nationalism, modern imperialism, and the eugenicist paradigm had gathered momentum at the European fin de siècle at exactly the same moment as the birth of the Jewish national idea. This only added urgency to

Figure 2.15  E. M. Lilien, Die Vertreibung aus dem Paradies (The Expulsion from Paradise), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. I (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1908), 40–41.

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the modern quest for Jewish identity. ‘Muscular Jewry’ became a form of resistance, a way to reject antisemitic fabrications of the anti-normal Jewish ‘other’ as ugly, diseased, effeminate, and unmanly with a hundred other variations. It would, forty years later, reach epic proportions in Nazi Germany. Lilien’s artwork became a way for modern Jews to come to terms with these new aesthetic principles governing body image. His popular drawings recreated and reimagined the ‘degenerate’ Jew as a new, healthy, tall, suntanned, fit, and muscular ideal specimen of manliness.

Notes 1

2 3 4

5

6 7

Friedrich Schiller (1788–1805) to Wilhelm von Humboldt (1769–1859). Friedrich Schiller, Die Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Schiller und Wilhelm von Humboldt, ed. Siegfried Seidel, 2 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau, 1962), cited in Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper, 2010), 87–88. On equality, emancipation, and the experience of modernity among German Jewry following the unification of Germany in 1871, see Introduction. Marion A. Kaplan, ‘Redefining Judaism in Imperial Germany: Practices, Mentalities and Community’, Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 1–34. See particularly Stanislawski, Zionism and Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London; New York: Routledge, 2007). In art history, for example, see Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998). Paula Hyman, ‘The Jewish Body Politic: Gendered Politics in the Early Twentieth Century’, Nashim 2 (1990): 37–51, as quoted in ‘Does Gender Matter? Locating Women in European Jewish History’, in Rethinking European Jewish History, ed. Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman (Oxford; Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009), 61. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1977); The History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1978). See Robert Nye’s focus on the importance that physical exercise, gymnastics, and sport played in the creation of healthy, athletic bodies and minds in order to emphasise the role played by aggressive nationalism and military pride in fin-desiècle France. Robert A. Nye, ‘Degeneration, Neurasthenia and the Culture of Sport in Belle Epoque France’, Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 1 (1982): 51–68; Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley: University Press of California, 1998 [repr. ed.]); Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). On feminism’s critique of Foucault’s theory of the ‘docile body’ and its inability to counter resistance. Jana Sawicki, ‘Feminism

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and the Power of Discourse’, in After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, ed. J. Arac (New Brunswick, NJ; London: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 161–78. 8 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985); George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 9 Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 5. 10 Ibid., 93–98. 11 Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 127. Gilman, like Mosse, discusses the female body, but mainly in relation to antisemitism, and as an aside to the main story about the perception of Jewish men as women. See later discussion on Sarah Bernhardt in Sander Gilman, ‘Salome’. 12 This gendered scholarship includes work by Todd Presner, who builds upon Nordau’s arguments on degeneracy raised by Michael Stanislawski, Robert Wistrich, and Moshe Zimmerman. Presner emphasised the importance Jewish gymnastics played in the creation of Jewish athleticised, muscular bodies. Todd Samuel Presner, ‘Clear Heads, Solid Stomachs, and Hard Muscles’, Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 2 (2003): 269–96; Presner, Muscular Judaism; Stanislawski, Zionism; Robert Wistrich, ‘Max Nordau: From Degeneration to “Muscular Judaism”’, Transversal 2 (2004): 3–21; Moshe Zimmerman, ‘Muscle Jews versus Nervous Jews’, in Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe, ed. Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 13–26. This essay originally appeared as ‘Muscular Jewry – The Remedy to Nervous Jewry’, Z’manim 83 (Summer 2003): 56–65. 13 Johann Joachim Winckelmann is often called the ‘father’ of the discipline of art history. As an archaeologist and art historian, he was the first to write a book on art history, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (The History of Ancient Art, 1764). See also Alex Potts’s re-reading of Winckelmann: Alex Potts, Flesh and the Idea: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 14 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), 84–86; ‘You May Not Tell the Boys: The Diaspora Politics of a Bitextual Jew’, in Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 262. See also Jay Geller on circumcision and the ‘queer female’ in Jay Geller, On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 15 Gideon Reuveni claims that Boyarin’s use of a ‘distinctly unheroic physical ideal’ as having precedents in Judaism since antiquity is questionable. Gideon Reuveni, ‘Sports and the Militarisation of Jewish Society’ in Brenner and Reuveni, Emancipation through Muscles, 44. 16 Sawicki states, ‘Reversing power positions without altering relations of power is rarely liberating. Neither is it a condition of liberation to throw off the yoke of domination’. Jana Sawicki, ‘Feminism, Foucault and “Subjects” of Power and Freedom’, in The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, ed. J. Moss (London: Sage, 1998), 102, cited in ‘Foucault and Feminism’, The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep. utm.edu/foucfem/, accessed 13 November 2013.

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17 Daniel Boyarin, ‘Retelling the Story of O: Or, Bertha Pappenheim, My Hero’, in Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 313–60. 18 Joan Wallach Scott, ‘A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–75; Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: Still a Useful Category of Analysis’, Diogenes 57, no. 1 (February 2010): 7–14. On gender and sexuality in Jewish cultural studies that includes Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt, eds., Judaism since Gender (New York: Routledge, 1997); Ann Pellegrini, ‘Whiteface Performances, Race, Gender and Jewish Bodies’, in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 108–49; Matti Bunzl, ‘Jews, Queers, and Other Symptoms: Recent Work in Jewish Cultural Studies’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 2 (2000): 321–41; Maria Benjamin Baader, Sharon Gillerman, and Paul Lerner, eds., Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); Ulrike Brunotte, ‘“All Jews Are Womenly, but No Women Are Jews”: The “Femininity” Game of Deception, Female Jew, Femme Fatale Orientale, and Belle Juive’, in Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism, 195–220. 19 By 1869, five years before Lilien was born, approximately 17,000 people lived in Drohobycz, which made it the third largest town in Galicia at the time, after Kraków and Lwów (Lemberg). This population comprised four thousand Poles, five thousand Ruthenians (Ukrainians), and eight thousand Jews. ‘Drohobycz Administrative District: A Brief History of Drohobycz’ at https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/ drohobycz/shtetls/drohobycz.html, accessed 24 April 2014. The life of the 1930s artist Bruno Schulz (gunned down outside his house by the Nazis in 1942) is a different story. Schulz has been reinvented and commemorated by both the Poles and the Ukrainians as a great writer and painter. A monument to his memory stands on the alleged spot where he was murdered. 20 For more information on Drohobycz, see Ezra Mendelsohn, Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2002). On the petroleum industry in Galicia, see Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 21 Lilien, EMLsW, 13. As Zweig’s posthumous autobiography published in 1942 attests, Zweig had never met an Eastern European Jew until he met Lilien, and most probably, he knew very little about the town of Drohobycz. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1964 edition), 117. 22 According to Tom Peters, this information comes from the AGAD Archive JRI Poland. Reisel (b. Drohobycz 1876 –d. Drohobycz 1876, 5 months), Ruchel Lilien (b. Drohobycz 1880–d. Drohobycz 1882, 1 year, 8 months), and Juda Lilien (b. Drohobycz 1882–d. Drohobycz 1883, 2 months, 20 days). 23 According to Tom Peters, Markus Lilien (b. 1879–d. 1938); Minna Dichter née Lilien (b. Drohobycz 1885–c. New York 1972), wife of Joseph Dichter, mother of Clara Siegel, Helen Dichter, Jack Dichter, and Lilian Houss; and Hania (b. Drohobycz 1889–d. Drohobycz 1939). 24 Ekkard Hieronimus, ‘E. M. Lilien, Leben und Werk’, in Lilien, Briefe, 10. 25 Hieronimus, ‘E. M. Lilien, Leben und Werk’, 10. Although by the time Lilien arrived in 1890, Matejko was already in his fifties and died the year he left for Vienna. 26 Mendelsohn, Painting a People, 199–207. 27 Ibid.

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28 Ibid. I thank Dr Joanna Grabowska, archivist at the Matejko Art Academy, then the Academy of Fine Arts, Kraków, for showing me Lilien’s art certificate. It states that he attended only two classes per semester and only three or four semesters over the three years he studied there (from 1890 to 1892). As Dr Grabowska posited, the fees were then quite high and Lilien’s attendance (or non-attendance) record may have been due to his inability to keep up with the payments. 29 I thank University Librarian archivist, Dr Eva Schober, for access to the archives at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. The archival entry record at the Academy of Fine Arts Library for the year 1893–94, in the ‘Classifications-Listen der Allgemeinen Malerschule, 1889–1894’ (Vol. 17) (minutes of the examination of the Common Painting Class), state that Lilien: Schulzeugniß nicht gezeigt. Er brachte 2 genre(?)artige Studien, gemalt, die so halbwegs waren; seine Probezeichnung aber war sehr schwach u. roh. ‘(He did not show a certificate. He brought two genre (?) studies that were fairly good; his test drawings however were very weak and rough)’. 30 Mendelsohn, Painting a People, 199–207. On the Munich art scene, see chapter 7. 31 Stefan Zweig described Lilien’s upbringing with more than a bit of poetic licence as ‘desolate poverty … in a rocky colourless world’. Lilien, EMLsW, 13. 32 Lilien, EMLsW, 14–16. See entry on Eduard Fuchs in The Dictionary of Art Historians, ed. Lee Sorenson, http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/fuchse.htm, updated 2000, accessed 11 November 2013. Fuchs became a cultural historian and Daumier scholar, collecting caricatures of women and erotic art. His two important works on this subject were Das Erotische Element in der Karikatur (Berlin: A. Hoffman, 1904) and Die Frau in der Karikatur (München: Albert Langen, 1906). Fuchs was the subject of Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker’ (Eduard Fuchs, the Collector and the Historian), and he appears in the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung 6, 1937. Michael P. Steinberg, ed., Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 88. 33 Brieger, EML, 47. 34 There were ten editions of the book with Lilien’s illustrations published between 1900 and 1922. The first edition published in 1900 had a print run of 3,000 and cost eight reichsmarks. There appears to have been a luxury, leather-bound edition of sixty-five books that cost 25 reichsmarks. This edition was most probably only affordable to the middle and upper-middle classes. Confirmed by Dr Christian Hermann, at the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart. Overall, there were at least 11,000 copies of the book published by 1910. Another 24,000 copies were published by 1920. Peter Geils, Willy Gormy, and Reinhard Oberschelp, Gesamtverzeichnis Der Deutschsprachigen Schrifttums: 1700–1965 (Munich; London: Saur, 1979–1983). For this information, I thank Karl-Frieder Netsch at the Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig. 35 Population figures for German Jews living in Germany between 1871 and 1910 and then for the percentage of German Jews living in Berlin compared to other cities or areas of Germany (twenty-three per cent of the entire Jewish population of Germany lived in Berlin in 1910). See Monica Richarz, ‘Demographic Developments’, in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Vol. 3: Integration in Dispute 1871–1918, ed. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8, 29–30. 36 Taking into account cafes, reading rooms and libraries. For these publishing details, see Appendix A.

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37 My translation. Stefan Zweig, ‘Introduction’, in Lilien, EMLsW, 21. ‘Er war ein ungemeiner, ein wohlverdienter Erfolg für Dichter und Zeichner. Denn das Buch ist ein Dokument, nicht nur eines der volk kommensten Werke deutscher Buchkunst, sondern auch das erste Blatt tin der Geschichte der nationalen bewussten Kunst’. On the reception on Juda see below, pages 44–46. 38 On the racist doctrine of blood and race, see Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (New York: Basic Books, 1974). The History of Anti-Semitism: From Voltaire to Wagner, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 39 Oscar Panizza, The Operated Jew (1893), trans. Jack Zipes, ‘The Operated Jew’, New German Critique, Vol. 21 (1980), cited in Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 203–88. The story by Oscar Panizza (1853–1921) was about a fictional Jew, Itzig Feitel Stern, who underwent an operation in order to be reconstructed as an Aryan. The story begins with a clear description of Stern’s physiognomy: his Jewish ‘antelope eyes’, nose, eyebrows, ‘fleshly and overly creased’ lips, ‘violet fatty tongue’, ‘bow-legs’, and ‘curly, thick black locks of hair’. The Jewish response to Panizza’s book by Salomo Friedländer (1871–1946) is titled The Operated Goy. In this retelling of the story, the Aryan Count Reschock, a noble whose family of antisemites can trace its roots to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Emperor Titus, has ‘thin lips, Prussian chin, proud nape of the neck, [and an] extraordinary stiff posture’. Oscar Panizza, Der Korsettenfritz: Gesammelte Erzahlüngen (Munich: Mathes & Sietz, 1981), cited in Gilman. 40 Igal Avidan, ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, The Jerusalem Report, 12 June 1997, 44. 41 Herzl’s beard added to the widespread appeal of his regal bearing. In ultra-Orthodoxy, a Jewish man is forbidden from cutting his beard. Herzl’s neatly trimmed version apparently appealed to both sides of Jewish German and Zionist politics as it could pass as either secular or religious. 42 Zweig, World of Yesterday, 71–72. 43 My translation. Zweig, ‘Introduction’, in Lilien, EMLsW, 21–22. ‘[I]n seinen Versen glühen die Bilder dunkel wie Rubine, überleuchtet vom suggestiven Pathos der Psalmen und Gesänge; die monumentale Gewalt des alten Testamentes und den dunkel ekstatischen Rhythmus ihrer Lieder … Er paraphrasiert die Gedichte und hüllt sie in eine dekorative Einheit, die von den altvölkischen blauweissen Heimatsfarben umschlungen, von Dornen umrankt und vom silbernen Zionssterne überleuchtet ist. Die alten Geräte und vergessenen Wahrzeichen, Symbole und Zeugen der stolzen Vergangenheitl leben wieder auf in moderner Umbildung, das nationale wirkt in ornamentaler Verwertung’. 44 ‘Lilien eine bodenständige Eigenart geschaffen, die ihm niemand entreissen und die er nur selbst überwinden oder übertreffen kann. Denn hier spricht nicht mehr Kunst, sondern schon Kultur’. Zweig, in Lilien, EMLsW, 22. 45 ‘[D]as Kommen einer jüdischen Kunst Martin Buber’, in ‘Das Buch Juda’, in Die Welt, No. 50, issue 10, 14 December 1900, 12. 46 Robert Jaffe, ‘Neujüdische Kunst’, in Die Welt, No. 5, issue 14, 3 April 1901, 24; also as quoted in Mark H. Gelber, ‘The Jungjüdische Bewegung: An Unexplored Chapter in German-Jewish Literary and Cultural History’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 31, no. 1 (1986): 109.

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47 Ibid. See Introduction for the original definition. See also later discussion on Martin Buber and the cultural Zionists in chapter 6. 48 Alfred Werner, ‘The Tragedy of Ephraim Moses Lilien’, in Herzl Year Book, ed. Raphael Patai (New York: Herzl Press, 1959), 100. Dr Werner was born in Vienna in 1911 and died in 1979. He studied literature at the University of Vienna and was an art and literary critic. The Leo Baeck Institute, New York, holds his collection of writings. 49 ‘Wäre ich ein Jude, würde ich ein begeisterer Zionist sein’. Die Welt, No. 5, issue 8, 22 February 1901, 9 and quoted in Gelber, ‘The Jungjüdische Bewegung’, 109. For more reviews in English, German, and Polish that mention Juda when considering Lilien’s later work, see Lilien’s Nachlass at the German-speaking Jewish Heritage Museum at Tefen. 50 On Jewish art, iconography, and antisemitism, see Introduction. 51 Margaret Olin, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourse on Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2001), 104–05. Buber began studying mysticism in the 1900s and influenced a generation of thinkers on the forgotten Jewish mystical tradition as well as documenting other ecstatic traditions found within Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and elsewhere. For Buber’s writings on different religious traditions, see his Ecstatic Confessions (1909). Buber’s interest in Jewish art, which preceded his engagement in spiritual philosophy, and influenced the formation of his outlook on the latter, is not widely known. 52 Olin, Nation without Art, 101. For information on Buber see Maurice Friedman, Encounter on the Narrow Bridge: A Life of Martin Buber (New York: Paragon House, 1991); Gilya Gerda Schmidt, Martin Buber’s Formative Years: From German Culture to Jewish Renewal, 1897–1909 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995) and Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, ‘On the Bivalent Way’, in Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity: The Culture of Jewish Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). 53 Martin Buber’s ‘Address on Jewish Art’, in The First Buber, Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber, ed. Gilya Gerda Schmidt (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 46–63. For Buber’s personal letters, see Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, eds., Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialgoue (New York: Schocken Books, 1991). Also see Martin Buber’s letters to Lilien at the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. 54 Mark H. Gelber, ‘E. M. Lilien and the Jewish Renaissance’, in E. M. Lilien: The First Zionist Artist, Letters, Etchings, Drawings, Photographs, ed. Ruthi Ofek (Haifa: Rahash Printers, 1997), j. 55 Ibid. For more on Buber see chapter 5. 56 There is a discrepancy over whether the exhibition was on the second or third day. Gilya Gerda Schmidt, The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress, 1901: Heralds of a New Age (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 7. 57 The Berlin Secessionist’s exhibitions that showcased a small group of eleven artists were their way of showing dissatisfaction with the Salon’s choice of artworks. Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 38. Schmidt, Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress, 7–10. On the connection between Jewish modernism and German modernism, see Inka Bertz, ‘Jewish Renaissance – Jewish Modernism’, in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918, ed. Emily

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D. Bilski (Berkeley: University of California Press; New York: The Jewish Museum, 1999), 164–87. 58 For all works exhibited at the Fifth Zionist Congress art exhibition, see Appendix B, pages 277–278. Schmidt, Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress, 7. Most contemporary research on the Jewish art exhibition of 1901 and the Jungjüdisch culture was by Schmidt in The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress. Other social and cultural historians to write on the Jewish national art movement include Mark Gelber, ‘The Jungjüdische Bewegung’, and Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000); Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Michael Berkowitz, ‘Art and Popular Culture’, in Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 119–43. Margaret Olin considered the ideas and work of the Zionist national art movement in Nation without Art in the chapter entitled ‘Martin Buber: Jewish Art as Visual Redemption’. 59 The inventory was recorded as an appendix to the talk by Buber on the second day of the Congress, 27 December 1901. See Protokoll, cited in Schmidt, The First Buber, 46–64. 60 For the use of visual culture in the Zionist Congresses highlighting the importance Herzl placed on pins, badges, and postcards to publicise the Congresses, see Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War, 120–21. 61 Yehuda Alkalai, 1843. The Third Redemption, cited in Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 105. 62 Stanislawski, Zionism, 109; Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War, 121. Also, Introduction, pages 3–4. 63 Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe, 209. For a detailed discussion of the works in the exhibition, see also Schmidt, Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress. 64 Martin Buber, ‘Jüdische Renaissance’, Ost und West Issue 1, January 1901, 10; Schmidt, The First Buber, 34. 65 See below in this chapter on Nordau and Muskeljudentum. Buber was influenced not only by Nordau but also by Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s ideology of the Übermensch, the Superman, who, because of his ecstatic spiritual renewal through a connection with nature, is ‘no longer an artist’ but has ‘become a work of art’, became a Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), section I, 37, cited in Steven E. Aschheim, ‘Max Nordau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Degeneration’, Journal of Contemporary History 28, no. 4 (1993): 648. 66 Michael Goldfarb, Emancipation: How Liberating Europe’s Jews from the Ghetto Led to Revolution and Renaissance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). 67 Buber, ‘Jüdische Renaissance’, 10; Schmidt, The First Buber, 34. 68 Olin, Nation without Art, 99–106. 69 Ibid., 101. See also chapter 5 on the Democratic Fraction. 70 Bertz, ‘Jewish Renaissance – Jewish Modernism’, 169: Olin, Nation without Art, 101. 71 Rosenfeld was born in the Suwalki district in the Russian area of Poland, educated in Warsaw, and emigrated to the Unites States in 1886. For more information, see his archives in the Leo Baeck Institute at http://digital.cjh.org/view/action/singleViewer. do?dvs=1532685962297~426&locale=en_US&VIEWER_URL=/view/action/single

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Viewer.do?&DELIVERY_RULE_ID=6&frameId=1&usePid1=true&usePid2=true, accessed 11 May 2018. One of Lilien’s illustrations for the 1903 book comprised an image of the oppressed Eastern European Jewish worker literally being ‘sucked dry’ by his vampiric, blood-sucking Beardsley-inspired capitalist boss. (An der Nähmaschine [At the Sewing Machine].) 72 Sometimes known as Die Erschaffung des Dichters (The Creation of the Poet). Brieger, EML, 131. 73 For a discussion of this unusual illustration of four Herzlian male angels looking at the ‘birth’ of the first pre-pubescent male, Adam, see Natan Zach, ‘Hanefesh HaHazuya O Sippuro Shel Tavlit’, Igar 1 (1984): 14–17. 74 On the relationship between ideal male love and homoerotic love at the fin de siècle, see Stanislawski, Zionism, 111. 75 Max Simon Nordau, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1895), 42. Wistrich, ‘Max Nordau: From Degeneration to “Muscular Judaism”’, 7–8. 76 On Nordau see Stanislawski, Zionism, 59–61; Mendes-Flohr’s introduction to the 1968 edition of Nordau, Degeneration, 3–21 and Wistrich, ‘Max Nordau: From Degeneration to “Muscular Judaism”’. 77 Ibid., 5; Mendes-Flohr, ‘Introduction: Max Nordau and His Degeneration’, in Nordau, Degeneration, xvi. 78 Degeneration, 40–1. Mark S. Micale, ‘Charcot and the Idea of Hysteria in the Male: Gender, Medical Science and Medical Diagnostics in Late-Nineteenth-Century France’, Medical History 34, no. 4 (October 1990): 387 as cited in Mosse, The Image of Man, 82. For information on Lombroso see George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (London: Dent, 1978), 83–7. 79 Neurasthenia – nervous irritability or a disorder of weak nerves – was a term invented by the American physician George M. Beard, and regarded as the first sign of the onset of degeneracy. It was seen as one of the most serious illnesses to beset modern times. Part of the diagnosis was based on uncontrolled bodily movements. On neurasthenia see ‘Sport, Regeneration and National Revival’, in Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of Decline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 321; Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 15; Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 60–104. 80 Willy Hellpach, Die Geistigen Epidemien (Frankfurt am Main, 1906), 51, cited in Zimmerman, ‘Muscle Jews versus Nervous Jews’, 16. 81 Brenner and Reuveni, Emancipation through Muscles. 82 Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 39–59. 83 Ibid., 48–53; Norman Kleeblatt, ‘The Body of Alfred Dreyfus: A Site for France’s Displaced Anxieties of Masculinity, Homosexuality and Power’, in Diaspora and Visual Culture. Representing Africans and Jews, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2000), 76–92; Norman Simms, Alfred Dreyfus: Man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011). 84 The prime minister is also surrounded by other prominent Jewish figures, suggesting that they might have persuaded him to back the Dreyfusards between June and October 1898. These other Jewish figures included the Jewish banker Rothschild, depicted on the right as an oriental Jew in turban and long dress and the Jewish French lawyer and politician Joseph Reinach, shown whispering in Brisson’s ear. 85 See Nordau’s speech to the First Zionist Congress in Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, 239.

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86 On Nordau’s turn to Zionism see Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Stanislawski, Zionism, 59–65. Wistrich, ‘Max Nordau: From Degeneration to “Muscular Judaism”’. 87 Presner, ‘Clear Heads’, 269. 88 Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 547. 89 Max Nordau, Jüdische Turnzeitung, June 1903, cited in ibid. 90 They ‘wept, wept authentic tears at the spectacle of young Jewish physical beauty and physical strength, offered them so directly amidst the excitement of the congress’. Max Zirker, ‘Vom Basler Schauturnen’, Jüdische Turnzeitung, no. 9 (1903): 169–76, cited in Daniel Wildmann, ‘Jewish Gymnasts and Their Corporeal Utopias in Imperial Germany’, in Brenner and Reuveni, Emancipation through Muscles, 26. 91 Printed by Julius Streicher’s publishing house. The caption reads: ‘The God of the Jews is Money. And to gain money, he will commit the greatest crimes’. The toadstool motif may have come from a speech given by Kaiser Wilhelm II on his abdication in 1918, ‘let no German ever forget this … lest these parasites have not been extirpated and exterminated from German soil, this toadstool on the German oak’. (My italics.) The oak tree signifies Germany. See the famous painting by German Romantic period artist Caspar David Friedrich, The Chasseur (1814). Heimer’s toadstool signifies the opposite to all things German – the Jew – a parasite and an ugly fungus to be eradicated from German soil. 92 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 227. 93 See Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’. 94 See also my earlier discussion in this chapter on Johann Winckelmann and the classical aesthetics of the ideal body, page 36. 95 ‘Bilder von Congress’, Die Welt, issue 2, 10 January 1902, 12. 96 Buber’s ‘Address on Jewish Art’, in Schmidt, The First Buber, 57. 97 Brieger, EML, 95. 98 In 1902, he visited Russia to begin work on illustrations for a book with Maxim Gorki (1868–1936), the celebrated Russian revolutionary and writer. It was subtitled Stubanski Zbornik. Only two or three works were created, one of which was the famous drawing depicting the pogroms of 1903 and 1905 in Kishniev, entitled Den Martyrern von Kishniev (The Martyrs of Kishniev). In 1902, Gorki was temporarily exiled to central Russia because of his involvement with a secret printing press. It was during this period that he joined the Social Democratic Party headed by Lenin. By 1901, Lilien was also the graphic arts editor for Ost und West and working on the Judisher Verlag’s Jewish Almanacs of 1902 and 1904. 99 For the creation of Bezalel in Eretz Israel see Yigal Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art (Jerusalem: Lund Humphries; Israel Museum, 2013), 7–14; Gideon Ofrat, One Hundred Years of Art in Israel (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). Lilien and Schatz had disagreements during his time at Bezalel and Lilien left before the expiration of his contract. For this, see Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, 31. 100 Ibid., 14. In a recent discussion in November 2017, Zalmona now thinks that maybe Lilien was not a Freemason. On Freemasonry and the Jews, in particular their concept of ‘moral cosmopolitanism’, a combination of universal religious

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tolerance and celebration of difference. Jessica L. Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 2007), 66–77. 101 Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, 14. On Freemasonry and Lilien’s collaborations, see chapter 5. 102 This was Lilien’s last published book, Ferdinand Rahlwes and Ephraim Moses Lilien, Die Bücher Der Bibel, 3 vols. (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1908–1912). For a detailed discussion of his biblical project, see chapters 5 and 6.

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3

Boundaries and Borderlines: The ‘New Woman’ and the New Jewish Woman

The very idea of looking for Jewishness poses a problem. On the one hand, looking for Jewishness seems to exemplify those strategies that reduce people to pared-down, usually stereotyped essentials; Jewishness is visible, it can be detailed in any number of legible signs or symbols. As such, it works against assimilationist strategies. On the other hand, there is the possibility that Jewishness cannot be identified, is not recognisable. In as much as assimilationist success entails the disappearance of Jewish or any other alternate identity, it too poses problems. Of course, this presumes that assimilation works. —Carol Ockman, ‘When Is a Jewish Star Just a Star? Interpreting Images of Sarah Bernhardt’

One of Ephraim Moses Lilien’s first artworks undertaken in Berlin was a poster commissioned for the Berliner Tageblatt, a well-known daily newspaper in the thriving modern metropolis. The advertising supplement on horticulture and housekeeping encapsulated his mastery of Jugendstil. Entitled Poster for the Newspaper Berliner Tageblatt (1899), the illustration demonstrates Lilien’s aptitude for the decorative, linear, and patterned German iteration of Art Nouveau (Fig. 3.1).1 Lilien’s colourful lithograph of a frivolous, ‘natural’, domestic goddess flanking a billboard advertising gardening and domesticity remains a palimpsest of differing attitudes prevalent at the fin de siècle about women and gender. It symbolised women’s changing roles in a society in flux and the primacy or importance placed on their biological destiny as mothers and nurturers. The borders between the phenomenon of the ‘new woman’ and cultural images of her as the earth mother are blurred, complex, and contradictory, not unlike Lilien’s own multiple or hybrid identities.2 Trying to differentiate between the New Woman and the new Jewish woman runs the risk of amplifying the contradiction already located at the heart of such a distinction, as Carol Ockman’s study of the images of the actress Sarah Bernhardt suggests.3 Endeavouring to distinguish Jewish racial stereotyped differences (the focus of notions of Rassenkraft) from the general population seems not only illogical but also absurd after Auschwitz. Differentiating between Jewish racial ‘abnormality’ and non-Jewish ‘normality’ was a common procedure of non-Jewish European völkish-

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Figure 3.1  E. M. Lilien, Plakat für das Berliner Tageblatt (Poster for the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt), 1899.

nationalist thought at the fin de siècle. The discussion below aims to examine that very attempt at differentiation and the constructed boundaries and borderlines which underpin it.4 This chapter begins with an assessment of the literature surrounding the often inconsistent cultural and sociological phenomena of the ‘new and modern woman’ and the arguments regarding the peculiarities of her construction in Germany. A short analysis of the femme fatale, the nemesis of the new woman, is followed by an examination of Lilien’s earliest portrayals of this stereotype that were created prior to his turn to both a biblical and Zionist agenda between 1900 and 1901. Finally, it discusses two different Jewish women, Nahida Remy (1849–1928) and Helene Lilien (1880–1971), both examples of the ‘modern woman’ who craved equality and believed in the new rhetoric of Zionism, providing context for Lilien’s vision.5

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Who was the ‘New Woman’? The phrase ‘New Woman’ was used to describe a semi-fictional woman who had become popular in the fin-de-siècle imagination through debates in contemporary journalism.6 Coined by Sarah Grand in an 1894 article for the North American Review,7 this new woman was less an embodied female than an idea, a figure who challenged accepted views of femininity and female sexuality and had access to higher education and the right to earn a living.8 She was concurrently flesh and blood, and metaphor.9 Her origins lay not in continental Europe, but in England and America where she became a latenineteenth-century symbol of political and legal emancipation. The ‘new woman’ idea culminated in the suffragette movement that extended the franchise to women, as well as the broader social emancipation of women.10 In Germany, the women’s emancipation movement emerged more slowly, checked by the conservative and authoritarian politics of Bismarck.11 Most bourgeois German feminists of the day believed that motherhood was still the major concern and occupation for women, whereas British and American feminism fiercely argued the debates over ‘natural’ differences.12 The ‘new woman’ was an international fin-de-siècle phenomenon contemporaneous with significant political and social changes of the 1880s and 1890s.13 As the legal and professional possibilities for middle-class women in Europe and Germany improved significantly at the end of the nineteenth century, these emerging modern women often left home and family for careers in teaching and journalism. This provoked a ‘sexual crisis’ that pervaded the era’s cultural and intellectual life, as well as its literature and visual arts.14 Max Nordau proclaimed in 1897 that the modern woman was a ‘hybrid figure, wearing pants, walking in the street with her hands in her pockets and a cigarette on her lips’.15 In the same year, Emile Zola warned, ‘woman can never be anything but what nature wants her to be’. Everything else, he declared, ‘was nothing but abnormal, dangerous and perfectly vain’.16 German illustrated magazines such as Jugend and Simplicissimus portrayed this new woman as either the ideal beauty or a grotesque feminist. In Das Weib vor, hinter und auf dem Rade (Women before, behind and upon the wheel),17 Bruno Paul created a humorous print in which a fashionable and pretty cyclist appears as the culmination of a social evolution – from ploughing the fields to sewing clothes to cycling (the emblem of female liberation from the home) (Fig. 3.2). Paul emphasised the war between the sexes when he drew the emerging new woman as a grotesque feminist in Das Brotkörbchen (The Little Bread Basket) (1897), published in the more satirical magazine Simplicissimus (Fig. 3.3).18 The feminist boldly exclaims: Comrades and fellow guerrillas, men are the epitome of egoism; we need relationships (with them only) slightly higher than the bread basket! In the nineteenth century, traditional gendered male and female roles became the model for the bourgeois family.19 In Germany, as in America and Europe, women were thought to possess a maternal instinct that made them inherently nurturing and selfsacrificing and therefore suited to the private world of home, family, and domestic activity. By contrast, men were more suited to the public sphere of work, politics, and

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Figure 3.2  Bruno Paul, Das Weib vor, hinter und auf dem Rade (Women before behind and upon the wheel), Jugend Vol. 1, No. 21, 23 May 1896, 335. Inv.-Nr. 45740 Z (SGS00027185). Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://digi. ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1896_1/0326/image. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, accessed 28 June 2018.

Figure 3.3  Bruno Paul, Das Brotkörbchen (The Little Bread Basket). Cover for Simplicissimus Vol. 2, No. 35, 27 November 1897, 273. Inv.-Nr. Simpl. 1279 (SGS00025047). Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://www.simplicissimus.info/ index.php?id=12. Courtesy of Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft, accessed 28 June 2018.

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culture. This narrative, verified by German anthropologists who had studied nonWestern ‘primitive societies’, deployed cultural evolution to suggest that the apex of civilisation was their own Western form of patriarchy. By ‘nature’, the narrative continued, women were passive and emotional, men active and rational. In Imperial Germany, this was reinforced by the concept of the ‘ideal’ German woman as perceived by Schiller, Goethe, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Her attributes were beauty, generosity, modesty, receptivity, and love. By the first decade of the twentieth century, her most important duty was bearing and raising children and her life centred around the three K’s – Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, and church).20 Like the discourse surrounding the new woman, this presented an ideal rather than a social reality. By the turn of the century, German cultural anthropologists and sociologists contested Freidrich Engels’s socialist argument that patriarchy was a form of capitalist oppression and matriarchy a form of primitive equality.21 Female intellectuals of the period refuted conservative views on women. An upsurge of feminist endeavour resulted in the foundation of two major feminist organisations: the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine – BDF, 1894) for middle-class feminists, and the Union of Progressive Women’s Associations (Verband fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine – VFF, 1899), a progressive middle-class organisation that advocated for working-class women’s suffrage and equal opportunity.22 As part of her work for the Social Democratic Party, Clara Zetkin (1857–1933) developed a third organisation far more radical in outlook than the BDF or even the VFF.23 Religious values and the importance of motherhood still pervaded even progressive middle-class culture in Wilhelmine Germany. The tension between the importance of Heimat and joining the workforce was also felt by fin-de-siècle German Jewish women. They were often reminded that Judaism, even for modern Jewish women, began at home. The German playwright, Jewish convert, and journalist Nahida Remy argued in her popular book Das Jüdische Weib (The Jewish Women, 1891) that a modern Jewish woman needed to serve the Lord as a good wife should, to be both a fruitful citizen of Germany and good German Jewess. She quotes a passage from the Talmud to prove her point, ‘“I and my house we serve the Lord” [Joshua 24:15] … His house, that is his wife’.24 The new modern Jewish woman faced the same contradictory cultural, political, and sociological messages from her religious or secular socialist and feminist peers as her non-Jewish German sisters. A typical member of the Jewish women’s movement at turn of the nineteenth-century Germany would be a housewife and mother who performed ‘traditional voluntary social work in the Gemeinde; who demanded careers and educational opportunities for women, but for specifically “female” fields; and who insisted upon an equal role for women in politics and society but did so in a most ladylike manner’.25 This same veneration of ‘natural’ femininity throughout Europe meant that women became associated with the very idea of nationhood as a chaste Marianne or Germania.26 As a bearer of children and guardian of the fertility of the nation, women constituted a solid representation of the ‘earth mother’, implicitly tied to the land and the nation. Ironically, this tie with the seemingly ‘irrational world of nature’ meant that women also came to be seen as frivolous beings incapable of rational thought.27

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The idea of the female as naturally inferior to the male was also supported by scientists in Germany like Ernst Haeckel, an eminent biologist and promoter of the pseudo-science of social Darwinism.28 Male artists also depicted women as a real or symbolic representation of nature, signifying that women were more ‘of nature than man, less in opposition to it both physically and mentally’.29 Male Art Nouveau artists of the 1890s ‘rallied to the celebration of female fecundity and decorative domestic intimacy as a response to the threat of the “New Woman”’.30 In Germany, Lilien’s bountiful women in the Berliner Tageblatt, with their flowing locks, presented a textbook example of this new aesthetic. In the artwork of the international Art Nouveau movement, artists such as Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939, Czechoslovakia), Gustav Klimt (1862–1918, Austria), Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898, England), and Fidus (aka Reinhold Karl Johann Höppener, 1868–1948, Germany) portrayed women with swirling hair surrounding them like untrammelled nature, reinforcing the connection between the earth and their bodies.31 These archetypal images of the ‘earth mother’ often signified something else: she was not only as fertile as nature but also as sensual, sexual, active, and provocative as an animal. The dichotomy that identified woman with nature and man with culture was pushed to the extreme by many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century vanguard male artists. Woman became nature in its harshest form, as an amoral creature of passion and instinct, who was uncivilised, alien, and irrevocably powerless.32 As the bourgeois feminist movement intensified its campaigns for girls to be allowed to study at university, the gender wars increased. Many anti-feminist male thinkers used quotations from Schiller and Goethe coupled with traditional phrases such as Die Frau gehört ins Haus (woman belongs in the home) to protect women from the public sphere. Though these views were extreme examples of anti-feminists’ concern for the traditional family, this discourse became immensely popular. German neurologist and physician Paul J. Mobius encouraged the physiological inferiority of women, by comparing male and female brain sizes in a pamphlet, Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (About the Psychological Feeblemindedness of Women, 1908), suggesting women were incapable of learning beyond a basic level.33 By 1912, Mobius’s treatise had gone through ten reprintings.34 Other anti-feminist male eugenicists worried about middle-class women’s alleged refusal to bear children, and believed that this ‘decline’ in the traditional family contributed to a drop in birth rates and deteriorating quality of the whole German populace. Even worse, it constituted a threat to the nation-state. This dangerous new woman was also linked to the rise of the supposedly ‘degenerate’ sexual behaviour of homosexuals and dandies, who paraded their proclivities among avant-garde elites of fin-de-siècle Europe and appeared increasingly effeminate, a development that linked them – in the fin-de-siècle imagination – to women’s supposed increasing masculinity.35 As the century wore on, feminism and homosexuality were increasingly linked to degeneracy, decadence, and national concerns about racial ‘unfitness’. Anti-feminists such as Kathinka von Rosen rallied around the German League for the Prevention of Women’s Emancipation. In Über den Moralischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (On the Moral Imbecility of Women) (1904), von Rosen pointed out that the ‘moral decay’

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of modern women was due to the irreconcilable differences between motherhood and working outside the home; she even demanded a law mandating celibacy for all employed women.36 More ominous, she suggested that the women’s movement resulted from foreign influences. Feminists, she wrote, ‘contradicted the German spirit’.37 As Rosen’s work for the Vaterländischer Schriftenverband demonstrates, nationalism often combined with anti-feminism to suggest that the decline in the quality of the German race was due to the influx of ‘foreigners and women’ (Ausländer und Frauen Politik).38 These critics of feminism labelled the women’s movement ‘un-German’ as it sought to alter the ideal German woman. Their opinions could be read in racist, antisemitic journals like Der Hammer: Blätter für deutschen Sinn, which stated that ‘genuine’ German men who were not affected by feminism – that is, ‘men of Bismarck’s spirit’ – must be given the reins of power.39 The historian Peter Pulzer established a strong link between anti-feminism and antisemitism when he wrote that ‘most anti-Semites were antifeminists and most antifeminists were, if not actively anti-Semitic, at least strongly nationalist at a time when this was coming to mean almost the same thing’.40 This warning about the feminisation and degeneration of masculinity was sobering for many acculturated German Jews such as Herzl and his contemporaries. As they saw it, Jewish nationalism was a redemption for the stereotypically effeminate Diaspora Jewish male. By the end of the 1890s, the Dreyfus affair in France, the most politically charged event of the last decade for European Jews, demonstrated how national concerns fuelled by racist theories of fitness and hygiene could explode in an orgy of antisemitism.41 In the visual arts and literature, the dangerous ‘new woman’ often began to appear as the more insidious ‘deadly woman’, the femme fatale, as if invigorated by similar theories of violence and blood. The charming connotation of the French term femme fatale disguises a more menacing, literal translation. Now well-documented in literature, art, film, history, mythology, and gender studies, the femme fatale was a stock figure that interpreted the emerging modern new woman of the twentieth century as more dangerous and seductive than the Art Nouveau or Jugendstil metaphor for spring.42 She was an attractive, autonomous, agent who created and manipulated events to achieve her own goals. Often depicted as the Darwinian female of the species, she used her sexuality against men who were too weak and powerless to resist her feminine wiles.43 As Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) signalled, women seemed to ‘confound power, subjectivity and agency’,44 because they were portrayed as sexually liberated, provocative, potentially devouring, and above all, the ‘symptom of male fears about feminism’.45

The ‘New Woman’, Lilien’s early femmes fatales and the Jewish woman: Does she figure? The vision of the provocative femme fatale clearly emerges in two of Lilien’s early works for the literary magazine Jugend. Both Mein schönstes Fräulein, darf Ich’s wagen … (My fair young lady, may I dare) and Künstlerpostkarte der ‘Kommenden’ (An

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Art Postcard for Kommenden) reveal a risqué sense of humour and a penchant for portrayals of naked young women with flowing hair (Figs. 3.4 and 3.5).46 In the first drawing, the buxom young nymph looks up while averting her gaze, as Pan impishly enquires, ‘May I dare … ?’ The male spectator is left to complete the question with ‘ … ravish you?’ In the second sketch, the naked young woman thumbs her nose at Pan as he lunges towards her with a lewd grin on his face. Lilien’s humour appears to make light of his complicity with the masculinist values of the period, as if he is teasing his male audience in an erotic, private game of sexual licentiousness. This portrayal of the nude female body with flowing Medusa-like blonde hair and a sexually amicable body appears repeatedly, particularly in his individually commissioned, handdrawn bookplates, such as Ex Libris Anselm Hartog (1899) (Fig. 3.6). In this work, Lilien depicts Eve tempted by the serpent; he adds a comic touch and metaphor by substituting a book for the forbidden fruit.47 Lilien created many bookplates for famous friends and colleagues, such as writers Maxim Gorki, Stefan Zweig, Martin Buber, and Bezalel founder Boris Schatz. Bookplates became common after the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and were private artworks usually intended for a select audience. They were created in the name of the bookplate owner and would only have been seen by someone entitled to either borrow a book from the owner’s library or peruse one while in their library. They often reveal personal and cultural information not meant for the public. Lilien was the first Jewish artist to create ex libris with distinctive Jewish motifs and was adept at creating plates with personal or playful messages. Lilien’s most instructive bookplate depicting an alluring and naked female body remains the one he created for himself. Entitled Ex Libris, des Künstlers (1898), it

Figure 3.4  E. M. Lilien, Lilien, Mein schönstes Fräulein, darf Ich’s wagen … (My fair young lady, May I dare …), aus der Jugend, Georg Hirt Verlag, n.d. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 44.

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Figure 3.5 E. M. Lilien, Künstlerpostkarte‚ “Die Kommenden” (An Art Postcard for “Die Kommenden”), 1899–1900, zincograph, B41.08.1075. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Figure 3.6  E. M. Lilien, Ex Libris Anselm Hartog, 1899, zincograph, B07122. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

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says more about his personal attitudes to the female body than those he depicted earlier for Jugend and the Berliner Tageblatt (Fig. 3.7).48 Lilien depicts his female subject as passive and inert, feigning modesty by covering her face with the book she is reading, her hair conveniently covering her genitalia. The viewer is not certain if this is a Jewish woman, although Lilien includes a Hebrew quote on the side of the bookplate: ‘la-tehorim kol tahor’ (To the pure, everything is pure). Lilien’s bookplate teeters on the edge of decadence but veers towards modesty, implying that indecent ideas are in the mind of the beholder, not the images depicted. The Hebrew text is not from the Hebrew Bible but a famous anti-Jewish dictum in Paul’s Epistle of Titus. The letter warns the Cretans against listening to Jewish writings about men who distance themselves from the truth. It ends with the remark, ‘To the pure all things are pure, but to them that are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure’.49 Lilien may have been aware of the double meaning, and used this antisemitic quotation to admonish himself for his own sexual proclivities as well as his own residual religious sentiment. It appears to be a personal joke, meant for a very small audience of friends and family, along the lines of ‘get your mind out of the gutter, you red-blooded male’. Lilien’s female nudes are not usually as sexually erotic, depraved, or seductive as are Aubrey Beardsley’s decadent portrayals of the female figure in England (Fig. 3.8). Beardsley, a progressive modernist, was a considerable influence on Lilien’s work.50

Figure 3.7  E. M. Lilien, Ex Libris, des Künstlers, c. 1898, zincograph, B44.12.1996. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner.

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Figure 3.8  Aubrey Beardsley, Suggested Reform in Ballet Costume, 1895.

Lilien’s image of a girl reading a book in his own ex libris may well have been derived from Beardsley’s rather demure girl reading her book in Design for a Catalogue Cover (1895). Apparently, Lilien owned a copy of the book Early Works of Aubrey Beardsley in which this image appears (Fig. 3.9).51 On balance, Lilien’s depiction of the femme fatale in his own bookplate indicates that he acknowledged bohemian readings of sexuality and sensuality rather than strictly adhered to them. To understand why, we need to examine Lilien’s background and formative religious and cultural influences, which were vastly different from Beardsley’s bohemian milieu. Growing up in Eastern Europe among Eastern European Jews in Drohobycz in the oil-rich centre of Galicia, Lilien appears torn between the religious identity of his landsmen and the alterity of the secular modern. The memory of Jewish life in Drohobycz was entirely obliterated by the Nazis in 1939 and is now forgotten.52 Zweig, who met Lilien in Berlin in the late 1890s, promoted the idea that Lilien’s early works confirmed his position as a young and rebellious artist who seemed to deliberately oppose the traditional Eastern European Orthodoxy of his Galician upbringing. In his ‘Introduction’ to Lilien’s oeuvre in 1903, Zweig praised Lilien’s modernist vision as manifested in his portrayal of the naked female body. He denounced Eastern European Jews and their traditional laws of purity, claiming that Lilien was ‘the first Jewish artist who had shown the Hasidic fanatics representations of the nude’.53 Secular and acculturated Jews like Zweig regarded religious Eastern European Jews, with their irrational belief structures and seemingly unhygienic practice of the

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Figure 3.9  Aubrey Beardsley, original cover design for The Yellow Book, 1895.

mikveh as examples of Orthodox Judaism’s purity laws, as problematic for many secular Germans and modernists.54 Zweig may have overstated the status of Lilien’s hometown as a backwater of religious fanaticism at the turn of the century.55 As early as 1890, when Lilien was sixteen, Drohobycz had already grown from the third largest town in Galicia after Kraków and Lwów (Lemberg) into a sizeable cosmopolitan city.56 Secular Jewish nationalism was already established there in the form of the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement.57 Many of their followers seemed intent on rejecting the inequality they observed between the sexes in traditional Judaism.58 Nevertheless, in the personal rendering of his own bookplate, Lilien seems unable to escape what seems like his religious and Orthodox upbringing. It is not clear how religious a background Lilien had from his family. He took pride in his priestly lineage as observed in his frontispiece for Juda (Fig. 7.1), but by 1902 Lilien referred to himself as ‘a convinced Zionist but not religious’.59 The personal bookplate reveals a modest and conservative portrayal of the female nude body, compared to his non-Jewish peers like Beardsley who created images that were perverse, grotesque, and erotic.60 As part of an English upper middleclass and artistic establishment that included the homosexual clique of Oscar Wilde and the English aesthetes, Beardsley would not have been nearly as troubled by the

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complexity of different religious, political, and economic nuances as Lilien. Beardsley probably revelled in it. Comparing Lilien’s bookplate to Mucha’s cigarette-smoking femmes fatales or Klimt’s sexually charged paintings, such as Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence for the ceiling of the Great Hall in Vienna, further clarifies this difference.61 In the two advertisements below for Job cigarette papers, the disparity between the representations of women by Mucha and Lilien seems particularly apparent. Mucha’s women with full lips, flowing hair, and smoke billowing suggestively around their curvaceous and relaxed bodies are sensual creatures, even if they are still fully clothed, like Michelangelo’s Sybil, the prophetess on the Sistine Chapel who was Mucha’s original inspiration (Figs. 3.10 and 3.11).62 By contrast, the naked women in Lilien’s bookplate appears docile. In their form and content, Lilien’s muscled heroes and early female nudes recall the earlier less decadent works of Gustav Klimt. Klimt’s poster for the secessionist exhibition of 1898 depicts the classical story of Theseus slaying the Minotaur to liberate the youth of Athens. Created for the first Viennese secessionist exhibition, Klimt designed the poster to echo the new generation of painters and architects who seceded from the

Figure 3.10  Alphonse Mucha, poster design for Job cigarette papers, 1896.

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Figure 3.11  Alphonse Mucha, poster design for Job cigarette papers, 1894.

Figure 3.12  Gustav Klimt, Nuda Veritas, Ver Sacrum, 1898.

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conservative Association of Austrian Artists. These progressive artists believed they could rescue Viennese culture from the suffocating bourgeois conservative elites and find radically new solutions to the meaning of life.63 Klimt’s male heroes are strong, muscular, and toned and able to defeat the Minotaur.64 The black and white illustrative style is similar to the Munich and German Jugendstil of Lilien. Klimt’s female nude in Nuda Veritas, created for the first issue of the secessionist publication Ver Sacrum, could have come straight from Lilien’s early oeuvre of femmes fatales (Fig. 3.12). The dark-haired nude surrounded by swirling motifs echoing the world of nature suggests a similar hope for the regeneration of society. Klimt’s nude holds up an empty mirror as a means of including the spectator in the picture and provoking the audience to consider its role in this renewal.65 In a double-page spread created for the May Day newspaper Mai-Festzeitung of the German Socialist party in 1899, Lilien created an image of a bare-breasted socialist carrying a torch and a banner proclaiming the May Day message of freedom for all the workers of the world (Fig. 3.13). An iconic image of a strong woman as a political motif for justice and morality, Lilien’s image recalls Delacroix’s

Figure 3.13  E. M. Lilien, front page of Mai-Festzeitung (May Day newspaper), 1899.

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Liberty Leading the People (1830), but again mirrors his interest in socialist ideology and its imagined idea of renewal more than it does the status or position of real women.66 To summarise, in Lilien’s early depictions of the female body, women are portrayed as sensuous, sexual, and provocative, often with little or no pronounced musculature. Lilien rebelled against the rules of modesty within traditional Jewish Orthodoxy as well as the puritanical or conservative views of modern bourgeois society that so many other middle-class male avant-garde artists encountered at the fin de siècle. His early female nudes, in style and technique, demonstrated a similar interest in the revolt against outmoded values, like Gustav Klimt’s Nuda Veritas or Mucha’s precocious images in the poster designs for Job cigarettes. Mucha’s and Klimt’s works appear more sexually charged than Lilien’s early femme fatales. Mucha’s artwork came to prominence in popular culture at the fin de siècle, precisely because he portrayed sensual beauties like the Jewish actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) as the ultimate symbol of the erotic and oriental femme fatale. Why was Lilien’s work so comparatively tame? Was it because, given his knowledge of real Jewish women, he was struggling to reconcile their role as creative artists and modern women with their role as dutiful wives and mothers? What was Judaism’s attitude to the changing role of Jewish women at the time?

Judaism, gender, Zionism and the ‘new Jewish woman’: Helene Lilien and Nahida Remy Ruth Lazarus – two very different lives The German Jewish tradition of feminism was similar to German feminism. Both traditions still believed in the importance of motherhood and the home, even as the debates on equality between the sexes raged across the continent. The one exception to this rule was the utopian vision of the newly formed Jewish nationalist movement that promised a sexual revolution or liberation for all Jews, both men and women.67 Zionism created not only the virile ‘New Jewish Man’, but also promised the ‘rejection of the inequality of women in traditional Judaism’.68 These tempered views of the modern Jewish woman reflect the lives of two German Jewish women: the artist, wife, and mother Helene Lilien, née Magnus (1880–1971), who married Ephraim Moses Lilien in 1906, and the philosemite Nahida Remy Ruth Lazarus, née Sturmhöefel (1849–1928), a writer and convert. Both women craved equality and married Zionists, yet both remained torn between their private role as wife and mother and their creative role as artist and writer. They offer numerous insights into the way many other Jewish women also negotiated the complexities and contradictions of modern life. The young artist Helene Magnus, the only daughter of German Jewish parents, was born in Braunschweig (not far from the metropolis of Berlin), where the large, welloff, acculturated, intellectual German Jewish Magnus family of lawyers and medical doctors had lived for generations.69 Helene’s father Otto (b. Braunschweig 1836–1920) had studied law and held a doctorate, while Otto’s father Julius and grandfather Salomo had both been medical doctors. His brother Rudolph (1823–1927) became a doctor and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine.70 Her maternal grandfather had also studied law and held a doctorate. Helene had been an art student for two years

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when she met her husband, Ephraim, on a trip to Munich. They began a fervent and frequent correspondence in 1905, just before his first trip to Palestine.71 The letters reveal an intimate, passionate relationship, and the two were married in Berlin in 1906 when Lilien was thirty-two years old and she was twenty-five. As part of the Jewish Bürgertum (bourgeoisie), Helene’s marriage to an Ostjude from a ‘traditional’ religious home in eastern Galicia must have been viewed with some scepticism by her parents, for their worldviews were far apart. Her first letter to Lilien suggests that her attitudes to Zionism and the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe were the opposite of his. The letter expresses the view that all Jews should swear allegiance to their own nation-state because otherwise it would seem they are not loyal citizens, their home is elsewhere, and they are intruders. Few of her letters have been published, making it difficult to gauge her attitude to Lilien’s strong Zionist leanings over time.72 No doubt, she found herself in a difficult situation regarding her own stance vis-à-vis her parents’ position on Judaism and the role of women. As she explained in one of her early letters to Ephraim (July 1905), both sides of her extended family had strong intellectual ties with Judaism. Her father was a leader in the Jewish community of Braunschweig, and her mother had a deep respect for Judaism. Helene, however, had little contact with Judaism as a living religion, perhaps because Braunschweig had such a small practising Jewish community.73 Helene worried about her parents’ attitude to Ephraim, both as an Eastern European Jew and as a poor artist. She wrote to him of these concerns, and he replied saying she should not worry, because even though he had limited money, his name was reputable.74 As the only daughter of an ill mother, Helene was torn between her obligation to assume all the domestic duties her mother could no longer perform, and her yearning to be an artist in her own right, using her intellect for something more than housework.75 Overseeing domestic chores did not satisfy her; the situation was torturous.76 Eventually her parents gave her permission and money to study, and for this she felt guilty, as they had to manage without her.77 Looking at the many etchings and lithographs of Helene and their children, the overall picture of her life with Ephraim is one of idyllic bourgeois domesticity. For instance, the portrait of Helene reclining in bed wearing night cream, and an image of their son Otto urinating in the indoor toilet, both reveal the reality of their domestic home life, and were probably drawn while they lived in Charlottenburg, Berlin, with their two young children between 1906 and 1911 (Figs. 3.14 and 3.15). The frequent depictions of Helene’s parents suggest a shared, harmonious existence. One image shows her mother at her writing desk. Another depicts her father reading a book by the light of a lamp with the help of a magnifying glass (Figs. 3.16 and 3.17). Not only did Helene tend to their children, Otto and Hanna, but – like many other women of her class and generation in England and America – she became stepmother to Lilien’s illegitimate child, Alexander, sometime after the child’s mother, Marie-Stüler, died in 1904.78 A number of factors – this stepchild, her love of art and her parents’ permission to go to art school, her passionate letters to her husband, the suicide in 1899 of her own father’s sister Ann, and both her parents’ deaths in 1920 from the influenza epidemic – suggest that Helene’s life was not as cloistered or easy as one might imagine.

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Figure 3.14  E. M. Lilien, Helene with Night Crème, or Morning Reading, c. 1909, etching (red), P74.092455. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

Figure 3.15  E. M. Lilien, I Need No Aid, 1911, etching, P74.09.2483. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

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Figure 3.16  E. M. Lilien, Frau Magnus at Her Writing Desk or Portrait of His Mother-in-law, c. 1909, etching, P74.09.2424. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

Figure 3.17  E. M. Lilien, Otto Magnus Reading by the Light of the Lamp or Portrait of His Father-in-law, c. 1909, etching, P74.09.2432. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

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When Ephraim was away on business on one of his trips to Palestine or visiting his parents in Drohobycz, their correspondence indicates that Helene took a keen interest in Lilien’s art. Lilien often asked her for her opinion on his drawings and etchings. In a letter he wrote to Helene from Jerusalem, he discussed his publisher’s correspondence concerning the covers for his biblical illustrations.79 Lilien’s correspondence was often filled with the minutiae of costs for printing and buying equipment. They must somehow have been able to manage financially on the proceeds of Lilien’s publishing deals and sales of his artwork and Helene was often helping the publisher manage Lilien’s business while he was away. She also contributed an illustration to the edition. During the Great War, she found herself, like so many other German women, looking after her two small children while Lilien, who in 1915 had volunteered for service in the Austrian army on the Eastern European front, became a war photographer for the Austrian Military Press Corps. Once Lilien was ensconced in the Office of Information of the Austrian Army Front, Helene corresponded with him as he journeyed through Palestine, Turkey, and Syria. She spent the war years living in Braunschweig with her parents and worrying about her foreign-born, non-naturalised husband, who finally became a German citizen in 1920, the same year her parents died. Helene, like many other women of her generation, was caught between her own needs and the importance placed on women’s biological destiny as mothers and nurturers. In the end,

Figure 3.18 Nahida Remy, c. 1985, The Jewish Woman, trans. by Louise Mannheimer (Cincinnati: C. J. Krehbiel, 1895), 4.

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Figure 3.19  Epigraphs, Nahida Remy, The Jewish Woman, trans. by Louise Mannheimer (Cincinnati: C. J. Krehbiel, 1895), 6.

she chose to be a good wife and mother, outliving her husband by nearly fifty years and only leaving Braunschweig in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. She moved to England, and eventually settled in Denmark with her daughter Hannah, where she died in 1971.80 Like Helene, Nahida Ruth Remy Lazarus married a Zionist. Unlike Helene, Nahida was born into a German Catholic family and chose to follow a career as a writer. She is remembered for a famous polemic she wrote in 1891 entitled Das Jüdische Weib (The Jewish Woman). The book was an intriguing blend of feminism and her positive interest in Judaism. By 1895, the year after Nahida officially converted to Judaism, the book had become so popular that it was translated into English, and four German editions appeared between 1891 and 1922 (Figs. 3.18 and 3.19).81 Remy began her passionate argument with the acute observation that ‘in order to comprehend woman, one must study the history of her slavery’. As she had already published her first comedy, Die Rechnung ohne Wirt, at the age of twenty, and numerous plays, novels, and essays, the readers of The Jewish Woman might have assumed that what followed would be an argument for the emancipation of women.82 Remy’s work argues for women’s equality; her chapter on the modern Jewish woman praises the Americans for ‘[t]he eternal law of justice which has freed women from the state of mental inferiority in which she has been kept through the centuries’.83 She even assures the reader that this has meant that ‘what women cannot attempt in Europe, she has successfully done in America; she has stepped onto the platform and even into the pulpit’.84 Although Remy began with such promising, feminist messages, her book concluded by favouring the private role of the Jewish woman as wife and mother over any other, reflecting a conflict between her feminist aspirations for women’s equality and her newfound commitment to Judaism.

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Remy certainly had a deep understanding of Judaism; she converted to Judaism in 1894, three years after her book was published. She had studied with the philosopher and psychologist Dr Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903) after her first husband, the Jewish film and theatre critic Dr Max Remy (1839–1881), died in 1881.85 She married her mentor Lazarus in 1895 and immersed herself in the writings of the German Jewish Enlightenment tradition of Moses Mendelssohn, the famous German Jewish philosopher, and Heinrich Graetz, one of the first German Jewish scholars, to write an entire history of the Jewish people from ancient times to the present. She also studied under the renowned rabbi and intellectual founder of neo-Orthodoxy or positivehistorical Judaism, Samson Raphael Hirsch.86 Remy believed that the role of a Jewish wife and informed educator was the most significant role Judaism offered women. Her own ambivalence on the matter of Jewish female agency was not unusual; it mirrored the bulk of German bourgeois feminists in the Allgemeine Deutscher Frauenverein (General German Womens’ Association) and the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (Federation of German Women’s Associations). By quoting the Hebrew Bible in her preface to link the place of women to both Heimat and ‘the Lord’, Remy points to an affinity between the new nationalism of her adopted religion, the emotional idea of one’s own home or Heimat, and the new political idea of the nation-state of Germany after 1871. There was an affinity between the new national political German state and the importance Germans attached to the concept of belonging to a provincial or small hometown that provided a deep sense of local identification.87 By 1901, Remy was the only woman on the board of Ost und West, the first monthly illustrated journal to present the ideas of the cultural Zionists to acculturated German Jews, and her ideas on women mirrored her similarly conservative attitude to Jewish nationalism. For conservative women like Remy, Zionism began at home.88 The complicated dynamics of Judaism and gender that dominated Zionist debates on equality between the sexes at the end of the nineteenth century paralleled the wider debates on the public versus private role of women. The rhetoric of male Zionists like Herzl, Buber, and Nordau signalled the importance of Zionism for men; the ‘lustre’ of Zionism, or its antibourgeois claim to equity between Jewish men and women at the end of the nineteenth century was never actually fulfilled.89 The Zionist repudiation of middle-class German women who failed to work for the movement, or attend to the Jewish religious and cultural needs of the family, disappointed many middle-class German women who were originally attracted to Zionism for its policy of gender equity. In fact, many of these women actually did work for Zionism.90 Hermine Schildberger, in an article for Die Welt in 1899, differentiated between the position of Jewish women as wives and mothers, demanding a more political role in public life.91 She asks fervently: [W]ill we women really be capable someday of working in public life somewhere or other for the well-being of our sisters and brothers? Can the ardent desire, the burning wish to help, replace the lacking strength? But then, what strength, what might lie in the hands of a woman in a land that forbids her, at least for the time being, every participation in political life?92

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Schildberger proposed that women had ‘the right like a man to make her views known’, and she received the reply that women counted as delegates at the Zionist Congress and thus were equally regarded.93 She asked that Zionist leaders hold lectures and discussions in which women could participate as equals because she understood that this was already happening in Vienna under Frau Dr Sidonie Kahn and in America under Professor Emma Gottheil.94 Women did occasionally speak at the Zionist Congresses. Rozia Ellman addressed the Second Congress in Basel (1898), Emma Gottheil spoke at the Fourth Zionist Congress in London (1900), Miriam Schach in Paris at the Tenth Zionist Congress (1911), and Johanna Simon-Freidberg of Heidelberg at the Eleventh Congress in Vienna (1913).95 The gendered body politics of German nationalism influenced the way Jewish nationalism incorporated gender.96 The modern Jewish woman remained the guardian of the Jewish nation and the transmitter of Jewish culture and tradition.97 This passive role was no different from other nineteenth-century claims by sexologists or journalists regarding the separation of the private and public spheres. In his play Das Neue Ghetto (1894), Theodor Herzl idealises the domestic attributes of the traditional Jewish female Eastern European Jew as if she was a more authentic socialist/utopian stereotype of the Jewish woman than the middle-class German or Viennese Frau. Herzl castigated middle-class German Jewish men and German middle-class women for being materialistic and morally bankrupt; both needed emancipation from what he saw as negative Jewish qualities.98 In his famous pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896), Herzl states that women as well as men were needed to bring about Zionism.99 Fourteen women participated in the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The Second Zionist Congress, a year later, gave women voting rights.100 Women boosted membership of the small political movement, but were expected to provide services to the movement in return.101 Devotion to the Zionist cause brought with it the attitude that women should support their men as they fought for a common, familial cause. Women could work, but they were not allowed to work overtime or when pregnant.102 Nordau, Herzl’s acolyte, was even more ambivalent about the role of women in political Zionism.103 In his text Degeneration (1892), Nordau expresses a negative view of women. Indeed, his earlier views on women are extremely anti-feminist. His 1883 text Die Conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenscheit (The Conventional Lies of our Civilisation) asserts that ‘[w]oman has a high and honourable position in the culture, because she is modest, and because she is content to be the complement of the man and to recognise his superiority’.104 After becoming a Zionist, he became more outspoken, suggesting that women were needed to temper the harshness of life and that they should serve as wives and mothers and be confined to the home and the education of the children.105 In his address to the Zionist Gymnastics Club in Berlin in 1903, he called on Jewish men to become Muskeljudentum, but failed to mention women at all. In cultural Zionism, women fared little better. The middle-class Jewish woman was ‘a bad despotic housewife, a bad spouse and mother, the representative of the sickest Modernity, bearer of lax and sinful marriage, family, and social morality. She offends morals and good taste’.106 Berthold Feiwel stressed the degeneration of the modern

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Jewish middle-class woman using Nordau’s terminology, while Martin Buber, in a more romanticised picture of the Jewish woman, idealised the ghetto as a time when Jewish women had an inner strength that was now lost in the luxury and ostentatious world of emancipation.107 The literary and cultural historian Marc Gelber identifies three major characteristics associated with the literature of Jewish women’s Zionist groups. His categorisation sheds light on the way these women negotiated their feminist and Jewish national goals, using examples from three major women’s groups in Central Europe: Berlin’s Juda’s Töchters (Judea’s Daughters), 1895, plus two Viennese movements: Mirjam, Verein Jüdischer junger Damen (or Miriam, the Association of Jewish Young Ladies), 1885, and Moira, 1891.108 The first characteristic was ‘pride in Jewish tradition and the identification of Jewish Biblical and historical heroines, who function as a complement to the “male Pantheon”’.109 The second was an ‘obedience to the traditional roles assigned to women in Jewish religious life’.110 And the third was a resolve to ‘serve as the continuators of this … glorified past by rejuvenating Jewish forms of life and erecting a new Jerusalem, either in the Land of Israel or … at least a Jerusalem of the spirit’.111 Gelber highlights the intersection between the conservative feminist movement in Germany, which viewed motherhood as the supreme function of women, and the worldview of most male Zionists, who did not oppose Jewish women working outside the home, but believed that the main role of Jewish women was involvement in the education of the next generation. Both Paul Hyman and Marion Kaplan, whose research did not concentrate on Zionist women, noted the same views among German Jewish men who were not avid Zionists.

The ‘New Jewish Woman’: Conclusions The ‘new Jewish woman’, like her non-Jewish counterpart, was an amalgam of differing attitudes about women and gender at the fin de siècle. She sought social as well as political emancipation from male hegemony, yet was often left feeling marginalised and doubly stigmatised as both a Jew and a woman. Lilien’s early images of women such as the poster for the Berliner Tageblatt, (1899) and illustrations for Jugend, reveal a common youthful rebellion, typical of many male avant-garde artists who saw in Jugendstil a way to rise up against the strictures of modern bourgeois society. Lilien’s early female representations emerge as portraits of these modern femmes fatales: seductive, sensual temptresses as well as earth mothers, who contradicted the ideals of the ‘new woman’. They also reflected fin-de-siècle tensions regarding the changing nature of women’s roles where the importance of women’s biological destiny as mothers and nurturers, which was being questioned by feminists, was still upheld by anti-feminist prejudice in the visual arts. Lilien was as voyeuristic and anti-feminist as other male avant-garde artists of the period. Nevertheless, his early depictions of the female nude seem less decadent and sensuous than images by other artists at the time, such as Beardsley, whose misogynist portrayals of the Jewish Salome were far more insidious, dangerous, and sexually charged. The comparison between Lilien’s more docile depictions of the

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femme fatale and Beardsley’s powerful images suggests that although Lilien was quick to emulate other non-Jewish avant-garde techniques, his representations were often based on more conservative models of real-life Jewish women. These were women who juggled their real-life roles as creative artists, modern women, dutiful wives, and mothers, as well as sexual beings. Conversely, Lilien’s depiction of Jewish women was also a revolt, not only against the confines of Orthodox Judaism but also against a religion that ostensibly had no tradition for representing the Jewish body in art. To sum up, Jewish women experienced the social and political changes that accompanied emancipation differently from Jewish men. While the ‘Jewish question’ preoccupied male Jewish communal leaders, women were often content to define or create a modern Jewish identity that set boundaries to assimilation, but also facilitated their integration into larger society. Jewish men such as Lilien who wished to integrate into the larger society did so often without considering the ‘women’s question’.112 Like other men, Lilien struggled to gain respect and power in a far-from-open, larger nonJewish society. His images of the decadent and sensuous femme fatale may reflect a similar desire to be an accepted member in the avant-garde non-Jewish art world while still creating images of women that reflected his own anxieties about the new woman.113 Jewish women in the nineteenth century, as the accounts of Helene Lilien and Nahida Ruth Remy Lazarus confirm, were more often than not a conservative force within the German Jewish home. They maintained aspects of Jewish ritual custom even as their male relatives abandoned them, and often served as a brake on the wholesale abandonment of Jewish practice.114 According to Tom Peters, Helene Magnus and her daughter Hannah Peters (née Lilien) always put two candles on the dinner table on Friday and Saturday night as welcome and farewell to the Sabbath.115 From an upper-class intellectual and acculturated Jewish family, Helene was able to marry her Zionist sweetheart even though they came from different social classes and cultural backgrounds. Although in her early years her husband’s notions of social and political egalitarianism within Zionism may have encouraged her belief that women were equal to men and nurtured her own passion to create art, she seemed happy to retreat to the creative production of children and Heimat while her husband involved himself in the production of artwork for the Jewish national movement. She did not entirely relinquish or abandon her artistic career, continuing to manage her husband’s business when he was away and contributing art to some of the book covers for his biblical illustrations. Nahida Remy was convinced that the primary goal of Jewish women was service and commitment to Judaism. Service for Remy meant involving oneself fully in the Jewish community, obtaining a complete Jewish education, and reaching out to help other Jewish women in need. These were the most important values a Jewish wife and a Jewish woman needed. These ideas – service, social work, and education – were in keeping with the Zionist rhetoric of Herzl, Buber, and Nordau. Both Remy and her husband were on the board of the cultural Zionist magazine Ost und West in its formative years. As the only female on the board, she must have been aware of the significance this carried. Yet, like her male Zionist compatriots, and like Helene, she was content to believe that Zionism, like Judaism, began at home.

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Notes The daily newspaper Berliner Tageblatt was published from 1872 to 1939. See Linda Nochlin, ‘Foreword: Representing the New Woman-Complexity and Contradiction’, in The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2011), 1. 3 Carol Ockman, ‘When Is a Jewish Star Just a Star? Interpreting Images of Sarah Bernhardt’, in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Tamar Garb and Linda Nochlin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 122–23. 4 For connections between völkish nationalist thinking and similar racial ideas and rhetoric among German cultural Zionists, see George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985); Mark H. Gelber, Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000), 125–60. See also chapter 6. 5 A phrase used by Nochlin in Garb and Nochlin, The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, 1. 6 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siecle (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 1–4; Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 63. Ledger describes the wild woman, the glorified spinster, the advanced woman, the modern woman, the shrieking sisterhood, the revolting daughters as all semi-fictional women based on debates occurring mainly within journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. 7 Ledger, New Woman: Fiction and Feminism, 3. 8 Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham, New Woman Hybridities: Feminity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930 (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 9 Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, eds., The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library, 2011), 1. As Otto and Rocco articulate, it was Mary Roberts who made the distinction between the cultural image of the ‘New Woman’ and the social phenomenon of the new woman. 10 In Britain, this began in 1869 with the publication of John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women, and in America with the setting up of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. 11 Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London: Sage, 1976). 12 Suffrage was hotly debated among German feminists in both the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein (1865) and the Bund Deutscher Frauenverein (1894). Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1–30; Alan Levenson, ‘An Adventure in Otherness: Nahida Remy-Ruth Lazarus (1849–1928)’, in Gender and Judaism. The Transformation of Tradition, ed. T. M. Rudovsky (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 100. Marion A. Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904–1938 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 7 and Edward Ross Dickinson, ‘“A Dark, Impenetrable Wall of Complete 1 2

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Incomprehension”: The Impossibility of Heterosexual Love in Imperial Germany’, Central European History 40 (2007): 467. 13 Two years after Grand coined the phrase, the term ‘new woman’ became ubiquitous in print, cartoons, and photographs in America, England, and continental Europe. Otto and Rocco, New Woman International, 6. 14 Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, 63. This was slightly different from England where women entered the teaching and nursing professions in greater numbers than law, medicine, or journalism. On women’s struggle in the legal, medical, and teaching professions in Imperial Germany, see James C. Albetti, ‘Women and the Professions in Imperial Germany’, in German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Ruth-Ellen Joeres and Mary-Jo Maynes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 94–109. Mary Louise Roberts states, Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House (1879) and August Strindberg’s play, Married (1884–85) implied the new woman was also becoming a symbol of rebellion against the ‘stale Victorian truisms of bourgeois liberal culture’, a challenge ‘to conventionality, unhappy marriages, tyrannical husbands, and the inhibition of personal freedoms’. Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 21. 15 Saint-Georges de Bouhelier, ‘Petite enquêté sur le feminisme’, as quoted in ibid., 26. 16 Ibid. 17 Jugend I, 1896–97. The caption reads: ‘On the agitation of a woman speaking in a meeting: Comrades, Women guerrillas, men are the epitome of egoism; we need relationships only slightly higher than [we need] the bread basket’ (Auf der Agitationsrede in einer Frauenversammlung; Genossinnen, Mitkämpferinnen, die Männer sind die Verköperung des Egoismus; Wir müssen ihnen das Brotkörbchen etwas höher hängen). 18 Simplicissimus 2, 1897–1898. 19 Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Oxford; New York: Berg, 1989). 20 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 17–18, 90, 97; Diane J. Guido, The German League for the Prevention of Women’s Emancipation: Antifeminism in Germany, 1912–1920 (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 15. 21 Ann Taylor Allen, ‘Patriachy and Its Discontents: The Debate on the Origins of the Family in the German-Speaking World, 1860–1930’, in Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas, ed. Suzanne L. Marchand and David F. Lindenfeld (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 81–101. Sociological debates on the centrality of patriarchy included responses from Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel and even Max Weber. Allen proposes that Engel’s socialist argument in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), supported by the likes of August Bebel, was still too radical for these three sociologists. 22 Both focused on the legal status of women in marriage, family, and the aspirations of women for equal rights to higher education and professional opportunities. 23 Zetkin was a German Socialist and a campaigner for women’s rights and universal suffrage. From 1891 to 1917, she edited the SPD women’s newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality) and proposed the first International Women’s Day in 1910–11. She became a member of the German Communist Party and an elected member of the Reichstag from 1920 until 1933 (when the party was banned by Hitler). Her election to the Reichstag in 1932 made her its longest serving member, and tradition dictated that

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she open the parliamentary session. She did so with a forty-minute attack on Hitler and the Nazi party. The Guardian, 9 March 2012 at http://www.theguardian.com/ theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2012/mar/08/clara-zetkin-international-womensday, viewed 23 December 2013. 24 Babylonian Talmud, Yoma, 2b, quoted in preface to Nahida Remy, The Jewish Wife (Das Jüdische Weib), trans. Louise Mannheimer (Cincinnati: C. J. Kriebel, 1895). 25 Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904–1938. 26 George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 80–91. 27 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 4. 28 Social Darwinism is applied Darwinian theory, promoting the belief that the strongest or fittest should survive and flourish in society, while the weak and unfit should be allowed to die. These ideas infiltrated colonialism, imperialism, and eugenics and eventually influenced Nazi ideology on race. For the historiography, definitions, and dissent over its importance, see “The Identity of Social Darwinism,” in Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3–39. 29 Carol Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting’, in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 302. 30 Lynn Avery Hunt, Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), cited in Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, 145. 31 See Mucha’s image of Mother Earth as a queen in Nature, c. 1900 or Fidus’s image of a young woman as the embodiment of Spring, dancing in the new season in Waltz, 1894. 32 Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting’, 304. 33 Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 59–60. Guido, The German League for the Prevention of Women’s Emancipation, 11–14. Marion A. Kaplan, Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 181. 34 Guido, The German League for the Prevention of Women’s Emancipation, 14. 35 For example, Oscar Wilde in London, Robert de Montesquieu in Paris, and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s adviser and friend Count Eulenberg (convicted of homosexual acts in 1908) in Berlin. Wilde was gaoled in 1895 for gross indecency by his lover’s father, who had read Wilde’s only novel The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890) containing homoerotic themes. De Montesquieu was friends with many fin-de-siècle artists including Sarah Bernhardt. Kaiser Wilhelm II supposedly had an affair with Phillip Count zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld (seen by some sections of society as a Jew and a spy). On homosexuality and decadence see Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality; The Image of Man. 36 Kathinka von Rosen, ‘Zur Frauenfrage: Deutsche Frauen in die Font!’ in Flugschriften des VSV (Berlin: Verlag des Berlin, 1910), cited in Guido, The German League for the Prevention of Women’s Emancipation, 15. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.

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39 Ibid. 40 Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 216. 41 Noted in chapter 2. See Norman L. Kleeblatt, ‘The Body of Alfred Dreyfus: A Site for France’s Displaced Anxieties of Masculinity, Homosexuality and Power’, in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2000), 76–91. 42 On ‘new women’ and culture see Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Nerida Campbell, Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2008); Duncan, ‘Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting’; Heilmann and Beetham, New Woman Hybridities; Ockman, ‘When Is a Jewish Star Just a Star?’; Roberts, Disruptive Acts. 43 Campbell, Femme Fatale: The Female Criminal, 7. 44 Ann C. Chave, ‘New Encounters with Les Demoiselles D’Avignon: Gender, Race and the Origins of Cubism’, in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Post-Modernism, ed. Norma Broude (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2005), 316. 45 Ibid., 316; Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2–3. 46 Brieger, EML, 44, 58. 47 Ibid., 106. 48 Ibid., 101. 49 Stanislawski, Zionism, 100. Dürer, the iconic ‘founder’ of German bookplates used the same phrase in a 1525 bookplate for Hector Pömer. Perhaps Lilien, in his bid to be the ‘founder of Jewish bookplates’, turned to Dürer for inspiration. Nicholas Block, ‘In the Eyes of Others: The Dialectics of German-Jewish and Yiddish Modernisms’ (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2013), 132–37. 50 Milly Heyd writes of Beardsley’s influence on Lilien in Milly Heyd, ‘Lilien and Beardsley: To the Pure All Things Are Pure’, Journal of Jewish Art 7 (1980): 59. For Olin’s chapter on the cultural Zionist movement and Lilien, see ‘Martin Buber: Jewish Art as Visual Redemption’, in Margaret Rose Olin The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 99–126. See also Haim Finkelstein, E.M. Lilien in the Middle East, Etchings (1908–1925) (Beersheba: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Avraham Barom Art Gallery, 1988); ‘Lilien and Zionism’, Assaph 3 (1998): 195–216; ‘E. M. Lilien: Between Drohobych and Brunswick’, in Art in Jewish Society, ed. Jerzy Malinowski et al. (Warsaw: Polish Institute of World Art Studies & Tako Publishing House, 2016), 189–96. 51 Heyd, ‘Lilien and Beardsley’, 58. The copy was given to the Bezalel Library in 1941. 52 Ezra Mendelsohn, Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 1. Also see Omar Bartov, ‘Eastern European Jewish History’, unpublished seminar paper, Sydney University, April 2009. 53 Zweig, ‘Introduction,’ in Lilien, EMLsW. 54 The mikveh is the physical place, the ritual bath, where ritual immersion for spiritual purification takes place. Tevila is the act of immersion. Mainly used by married women after the period of niddah or separation period between husband and wife following a woman’s menstruation (according to the laws of family purity in Jewish

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law or halakah). Jewish Virtual Library at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ jsource/Judaism/mikveh.htm, updated 2014, viewed 23 December 2013. See also Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 55 This may have been because Lilien was the only Eastern European Jew that the assimilated Zweig had met when he came to Berlin just after the publication of Lilien’s first book in 1901. For instance, in his autobiography (given to his publisher the day before he and his wife committed suicide), he mentions his meeting with Lilien: ‘I encountered for the first time an Eastern European Jew and a Judaism which in its strength and stubborn fanaticism had hitherto been unknown to me’. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 117. 56 For this information, see n. 28 in chapter 2. The census for c. 1890 showed that 115,000 people lived in the Drohobycz district – 92,500 Gentiles and 23,000 Jews; half of Drohobycz itself and most of neighbouring Borysław (9,000 out of 10,400) were Jewish. www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/drohobycz/genera, updated May 2009, viewed 11 September 2009. 57 The ‘Lovers of Zion’ were associations of proto-Zionist study circles formed in Romania and Russia that spread to England, America, France, and elsewhere. The group began around 1880 and continued until about 1902 or 1903, when they merged into the Zionist movement. 58 Such utopian ideals were not necessarily followed through. For attitudes to the relations between the sexes in the Hovevei Zion, see Ruth Kark, Margalit Shilo, and Galit Hasan-Rokem, eds., Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel: Life History, Politics, and Culture (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008), 26. 59 For this quote see Letter 29, ‘Martin Buber to Theodor Herzl, Nasswald, July 1902’ in Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue eds., Nahum N. Glatzer and Mendes-Flohr (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 26. 60 On Beardsley’s images of the grotesque, see Linda Gertner Zatlin, ‘Aubrey Beardsley’s Japanese Grotesques’, Victorian Literature and Culture 26, no. 1 (1997): 87–108. 61 For more on Klimt, see chapter 4. 62 Renate Ulmer, Alfons Mucha (Cologne; London: Taschen, 1994), 40. 63 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Secessionists linked their revolt over the staid conservative forces of Vienna’s Academy of Art to classical history wherein Roman citizens (the plebs), who were not part of the ruling class, rejected their rule by defiantly withdrawing to a hill outside the city. The name was taken from the Latin secessio plebes. 64 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Theories of Representation and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 3–15; Sigrid Bauschinger, ‘The Berlin Moderns – Else Lasker-Schüler and Café Culture’, in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918, ed. Emily Bilski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 61. 65 Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 217. 66 Lilien also created a bookplate that is strikingly similar for Richard Fischer in c. 1900.

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67 David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 176–77. 68 Ibid. 69 Braunschweig dates to the twelfth century, when it was called the Lion City after Henry of the House of Welf. In 1209, it became the centre of medieval Europe or urb Regis under Henry’s son German-Roman Guelph Emperor Otto IV. The Magnus family had lived in Braunschweig for generations. Helene Lilien’s grandfather Julius Magnus (1804–82), and great-grandfather, Salmann HaLewi (1778–1812), had lived in Braunschweig. Sophie Magnus, Helene’s mother, was born in Hamburg in 1840 and died in Braunschweig (1920). Helene’s uncle Gustav (her father’s brother) was a physicist, her aunt Ann Aronheim married a doctor, and her father’s other brother, Carl, was a banker with Lehman, Oppenheimer & Sons. This information comes from correspondence with Helene’s grandson, Tom Peters, in Switzerland. 70 He died before the award was announced. 71 Lilien, Briefe. These letters are from Ephraim to Helene. As mentioned in the Introduction, Helene also wrote letters to Ephraim that remain unpublished; the first few in their early correspondence suggest that they had a passionate love affair and that Helene was a fiercely independent woman who often wrote to her fiancé more than once a day. 72 Helene Magnus to E. M. Lilien, Braunschweig, 10 March 1905: ‘Ihr sollt nur Juden sein, nur Menschen mit einer Religion aber ohne Vaterland, ist das nicht traurig? Denn was ist Zion, Palestina? Doch nur ein Schemen aus uralter Zeit, aber nichts was heute Wirklichkeit hat. Ich glaube, soweit ich es übersehen und beurteilen kann, die Bewegung hat mehr gegen als für sich, denn welches Volk und welches Nation könnte man es verdenken, wenn sie nichts mehr für die Juden tun und sie nicht mehr als ihresgleichen anerkennen wollen, wenn die Juden selbst sagen, wir sind andere Menschen, ein anderes volk, unsere Heimat ist nicht hier sondern in Zion, wir selbst fühlen uns nur als Eindringlinge. Nein das sollen sie nicht sagen, sie müssen sagen wir sind Deutsch, Russen usw. Wir wollen, unser Bestes wir unseren Vaterland gebe, und die Zeit muss kommen, da wir mit dem ganzen Volke eins geworden sin. Dafür wollen wir kämpfen, das sei unser Ziel’ (You shall be only Jews, only people with a religion but without a country is that not sad? For what is Zion, Palestine? But only a shadow of ancient times, as nothing has reality today. I think, as far as I can see it and judge, the movement has more against than for it, because what folk and which nation can one blame if they do nothing more for the Jews and they do not want to acknowledge them as an equal, if the Jews themselves say we are another people, another folk, our home is not here but in Zion, we ourselves sometimes feel we are only intruders. No, they should not say that, they have to say we are German, Russian, etc. We want to be there, we do our best for country and the time must come when we will become one with the whole people, but we have to fight, that is our goal). My translation, LS. 73 ‘Und trotz allem diesen spielt das Judentum keine Rolle bei uns, meine Mutter hängt aus peität daran, ich selbst habe gar keine Berührungspunkte damit. Wir haben fast ausschliesslich christlichen Verkehr, nicht aus Hochmut, sondern einfach deshalb, weil in der verhältnismässig kleinen Gemeinde nur ganz wenige gebildete Familien gibt’ (And despite all this, Judaism plays no role with us, my mother still respects it, but I myself have no points of contact with it. We have almost reached an exclusively

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Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation Christian movement, not out of arrogance, but simply because in the relatively small community there are very few families). E. M. Lilien to Helen, Jerusalem, 9 May 1906. He wrote back telling her that though he has little money, he has a reputable name and that her parents should not worry: ‘I have never made a secret of my chronic money. On the contrary I have been somewhat conceited that without money I still created things of value …. If your father had asked me about my pecuniary circumstances, I would have replied, pecuniary circumstances are not to be separated from the spiritual ones, for my capital is my brain. Seven years ago, I had nothing. I was ill, without a home or knowledge. I did not even have enemies for I was totally unknown. Today I have health, the joy of life and a known name’. See the translation in Ruthi Ofek, E. M. Lilien: The First Zionist Artist, Letters, Etchings, Drawings, Photographs (Haifa: Rahash Printers, 1997), 140–41. ‘Da ich einzige Tochter bin und meine Mutter leidend ist, so dass sie unseren grossen Haushalt nicht allein führen konnte, wurde das selbstverständlich mein Wirkungskreis’ (Since I am the only daughter and my mother is ill, so that she could not perform the tasks of our very large household alone, this was of course my sphere of influence), July 1905, Helene to E. M. Lilien, ‘Vorwort’ in Lilien, Briefe, 8. ‘[D]er mich aber gar nicht befriedigte, weil nichts Wirkliches dabei zu tun war, nur immer da sein und verantwortlich sein … das war eine Qual für mich, besonders da ich immer den Trieb zur Kunst in mir fühlte, mit dem ich zu Haus gar nichts anfangen konnte’ ([B]ut [these activities] do not satisfy me, because nothing real was going on I had to always be there and be responsible. It was torture for me, especially since I always felt the urge to create art). Ibid. ‘Und meine grossherzigen Eltern haben mir auch nichts in den Weg gelegt, damit ich lernen konnte, obgleich sie nun ganz allein sind’ (And my magnanimous parents have laid nothing in the way, so that I could study, although they are now all alone). Ibid. Marie-Stüler was the Munich-born non-Jewish artist and Lilien’s lover. See Tom Peter’s bibliographic records on Marie Luise Karoline Adelheid (1868–1904). Marie’s surnames were Stüler-Walde and Stüler-München. See chapter 6 for a discussion of one of her works in Jugend as well as the biographical timeline of Ephraim Moses Lilien and his family, pages xxix – xxxi. Ephraim’s letter to Helene on 27 June 1914, cited in Ofek, E.M. Lilien: The First Zionist Artist, 160–1. For more information about her children, see Biographical Timeline, pages xxix – xxxi. Levenson, ‘An Adventure in Otherness: Nahida Remy-Ruth Lazarus (1849–1928)’, 109. Remy’s book was translated into English in 1895 by the American Louise Mannheimer, one of the speakers at the 1893 Jewish Women’s Congress, in Chicago, the first occasion where Jewish women gathered in large numbers specifically as Jewish women in America. Alan Levenson identified this in one of the few academic discussions of Nahida Remy’s work in ibid., 99. The two major studies on Remy are Levenson’s ‘An Adventure in Otherness’ and Barbara Hahn’s piece for the Jewish Women’s Encyclopedia; see Barbara Hahn, ‘The Jewish Women’s Archive: Jewish Women’, in A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lazarusnahida-ruth, updated April 2013, viewed 7 May 2013. According to Hahn, her mother was a teacher, proto-feminist, and activist.

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83 Nahida Remy, The Jewish Women (Das Jüdische Weib), trans. Louise Mannheimer (Cincinnati: C. J. Kriebel, 1895), 203. 84 Ibid., 255. 85 Max and Nahida were married in 1873. Barbara Hahn, ‘Nahida Ruth Lazarus (1998–2013),’ in A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 86 Breslau is now Wrocław in Western Poland, and was part of Germany until the end of the Second World War. Graetz wrote the eleven-volume Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (History of the Jews from Oldest Times to the Present) (1853–76); a condensed English version was published as History of the Jews, six volumes (1891–98). Encyclopaedia Britannica online at http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/240645/Heinrich-Graetz, viewed 14 April 2015. 87 Theoretical ideas on German nationalism have since been encapsulated by Eric Hobsbawm’s work on the German nation-state in The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Also see Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine Andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur and Technik in Deutschland, 1880–1933 (Schöningh: Paderborn, 1999). 88 For more on Ost und West, see chapter 6. 89 Michael Berkowitz, ‘Transcending “Tzimmes and Sweetness”: Recovering the History of Zionist Women in Central and Western Europe, 1897–1933’, in Active Voices: Women in Jewish Culture, ed. Maurie Sacks (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1995), 41–62. 90 Alison Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 121–40. 91 Schildberger is mentioned by Mark H. Gelber and Alison Rose as a prominent German-speaking early Zionist. Gelber, Melancholy Pride, 162; Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 117. 92 Hermine Schildberger, ‘Das Weib und der Zionismus’, Die Welt 3, Nr. 50, 15 December, 1899, 4–5, cited in Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 117. 93 Schildberger, ‘Das Weib und er Zionismus’. 94 Ibid. 95 Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 118–19, 241; Berkowitz, ‘Transcending “Tzimmes and Sweetness”’, 58. 96 Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 122. As stated in chapter 1. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., 125. 99 Although the word ‘woman’ or ‘women’ is mentioned only three times, all usages are in relation to working women (on p. 41), and to the middle class as wives, daughters, and sisters. See Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (London: Penguin Books, 2010). 100 Theodor Herzl and Alex Bein, Briefe und Tagebücher, vols. 3 and 4 (Berlin: Propylaen, 1983–1996), 668, cited in Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 130. 101 Priska Gmuer, ‘It Is Not Up to Us Women to Solve the Great Problems’: The Duty of the Zionist Women in the Context of the First Ten Zionist Congresses (Basel: Karger, 1997). 102 Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 109–24. 103 See Mosse’s Introduction to Max Simon Nordau, Degeneration (London: Heinemann, 1895). See also Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 123.

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104 ‘Das Weib hat eine hohe und vornehme Stellung und der Kultur, weil es sich bescheidet, weil es zufrieden ist, die Ergänzung des Mannes zu sein uns seine materialle Überlegenheit anzuerkennen,’ in Gelber, Melancholy Pride, 69–70. 105 Ibid., 170. 106 ‘Sie ist eine auch schlechte, despotische Hausfrau, eine schlechte Gattin und Mutter. Sie ist die Vertreterin der krankhaftesten Moderne, die Trägerin der laxen und sündhaften Ehe-, Familien- und Gesellschaftsmoral. Sie schädigt die Sitten und den guten Geschmack.’ Berthold Feiwel, ‘Die Judishe Familie. Die Judishe Frau’, Die Welt 5, Nr. 17, 26 April 1901, 1–3. 107 Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 134–37. 108 Gelber, Melancholy Pride, 163. 109 Ibid., 165. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Paula Hyman also points to a similar position. Paula Hyman, ‘Two Models of Modernization: Jewish Women in the German and the Russian Empires’, in Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Heirarchy. Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol. 16, ed. Jonathan Frankel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39. 113 Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle; London: University of Washington Press, 1995), 134–35. 114 Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 64–68; Marion A. Kaplan, ‘Tradition and Transition: Jewish Women in Imperial Germany’, in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith Baskin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 227–47; Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, 41. 115 Email correspondence with Tom Peters, 8 March 2012. Although Tom was not sure they were aware of its religious meaning.

4

The Dangerous ‘Other’: Lilien’s Jewish Femmes Fatales, Other Male Avant-garde Behaviour, and Else Lasker-Schüler’s Transgendered Vision

[S]he was glowing like a dark-tipped yet delicate ivory-tinted flower in the warm sunlight of content. —George Elliot, Daniel Deronda It struck him abruptly that a woman whose only being was to ‘make believe,’ to make believe she had any and every being you might like and that would serve a purpose and produce a certain effect, and whose identity resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as he phrased it to himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration – such a woman was a kind of monster in whom of necessity there would be nothing to ‘be fond’ of. —Henry James, The Tragic Muse I was born in Thebes, Egypt although I came into the world in Elberfeld in the Rhineland. —Else Lasker-Schüler

Lilien’s biblical femmes fatales and the Zionist agenda In Das Stille Lied (The Silent Song), Ephraim Moses Lilien clothes the bare-breasted lover in a costume of arabesque design evoking the exotic Orient (Fig. 1.2).1 From beneath an Arab style headdress, her long hair studded with pearls, falls between her breasts. Adorning her upper arm is an armlet in the shape of a snake.2 In contrast to the full-dress regalia of the ‘new Jewish male’ Juda, his lover is naked, appearing more sensual and with a fuller, rounder body than the pubescent girl-woman in Lilien’s bookplate from 1898 (Fig. 3.7). Lilien’s female partner of the ‘new male Hebrew’ seems to have much in common with the provocative femme fatale of his earlier illustrations for Jugend (Figs. 3.4 and 3.5).3 Acculturated German Jews such as Buber and his colleagues in the cultural Zionist movement were happy to praise Juda for its depiction

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of ancient Jewish male heroes. As the ‘darling’ and ‘hope’ of their faction, Lilien’s depiction of a licentious or submissive new Jewish woman, positioned perfectly for the male gaze, was passed over in silence.4 At the fin de siècle, significant non-Jewish avant-garde writers as well as visual artists were already portraying dangerous or exotic Jewish femmes fatales, or the ‘beautiful Jewess’, or belle juive.5 Not only were these ‘modern’ non-Jewish writers and artists complicit with the strong anti-feminist hegemony of the day (though Eliot’s novel was a very sympathetic rendering of proto-Zionist thought), their ideas were tainted with antisemitic fears about headstrong, independent Jewish women.6 In Germany, the Jewish poet and writer Else Lasker-Schüler exemplified the same phenomenon of growing female independence, threatened traditional and conservative female roles, and chose to create oriental images of herself and her alter ego Jussuf, as if she was ‘born in Thebes’. Lilien’s most sensual and overtly racially Jewish femmes fatales appear when he attempts to merge the femme fatale with the idea of the East or Orient. In keeping with the burgeoning German interest in the oriental, Lilien helps to invoke a more ‘authentic’ Jewish alterity for his contemporary Jewish audience by employing the biblical setting of the ancient Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine.7 This interest in the Orient was present in Herzlian political Zionism as well as in the political agenda of Buber’s cultural Zionism.8 Likewise, if paradoxically, Lilien’s earliest images of the ancient oriental Jewish woman (such as the lover in Das Stille Lied) for the book Juda are set in a thoroughly Europeanised depiction of the ‘Holy Land’.9 In portraying this female partner for the ‘new Hebrew male’ as a sensual Jewish lover and temptress, Lilien purposefully imitated proscribed, normative feminine stereotypes of nineteenthcentury Europe, such as the decadent Art Nouveau femme fatales of Beardsley and Mucha. He had already done this for his earlier non-Jewish or racially ambiguous femmes fatales depicted in Jugend and Berliner Tageblatt. In Juda, Lilien takes the first steps towards creating images of femmes fatales with Jewish distinctiveness, transforming the more dangerous image of female Jewish difference into a new representation of the modern Jewish woman.

The real Jewish princess mythologised: Mucha paints Bernhardt, Beardsley paints Salome, Klimt paints Judith, and Liebermann paints Delilah The French artist and art critic Joris-Karl Huysman gave the most damning appraisal of the femme fatale in his description of Gustav Moreau’s 1874 painting Salome Dancing before Herod. She was all ‘quivering bosom, heavy belly and tossing thighs; she was … in a sense … the symbolic incarnation of old-world vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria … a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning’ (Fig. 4.1).10 The subject and object in Moreau’s painting is Salome, the daughter of the Jewish princess Herodias (c. 15 BCE–after 39 CE) of the

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Herodian dynasty (c. 37 BCE–92 CE), who was responsible for the beheading of John the Baptist. Josephus Flavius, the Jewish historian, briefly mentions her by her Hebrew name, Shulamit; however in the New Testament, she appears only as ‘the daughter of Herodias’ (Mathew 14:3–11 and Mark 6:17–29). As the work of Beardsley demonstrates, the Christian myth surrounding this dangerous Jewish woman is subsumed into the general literary and artistic imagination at the fin de siècle.11 Real Jewish women, far from disappearing from the scene in fin-de-siècle Europe, figured prominently.12 The French stage was dominated by the Jewish actress Rahel (Elizabeth-Rachel Félix) in the early nineteenth century and Sarah Bernhardt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13 Mucha’s posters of Bernhardt became icons of feminine beauty. Klimt and Max Liebermann also proffered images of Bernhardt as Judith and Delilah. In literature, George Eliot and Henry James intimated that Jewish women were both exotic and erotic.14 For instance in Daniel Deronda (1876), the Jewish hero Daniel falls in love with Mirah Lapidoth, a beautiful Jewish singer, whom he saves from committing suicide. Daniel eventually discovers he was adopted and that his birth mother was a famous Jewish-Italian opera singer; racial mixing is thereby avoided.15 Mirah is portrayed throughout as an exotic, unusual, but successful singer, as is Daniel’s mother, and both Jewesses are linked to the stage. In James’s The Tragic Muse (1890), the Jewish heroine Miriam Rooth, an exotic and outlandish French actress born in Paris, is most probably based on both Rahel and Bernhardt.16 Henry James’s novels usually canvassed issues relating to the white, predominantly Christian world of England, France, and the United States.17 In The Tragic Muse, Miriam is described as an emerging starlet, a loud,

Figure 4.1  Gustav Moreau, Salome Dancing before Herod, often known as Salome Tattooed, 1874, oil on canvas, 92 × 60 cm. Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris.

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showy person with ‘a low forehead, with thick, dark hair [and] chiefly a pair of largely gazing eyes’.18 In his preface to the novel, James suggests that Miriam was a dramatic focus for the argument for art, yet the Jewess appears to be portrayed as an exotic foreign actress, a ‘spectacle’, who is both alluring and dangerous.19 For some artists like Alphonse Mucha, painting Jewish femmes fatales was a matter of money and reputation. In the 1890s, Mucha was happy to paint Bernhardt, the foremost femme fatale, and created at least nine colourful lithographs advertising her stage roles. These posters were a collaborative effort between Bernhardt, who instigated them, and Mucha, who gained his reputation based on their reception.20 In Edmund Rostand’s The Samaritan, Bernhardt played the Semitic biblical heroine Photine. Mucha’s poster for the play includes the Hebrew words for God – Yahweh and Shaddai – which Mucha probably added in a bid to exaggerate Bernhardt’s image of herself as the alluring and exotic Semitic ‘other’ (Fig. 4.2).21 For her part, Bernhardt used the discourse of advertising and consumer power to create her own manipulated images of herself as a femme fatale, revealing an unusual creative control for an actress at the time. The very same medium used her as spectacle, decoration, and commodity, because Bernhardt perfectly represented the anxieties associated with modern women and their emancipation.22

Figure 4.2  Alphonse Mucha, La Samaritaine, 1897, colour lithograph.

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The connection between the modern Jewess and Salome, the dangerous seductress who, like Judith, cuts off the heads of non-Jewish men, is based on a trope that presented Bernhardt as the dangerous, sexual seductress, and essential belle Juive.23 The belle Juive was an earlier nineteenth-century depiction of the Jewess as an ideal, oriental, exotic beauty. Raven-haired and dark-eyed, she was often named Sarah, Rachel, or Judith.24 The belle Juive was notably embodied as Esther, another well-known biblical heroine, in Balzac’s Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans (1838). Gilman’s depiction of her as Salome conveys the later nineteenth-century French meaning of the belle Juive, which had been transformed from someone to be admired into someone to be lusted over as the femme fatale.25 With the onset of the Dreyfus affair in the 1890s, and the increasingly racialised discourse of this period, the belle Juive was transformed into the treacherous modern Jewess of the early twentieth century, exemplified by Salome. According to Gilman, the modern Jewess was dangerous precisely because she appears to be simultaneously different and yet desirable, inherently sexual, yet pure evil. Safeguarding her precarious position in society, she simply murders nonJewish males.26 These images of the dark evil incarnate Salome were linked specifically with Bernhardt.27 Bernhardt was equally the treacherous ‘new woman’, a bluestocking, sexually ambiguous type who could be misread as ‘mannish’, who confounded categorisation and became instead the third sex – not quite a man and not quite a woman.28 If the stage was an ‘unsettling place’ on which to ‘act out’ the drama of the new woman, then it was also Bernhardt, with her ‘dark hair and black eyes’, who echoed nineteenth-century German-language drama by placing the European Jewess at its centre.29 In Franz Grillparzer’s 1851 play Die Jüdin von Toledo (The Jewess of Toledo), staged in the last decades of the century, Raquel the dark-haired protagonist is transformed from the belle Juive into a promiscuous new woman. Grillparzer based his play on the alleged love affair between Alfonso VIII, the king of Spain who was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s daughter, and his Jewish mistress Raquel.30 The conflation of the dark racial physiognomy of the Jewess with the belle Juive as ‘exotic and beautiful’ added to the new Jewish woman’s appeal as the artistic muse or model par excellence. Hence, Raquel parallels the Jewish actress in Henry James’s The Tragic Muse.31 As an actress and as a muse, Bernhardt represented a Jewish trope for all modern women, whether as the dangerous femme fatale or threatening new woman. She was Salome in Oscar Wilde’s misogynist play of the same name (even though she never actually played her) and was depicted in Beardsley’s images of Salome, created for that would be production. In Wilde’s play, Salome the bloodthirsty virgin-whore asks for the head of John the Baptist, even though in the original story Herodias apparently instructed her to do so. The culmination of Wilde’s play occurs when Herod demands Salome’s death.32 This image of the avenging and bloodthirsty Jewess is etched in ‘the secret or unspeakable subtext of Wilde’s play, especially its homoerotic and blasphemous elements’.33 The same character is present in Beardsley’s image of Salome in The Climax, where Salome appears as a witch (Fig. 4.3). Two locks of her black hair stand up like horns, recalling the negative medieval Christian motif that conflated the devil with the Jew.34 As evil incarnate or the devil herself, Salome, like her ancient biblical equivalent

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Judith, cuts off the heads of non-Jewish men in what looks like a form of symbolic, and Freudian, castration, proving that the modern Jewess was intent on emasculating not just all men but late nineteenth-century Christian men in particular.35 In Beardsley’s black and white illustration for Wilde’s play, the blood falls dramatically from John the Baptist’s head onto a white lily. According to medieval Christian iconography, the white lily often signified the Virgin Mary and represented purity.36 The symbol is used to compare the innocence of John the Baptist with the brutal revenge of Salome and King Herod to underscore the connection between brutal behaviour and the Jew. The conflation of the misogynist femme fatale with the attributes of the bluestocking new woman from Wilde’s play and images of the Jewess as the devil appeared in Richard Strauss’s fin-de-siècle operatic adaption of Wilde’s Salomé, and Oscar Panizza’s drama The Council of Love (1895).37 Both stage adaptations combine the devil or evil incarnate with the dangerous sexuality of all women. The Jewish woman is singled out as Salome, seducer, whore, and prostitute, carrier of the degenerate disease syphilis and metaphoric creator of all men and women.38 This bloodthirsty vision of a dangerous woman recalls the contemporary 1908 play, Mörderer, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women), by Austrian artist Oscar Kokoschka, later published in the 1910 issue of Der Sturm (The Storm) by Herwarth

Figure 4.3  Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax, 1893.

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Walden (Fig. 4.4).39 The play acted as a metaphor for the battle between the sexes where man is eventually victorious. The poster advertising the play at the Kunstschau exhibition in Vienna hung all over the city.40 Using the Christian iconography associated with the Pietà, the poster shows a pale, deathly looking, expressionless woman with a bloodied man in her arms. The angular lines of her face and arms together with the chaotic graphics at the bottom of the poster help create an image of woman as a destructive animal force of nature. Even though the play had only one performance, many reviews examined its ideas with a mixture of disapproval, controversy, and confusion. Drama critics such as Bernhard Diebold (1868–1945) and Robert Breuer (1878–1943) condemned the work, considering it both disturbing and ineffective.41 Although Kokoschka’s play mirrored the views of a few minor literary radicals at the time, it did reflect the misogynist subject matter of his academic colleagues in the arts and literature, as well as in pseudo-science and philosophy. The Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903) is particularly notable for his portrayal of gender relations during this period as a battle between men and women.42 Weininger’s ideas on the bisexuality of all individuals followed from Freud’s theories on the natural biological difference between the sexes. His antisemitic and anti-feminist book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903) served as a case study for the misogynist suggestion that the womanly part of man was man’s curse

Figure 4.4  Oscar Kokoschka, Pietà (Poster for Mörderer, Hoffnung der Frauen [Murderer, Hope of Women]), 1909, lithograph.

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and tragedy.43 Weininger converted to Christianity that same year to gain recognition and acceptance. He insisted that the male Jew was the ultimate, abnormal outsider, behaving like a woman, and inferior to men.44 His suicide confirmed the tragic inner turmoil that had offered such a horrific prognosis of gender and racial differences. It provided Weininger with a last resort, an escape from his two internal concerns: Jewishness and womanliness.45 The social and moral repercussions of Germany’s escalating material consumption at the beginning of the new century were frequently embodied in paintings of women who became a metaphor for luxury, fashion, and sexuality, paralleling the misogynist ideas of Weininger and Kokoschka. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s paintings of streetwalkers (1913–1915) confirmed the connection between women as consummate consumers, capitalists, and prostitutes (Fig. 4.5). German intellectuals such as Werner Sombart in Luxus und Kapitalismus (Luxury and Capitalism), 1913, often conflated capitalism with prostitution and consumerism.46 Sombart even asserted that Titian’s paintings of nudes and his celebration of the courtesan in the sixteenth century were due to the flowering of capitalism.47 Given Sombart’s attitudes to Jewish capital, singling out the Jews as responsible for its evils, and his description of the modern urban metropolis as a place of sin, meant that there was a tendency among conservative

Figure 4.5  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Straße, Berlin (Street, Berlin), 1913, oil on canvas, 120.6 × 91.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA. Public domain.

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Germans to conflate the modern sophisticated bourgeois woman with the modern Jewish woman.48 Oscar Panizza had already merged conspicuous female consumption with the Jewess in his 1895 work The Council of Love. Panizza’s description of the overt sexuality and promiscuous behaviour of the Jewess seemed like a metaphor for Kirchner’s Berlin’s streetwalkers.49 Not all non-Jewish artists were fascinated by the negative Jewish stereotyping of Old Testament biblical heroines. In Klimt’s Judith and the Head of Holofernes, Judith’s dark hair is piled high on her head. In true Klimt fashion, her breasts and navel are only half covered with gold patterned clothes, as if the idea of covering her naked torso was an afterthought (Fig. 4.6).50 In her right hand, she holds the head of Holofernes, scarcely visible in the painting. Her parted lips reveal the upper row of her white teeth; her half-shut eyes, and tilted head conjure the sexually orgasmic beauty of Lilien’s Song of Songs (Fig 7.2).51 Far from being a heroic figure, Klimt’s Judith is a modern Viennese society woman caught at the moment of sexual awakening, still wearing her exquisite gold collar studded with precious jewels. In the background, Klimt’s trees appear to resemble Assyrian reliefs, and the entire painting, with its highly gilded frame designed by Klimt’s brother, resembles a Byzantine icon.52 Some have suggested that the model for this painting was Adele Bloch-Bauer who may have been Klimt’s secret lover somewhere between 1903 and 1912.

Figure 4.6  Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1901, oil on canvas, 84 × 42 cm. Österreichische Galerie, Belvedere, Vienna.

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Adele was the wife of the Jewish industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and a wellknown Jewish society figure. Although Klimt may have modelled Judith on Adele, the Jewish community of Vienna was unhappy that Klimt had linked the biblical figure of Judith to the femme fatale image.53 Adele’s husband Ferdinand was unlikely to have commissioned Klimt to paint her portrait six years later if she had already been painted in an unflattering manner.54 Hence, it seems unlikely that Adele was Judith. Klimt usually painted a sitter only once, and he did paint Adele Bloch-Bauer twice. In 1907, he painted her as the true embodiment of femininity (Adele Bloch-Bauer I), with silent, pale face, and red, full lips staring, as one critic called it, ‘like an idol in a golden shrine’ (Fig. 4.7).55 He painted her again in 1912 (Adele Bloch-Bauer II) as an older, and wiser, Viennese beauty. The fact that Klimt painted his muse twice may imply that the gossip regarding Klimt’s relationship with Bloch-Bauer was probably correct, though neither Adele nor Klimt left any written record of what occurred (Fig. 4.8).56 Adele was not the only Jewish woman who sat for Klimt; he painted many other progressive Viennese Jewish women from the new upper classes, including Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein (the sister of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the soonto-be philosopher) and Fritza Riedler. Adele represented the quintessential Viennese modern woman. As one critic wrote, she was ‘a very specific type of new Viennese woman, whose ancestors are Judith and Salome … She is delightfully dissolute, attractively sinful, deliciously perverse’.57

Figure 4.7 Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil, silver and gold on canvas, 138 × 138 cm. Neue Galerie, New York.

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Figure 4.8  Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer II, 1912, oil on canvas, 190 × 120 cm. Private Collection.

Liebermann painted his Samson and Delilah in 1901, the same year as Klimt’s Judith. Like Klimt, he portrayed Delilah as a modern-day temptress. Delilah, who may have been Jewish and whose name is wordplay on the Hebrew, layla for night, tricks Samson into revealing that the secret of his extreme strength lies in his long hair.58 In order to defeat him, Delilah betrays his trust and cuts his hair while he is asleep. Samson loses his power and is captured by his enemies. Delilah is depicted at the moment of her victory holding up his hair to her fellow conspirators. Liebermann’s work never garnered the same attention as Lovis Corinth’s Salome II (1899–1900) (Figs. 4.9 and 4.10). Perhaps, his Delilah lacked the voluptuousness apparent in Corinth’s work of the same period. Liebermann’s Delilah, with her leaner body, caused ‘quite a fuss’ when exhibited at the 1902 Fifth Exhibition of the Berlin Secessionists in May 1898.59 The representation of a naked female body in a position of sexual or political power threatened the closed and parochial Berlin art world, which favoured conservative artists over experimental and less established artists who supported the new modernist styles of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Symbolism. Liebermann, the president of the Berlin Secessionist organisation, and possibly its only Jewish founding member, was aware of the power, prestige, and conservative nature of Imperial patrons and taste masters of Berlin high

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society. He proclaimed to the art critic Fritz Servaes that, ‘of course I knew in advance that my “Samson” would not please the Philistines – the Berliners and the Moabites, but I had not expected quite such a fuss’.60 Liebermann and Klimt were leaders of their respective breakaway secessionist movements. Happy to paint portraits of society women on commission, both rejected the cultural conservatism of Berlin and Vienna. Certainly, Liebermann would have been familiar with Klimt’s sexually charged and psychological portraits of women, like his depiction of Judith as an erotic symbol of sensuality and femininity. Liebermann’s Delilah was not a luscious femme fatale like Judith, and he leaves her racial identity ambiguous, although her position as a treacherous woman is not ambiguous. Liebermann had already depicted a Jewish-themed artwork earlier in his career and been distressed by the vilification that had ensued.61 Liebermann had attempted to paint Jesus as Jewish in his earlier painting, Der Zwölfjährige Jesus im Tempel (The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple), exhibited in 1879 at the International Art Show in Munich (Fig. 4.11). Friedrich Pecht, art critic for the Allgemeine Zeitung, Augsburg, declared that Liebermann had painted ‘the ugliest, know-it-all Jewish boy imaginable’.62 Pecht believed that ‘German feelings had been offended by this blasphemous painting’ and his assessment was even mentioned in Bavarian state parliamentary debates.63

Figure 4.9 Max Liebermann, Simson und Delila (Samson and Delilah), 1901–02, oil on canvas, 151.2 × 212 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

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Figure 4.10  Lovis Corinth, Salome II, 1899–1900, oil on canvas, 127 × 147 cm. Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.

Figure 4.11  Max Liebermann, Der Zwölfjährige Jesus im Tempel (The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple), 1879, oil on canvas, 149.6 × 130.8 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

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The Crown Prince of Bavaria was outraged by the painting. Liebermann declared as late as July 1911 that he would ‘never again paint a biblical subject’.64 The debate over his twelve-year-old Jesus intimates that Liebermann saw his Samson and Delilah painting as a universal, (art) historical theme, not strictly a Jewish biblical one. As a highly acculturated German Jew, Liebermann saw the response to his Delilah as typical of the opposing forces in the politics of the conservative German art world. Nationalistic forces represented by the Kaiser and his supporters battled against the more universal cosmopolitan ideas of Liebermann and the Berlin secessionists.65 The outrage over Liebermann’s image of Delilah did not represent a racial fight between Jews and non-Jews, though antisemites at the time would have disagreed with him. As a dangerous femme fatale, Liebermann’s Delilah was in line with other ambivalent readings of woman during this time, though clearly not as misogynist as Beardsley’s reading of Salome. Lilien was aware of Klimt’s erotic images as well as Liebermann’s more restrained and conservative work. He would also have known of the antisemitic incident over Liebermann’s painting of the Jewish Jesus.66 Liebermann was the most well-known Jew in the German art scene at the time as well as president of the Berlin Secession. He had been highlighted in Buber’s ‘Address on Jewish Art’ in 1901 as the second-most important Jewish artist alive after Joseph Israel. As the graphics editor for Ost und West, Lilien was cognisant of the style and themes demonstrated in their artwork.67

Else Lasker-Schüler’s transgendered oriental vision The figure of the seductive Jewish femme fatale was an early example of female independence and a threat to traditional and conservative female roles. The artist and writer Else Lasker-Schüler seems to have clearly embodied these characteristics in Germany (Fig. 4.12). Like Lilien, Lasker-Schüler was Jewish by birth and German by culture. Her desire to construct a new German Jewish identity that fused the oriental with the biblical was identical to Lilien’s, recalling other German-speaking literary figures who wrote about the Orient.68 Unlike Lilien, Lasker-Schüler’s position as an artist and woman in Berlin made her a double outsider in Wilhelmine Germany.69 Lasker-Schüler’s writing and artwork is less well known in the English-speaking world, though it has enjoyed a critical and popular revival in Germany since the late 1990s. She is now recognised as one of the major German poets of the Weimar period and sits alongside Goethe and Schiller as a recipient of the German medal or Kleist Prize for Literature in 1932. She was the first female and final recipient to be given such an honour before the prize was discontinued in 1933. The Israel Museum mounted a posthumous exhibition of her artwork in 1975, and the first German monograph about her work was published in 1980.70 In 2003, Betty Falkenberg published an Englishlanguage biography of Lasker-Schüler, and a major exhibition of her art was finally held in Germany, albeit at the Jewish Museum, Frankfurt. The German catalogue accompanying the 2010 exhibition re-assessed her graphic oeuvre and conferred on it the same significance as her writing.71 In 2012, Astrid Schmetterling published one of

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Figure 4.12  Portrait of Else Lasker-Schüler,1907, black and white photograph. Public domain.

the first discussions of Lasker-Schüler’s orientalist drawings in English.72 Donna Heizer highlighted the connection between Lasker-Schüler’s poetry, her German Jewish identity, and orientalism in 1995, but she did not analyse Lasker-Schüler’s artwork.73 The only other significant work in English, that relates her poetry to the ideas of the cultural Zionist movement and in particular the artwork of Ephraim Moses Lilien, was Marc Gelber’s 1999 essay.74 Although he did not apply his analysis to her images, he understood the connections between her German Jewish identity, the neo-Romantic ideas of the cultural Zionists, and the way she presented herself as an erotic, feminine force in her writings. The time is ripe to consider her contribution both as a poet and as a modern Jewish woman artist, and to foreground her interest in the East as a crucial aspect of her struggle to find a place for herself as a woman, and a Jew in Imperial Germany. Without Gelber’s groundbreaking work, these connections would not be possible. Else Schüler was born into an upper middle-class bourgeois family in the Rhineland industrial town of Elberfeld in 1869. Her father was a banker and builder, her paternal grandfather was a teacher and rabbi in a Westphalian village, and one of her mother’s cousins, Leopold Sonnemann (1831–1909), was the founder of the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung and later a member of the Reichstag. From age thirteen, she was homeschooled, after she developed a severe nervous disorder (chorea minor) that caused involuntary, jerky movements of her arms, legs, and face. There is some suggestion that

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the disease was caused by antisemitic taunts at school.75 In 1894, at the age of twentyfour, Lasker-Schüler married Berthold Lasker, a wealthy doctor, and moved with him to Berlin. Lasker-Schüler came to prominence in Imperial Germany when her first poems were published in 1899, the same year she gave birth to a son, Paul.76 Lilien and Lasker-Schüler both mixed with members of the group Die Kommanden (The New Wave), including Rudolf Steiner, the educator and founder of the spiritual movement called Anthroposophy, and encountered many of the creative and liberal thinkers of Central Europe.77 By 1902, she had met her second husband, Georg Lewin, at a meeting of the newly formed Die Neue Gemeinschaft (The New Community), where she gave him the pseudonym Herwarth Walden.78 Through Die Neue Gemeinschaft Lasker-Schüler met many prominent Jewish and non-Jewish writers and thinkers who coveted the social liberalism of this New Age community of pacifists, anarchists, humanists, socialists, and feminists. These included Martin Buber, Erich Mühsam, a Jewish playwright, anarchist and later cabaret writer during the Weimar period, Gustav Landauer, a radical Jewish socialist and anarchist, and Peter Hille, a vagrant poet and one of Lasker-Schüler’s mentors. Lasker-Schüler married Lewin/Walden in 1903 after finalising her divorce from Lasker, and Walden became the founder of the leading avant-garde periodical, art gallery, and publishing house Der Sturm.79 Through Walden’s Verein für Kunst (Art Society) and at the Café des Westens, LaskerSchüler met many of the leading avant-garde visual artists who were participants in the Berlin Moderns movement such as Oscar Kokoschka, and the well-known expressionist artist of the Die Blaue Reiter group, Franz Marc. During this early period in Berlin, she created artworks and poetry in the stylised, naturalist Jugendstil. At the café, she encountered other disseminators of modern art such as Viennese Jewish art dealers and cousins Paul and Bruno Cassirer, and Viennese Jewish art critic Karl Kraus, as well as theatre critic Alfred Kerr, the sexual researcher Magnus Hirschfeld, and author Walter Benjamin.80 She was friends with Berlin feminist Eliza Ichenhaüser and conducted lengthy correspondences with Kraus, Gottfried Benn, Buber, and Gershom Scholem.81 She seems to have presided over avant-garde café life in pre-World War One Berlin in much the same way Gertrude Stein did in Paris at the same time. If Lilien and Lasker-Schüler did not meet at the Café des Westens, they surely would have seen each other’s work on the pages of Ost und West, which strove to educate an acculturated German-speaking Jewish audience about modern Jewish art and culture. The journal endorsed a new Zionist aesthetic that valued the East, the location of the ancient narrative of Jewish history, and aimed to unite Eastern and Western Jewry in a national revival of Jewish arts and culture.82 Lilien was the graphics editor of the journal; his illustrations and Lasker-Schüler’s poems appear in the same issue twice in 1901.83As the literary critic Samuel Lublinksi, a friend of the poet explained, by the end of 1901, Lasker-Schüler was gaining recognition as a poet. Her first book of poems, Styx, had just been published. Lublinksi championed her poems in Ost und West because he believed they mirrored the values of the cultural Zionist movement. They emphasised the spiritual importance of the Jewish national soul, a Romantic yearning for the ancient homeland, and the city of Jerusalem together with a neo-Romantic or mystical/erotic desire for union with the divine.84

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Figure 4.13  ChanukkaLichter (Chanukah Lights), Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 883 –84. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/http:// sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/pageview/2584878, accessed 4 May 2018.

Lilien experienced a similar positive reception to his Juda illustrations that began appearing in the pages of Ost und West. The fact that both Lilien and Lasker-Schüler’s work appeared in the very first year that Ost und West was published is significant, indicating that both Lilien and Lasker-Schüler’s work reflected the early platform of cultural and national revival upheld by the journal (Figs. 4.13 and 4.14).85 Their ideas perfectly matched the German, Jewish, and Zionist neo-Romantic interest in a revival of the values and ideas of the ancient, biblical, and enigmatic East. Lasker-Schüler’s literature was influenced by the fashionable interest in orientalist decoration in art, as well as in literature, reminiscent of The Arabian Nights.86 As an unconventional, antibourgeois writer, she created an Asiatic language called asiatisch (Asiatic) that appeared in her oriental literature and performances.87 The pseudo-language incorporated Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew sounds and approximated a wild, ancient

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Figure 4.14  Gedichte von Else Lasker-Shüler, Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 931–32. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica //http:// sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/pageview/2584902, accessed 4 May 2018.

language. This interest in the otherness of the East, particularly its seductive and dangerous quality, meant that over time she adopted an oriental persona that combined her interest in Arab and Muslim traditions with what she called the Wildjuden (wild Jews) or biblical Jewish heroes of the Bible.88 This became apparent in 1907 with the publication of stories and poems titled Die Nächte der Tino von Baghdad (The Nights of Tino of Baghdad). The character Tino in these short stories and poems is a princess of Middle Eastern descent who lives in a palace with a contingent of warriors, slaves, and eunuchs.89 In her private letters to friends during this period, Lasker-Schüler began to transform from a female princess into a male figure.90 She first developed her alter ego Yosef, the Hebrew or Jewish Prince of Thebes in her poems Der Prinz von Theben (The Prince of Thebes), 1913. Then, she morphed into Prince Jussuf, the Arab Prince of Thebes.91

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In Die Nächte von Tino von Baghdad and Der Prinz von Theben, her first-person narrator is almost always an Arab, while her third-person narrator tells the tale of Jewish characters pointing out the common non-Western perception of the world. The combination of first-person (Arabic) and third-person (Jewish) voice culminates in the creation of Lasker-Schüler’s Middle Eastern, transgendered persona. Lasker-Schüler’s movement towards a transgendered persona is revealed in a few illustrations from these private letters. The words ‘von Theben’ (from Thebes) appear in the margins, and she begins to dress up as the oriental ‘Fakir of Thebes’ (Fig. 4.15). In this 1912 photograph, Lasker-Schüler takes on the character of Fakir, wearing velvet pants with a dagger tucked into the belt. In her letters, she stressed that she wanted to perform public readings of her Jussuf poems and writings dressed this way.92 She was so far ahead of her time that these poetry readings or ‘performances’ were considered many years later to be examples of ‘absurdist theatre’.93 As the cross-dressing Prince of Thebes, Else depicts herself in a much more positive light than in her earliest known drawing of 1900, in which she appears as a misanthropic weakling weeping tears of blood.94 Lasker-Schüler/Tino/Prince of Thebes is a stronger, more courageous character than her isolated freakish self in the early drawing Die Lÿrische Missgeburt (Fig. 4.17).

Figure 4.15  Die Flötenspielende Else Lasker-Schüler as Fakir von Thebes, c. 1910. Frontispiece of Mein Herz (My Heart), 1912. Photo by Becker and Maaß. ARC. Ms. Var. 501 13 01. Courtesy of the Else Lasker-Schüler Archive, Archives Department, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

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Figure 4.16  Egyptian Relief from the tomb of Rij (Ria). ÄM 7278, relief. Courtesy of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung.

Figure 4.17  Elsa Lasker-Schüler, Die Lÿrische Missgeburt (The Lyrical Miscarriage or Freak), 1900. Ricarda Dick, Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder, 118. Courtesy of Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.

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The photograph of Lasker-Schüler wearing trousers also recalls Egyptian relief carvings that were on show at the Neues Museum, Berlin, at the beginning of the twentieth century and confirms her deep interest in the art and ideas of ancient Egypt (Fig. 4.16).95 Lasker-Schüler appears to be modelling not only her poetry but also her new, real-life Eastern identity on these Egyptian male figures. In a sketch from 1912, later used to illustrate her Hebrew Ballads (1913), she is shown in profile with her hair in a bob and again dressed in harem pants (Fig. 4.18). She holds a small, oriental city emblazoned with a Jewish Star of David that floats beneath a crescent moon. Finally, Lasker-Schüler appears as both Abigail, the Jewish Princess, and the boy prince of Thebes in an artwork that has both names scrawled under the image (Fig. 4.19). In the drawing, titled Abigail III/ehemaliger Prinz von Theben (Abigail III, Old Boy Prince of Thebes, 1913), LaskerSchüler wears a tall, turban-like hat. Both images, with their Arab dress and oriental overtones, reveal a sexual ambiguity. Her transformation from princess to Prince Jussuf appears complete in a small sketch drawn in a private letter of 2 April 1912.96 Here, her head is again in left profile. Atop her short hair is a large pharaonic-style crown, except this one has a Star of David emblazoned on it, and her image is repeated as if displayed on an Egyptian frieze (Fig. 4.20).97 The comparison between the biblical Joseph, or Yosef (in Hebrew), and Lasker-Schüler is clear. Like Yosef, Lasker-Schüler was an interpreter of dreams, a poet misunderstood by her own people for whom she cared deeply.98 Conversely, by spelling Yosef ’s name in Arabic, Lasker-Schüler became neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Muslim. Instead, Jussuf appears as a wealthy, imaginary poet-prince in whom both art and power are combined.99 To Lasker-Schüler, Jussuf personified the ideal person who, like the biblical Joseph, was a stranger in a foreign land, not unlike her own situation or that of her own people in fin-de-siècle Germany.100

Figure 4.18  Elsa Lasker-Schüler, Ganzfigur im Linksprofil, auf dem Arm eine Stadtminiatur (A large figure in left profile, a miniature city on her arm), 1912. Ricarda Dick, Else LaskerSchüler: Die Bilder, 15. Courtesy of Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.

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Figure 4.19  Elsa Lasker-Schüler, Abigail III/ehemaliger Prinz von Theben (Abigail III, Old Boy Prince of Thebes), between February and May 1913, pencil, ink, chalk on squared paper, 119 × 95mm, with inscriptions at lower right and bottom, ‘For Prince of Thebes.’ Ricarda Dick, Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder, 199. Courtesy of Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.

Figure 4.20 Lasker-Schüler, Die Judischen, between February and May 1913. Ricarda Dick, Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder, 19. Courtesy of Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.

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For Lasker-Schüler, the creation of a non-gendered, stereotypical identity was an attempt to escape the gendered boundaries of Wilhelmine Germany. By taking on the role of an androgynous male, she transformed herself from a cross-dressing Jewish woman to a more socially accepted Jewish man. Like Bernhardt, she manipulated her own image, but she never gained Bernhardt’s fame and fortune, nor did she work in the public and commercial world, even though she had received the prestigious German literary medal. To her many critics at the time, Lasker-Schüler played out the role of the dangerous and Jewish femme fatale. Kokoschka, the anti-feminist, never actually drew or painted her. As he declared many years later, although Lasker-Schüler ‘wrote about my pictures in fulsome terms – perhaps because of it – I never really understood her and could never draw or paint her’.101 Kokoschka’s views on LaskerSchüler may indicate how most ordinary Germans understood her at the time, even though Karl Kraus proclaimed her to be the ‘greatest lyric poet of modern Germany’.102 Kokoschka did not escape Lasker-Schüler’s gendered gaze either. She commented on his painting of women saying, ‘His Princesses were hothouse marvels; you could count their filaments and stamen’. She remarked that beneath these plant-life likenesses lurked, ‘just thinly veiled, an ur-animal smell’.103 It seems likely that Lasker-Schüler was commenting on his misogynist 1908 play. Today her post-modern, cross-dressing, gendered performances would be seen as a way to act out problems associated with fluid, multiple, or transnational identities and the double burden of being both Jewish and female. In the end, Lasker-Schüler’s life was one of extremes. She endured continuous financial deprivation as an artist, twice divorced, and lived through tumultuous times as a single mother. She survived the death of her only child to tuberculosis and fled from Nazi Germany to Switzerland in 1933. She lived the rest of her life in severe poverty as a refugee. In 1945, gravely ill and aged seventy-six, she died in Jerusalem during the British Mandate in Palestine.104 By deliberately blurring the boundaries between art and life, Lasker-Schüler created what Antje Lindenmeyer, Leigh Gilmore, and the philosopher Judith Butler refer to as an act of ‘subversive performance’, and what Roberts, a decade or so later, described as a ‘disruptive act’.105 According to Butler, the stage was a less threatening place to act out new ideas about fin-de-siècle gender than in real life.106 As Jane Misme, a French theatre critic, acknowledged in 1901, the stage was also a ‘reflection of the reality surrounding it’, a progressive influence, both an agent and a mirror of change.107 By turning away from what has been termed ‘classical autobiography’, a discourse of apparent selfhood and truth, Lasker-Schüler chose to turn her life into a performance, one that was often a revolutionary act.108 Jussuf was Lasker-Schüler’s attempt to merge East and West to create a connection between her Jewish self and her non-Jewish world. A story she wrote in 1912, entitled Malik, illustrates this well.109 In the narrative, Jussuf, a pacifist, is anti-emperor to the warmongering Wilhelm II. In this way, Lasker-Schüler situates Jussuf within an Orient that seems to function as an ‘other’ to the West. She felt closer to this ‘other’ than to contemporary Germany which prior to the First World War was intent on warmongering.110 Lasker-Schüler exploited the Orient for her own gain, attempting in the process – as did Bernhardt – to construct a powerful but enigmatic identity for herself that often reproduced

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stereotypes already found in European art and literature.111 She also attempted to speak from within the Orient as the eternal Jewish ‘other.’ By 1913, many of her ‘Jussuf ’ poems had been re-edited and published as Hebraische Ballads (Hebrew Ballads). All the poems in this collection were on biblical themes, and although some of them were published as early as 1901, others were new. In 1913, the German Jewish critic Ernst Lissauer commented that they were ‘not the poems of a German poetess, nor of a German of Jewish heritage, but, simply put, the Hebrew melodies of a Hebrew singer, who employs German sounds through an accident of the Diaspora’.112 Since then, they have been described as a mixture of biblical-historical tradition and poetic fiction.113 The great figures of the Hebrew Bible, Abraham, Ruth, Esther, David, Jonathan, and Eve are constructed in such a way as to remind LaskerSchüler’s bourgeois German Jewish contemporaries of their own German people’s history. Most of her poems represent ‘a moment or aspect of their story which is generally quite different from the scriptural tales through which they are known’.114 Lasker-Schüler spoke in both a masculine and feminine voice, celebrating what was considered normal feminine behaviour at the time. For Lasker-Schüler, gender was a flexible category even when gender norms in Wilhelmine Germany were ‘rigidly essentialised’.115 Her supporters and critics regarded these ballads as primarily apolitical, a ‘volume of spiritual and lyric expressions’, even though her portraits of rulers and powerful men were later considered to be among her protests against the increasing militarism and nationalism of the Wilhelmine era.116 Lilien’s Jewish femmes fatales align with Lasker-Schüler’s vision of a transgendered Orient, as both attempted to merge multiple identities into a cohesive unity. As avantgarde artists, both Lilien and Lasker-Schüler felt estranged from their bourgeois German Jewish counterparts but were still intimately bound to them. By merging their exotic Eastern Jewish ‘other’ with the biblical and therefore more authentic and historic Jewish narrative, they hoped to construct new German Jewish identities for themselves.

Conclusions For Lilien, just as for other vanguard male artists working at the end of the nineteenth century, painting continued to be a ‘male preserve’ and a ‘male predicament’. Images of the Jewish femme fatale by Mucha, Beardsley, Klimt, and Liebermann reveal the Jewess flaunting her sensuality and sexuality as Salome, Judith, or Delilah. They created a connection between dangerous females and dangerous Jews, as the devil or evil incarnate, seducer, whore, or prostitute. She is both a carrier of syphilis and a negative symbol of the creative force of the universe – a persistent and ultimately cataclysmic theme in modern European history. Lilien’s first depiction of a Jewish femme fatale in Juda as a sensual Jewish lover and temptress purposefully imitated the proscribed, normative feminine stereotypes of nineteenth-century Europe, even as he tried to produce striking images of a woman with Jewish distinction. The portrayal of Jewish women by Jewish male artists such as

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Liebermann or Lilien was, at worst, fraught with inconsistencies that reinforced the same contemporary and anti-feminist prejudices. Lilien’s new and striking image of a femme fatale in Juda with Jewish distinctiveness challenged antisemitic, racialised Jewish stereotypes of Jewish women by male avantgarde artists such as Beardsley, Klimt, and Mucha. Lilien’s image for Juda of a Jewish femme fatale, together with his strong images of manly men, may have stunned the German Jewish art world, yet they retained a cosmopolitan or avant-garde liberalism regarding the female body that served to intensify the objectification of women. In an effort to transform the more dangerous image of female Jewish difference into a new representation of the modern Jewish Zionist woman, Lilien’s liberalism appears ambivalent to the anti-feminist, possibly misogynist, attitude to woman in those same proscribed, normative feminine stereotypes, even as he found a new role for biblical Jewish heroes and heroines in the guise of a Jewish national art. This ambivalent attitude, along with the late-nineteenth-century crisis of masculinity and the conservative German attitudes to women’s emancipation, often signalled that if being masculine was the prerogative for German Jewish men, then being feminine was often the only recourse available to German Jewish women. What remains surprising about Lilien’s work is how closely his interest in the construction of a new Jewish national identity merged an exotic, Eastern, Jewish alterity with the biblical narrative, paralleling the portrayal of similar biblical and oriental themes in Lasker-Schüler’s artwork. However, she was intent on blurring the boundaries between genders. Lasker-Schüler defied categorisation like the Jewish actress Bernhardt. As a graphic artist, poet, playwright, and novelist, Jewish woman, bohemian, bluestocking suffragist or serpentine femme fatale, she personified the fin-de-siècle ‘new Jewish woman’. She was furthermore a supreme example of the third sex who struggled with issues of gender and difference, blurring the boundaries between herself and her writing, her life and her work, and her German and Jewish identities. She remained a double outsider, both as a Jew and as a woman in a man’s world. No wonder women like her, struggling for acceptance and understanding, were seen as so disruptive. Ultimately, both artists wished to explore their own multiple identities as moderns, as Jews, and as Germans, and they did so by constructing these identities within an oriental and biblical framework. They were part of a burgeoning group of Jewish writers, poets, and artists whose response to the problems of alterity or otherness was to view German orientalism as an inspiration that would help explain their multiple, hybrid, and transnational identities.117

Notes 1 Brieger, EML, 69. 2 For a similar hairstyle, see the image in Juda, Prinzessin Sabbat (Princess Sabbath), also known as Queen of the Sabbath (6.8), discussed in chapters 6 and 7. 3 Discussed in chapter 3.

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Jewish leaders and art critics hardly noticed this portrayal of a seductive, sensual femme fatale. As noted in chapter 3, male powers of authority were apparently more worried about the ‘Jewish question’ of German Jewish patriarchal loyalty and alterity than the ‘Women question’. See Claudia Prestel, ‘Frauen Und Die Zionistische Bewegung’, Historische Zeitschrift 258 (1994): 29–71 and Ann Pellegrini, ‘Whiteface Performances, Race, Gender and Jewish Bodies’, in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),108–49. 5 See later discussion on the belle Juive and nn. 25 and 26. 6 On the merging of ‘The Beautiful Jewess’, the oriental and the femme fatale, see Ulrike Brunotte, ‘“All Jews Are Womenly, but No Women Are Jews”: The “Femininity” Game of Deception, Female Jew, Femme Fatale Orientale, and Belle Juive’, in Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism, 195–220; Hildegard Frübis, ‘Die Schȯne Jüdin – Bilder Vom Eigen Und Vom Fremden’, in Projektionen: Rassismus Und Sexismus in Der Visuellen Kultur, ed. Anangret Freidrich, Birgit Haehnel, and Christina Threuter (Marburg: Jonas, 1997), 112–25; Anna-Dorothea Ludwig, ‘Between Orientalization and Self-Orientalization: Remarks on the Image of the “Beautiful Jewess” in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century European Literature’, in Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism, 221–9. Also see later discussion on Daniel Deronda and n. 14. 7 The word ‘authentic’ or the idea of ‘authenticity’ is in quotation marks throughout this book. The problematics of authenticity have been treated in literary, cultural, and aesthetic theories. See inter alia F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), and Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). For a more current postmodern critique see Chris Barker, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2003), 393. 8 By 1902, the publication of Herzl’s Altneuland (Old-New Land), his novel of a Utopian Zionist vision of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, created in the central European secular Zionist imagination the belief that the ancient biblical homeland of Palestine was the authentic place for Jewish renewal. 9 In Herzl’s Altneuland, Palestine was to be a new Vienna similarly de-judaicised and secular. See John Milfull’s article for a recent re-reading of Altneuland and Herzl’s vision of Utopia, John Millful, ‘The Zionist Paradox’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 54, no. 1 (2008): 126–31. On depictions of the Holy Land during this period, see chapter 5. 10 Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Against Nature) (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1959), in Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 24. 11 Beardsley illustrated Wilde’s play Salomé twenty years or so later. 12 It was Anne Pellegrini, in 1997, who wrote, ‘In the collapse of Jewish masculinity into an abject femininity, the Jewish female seems to disappear’. See Pellegrini, ‘Whiteface Performances, Race, Gender and Jewish Bodies’, 109. Her reaction was in response to the male conclusions of Sander Gilman, Jay Geller, and Daniel Boyarin, who claimed that antisemitism in late-nineteenth-century European history began associating the Jewish male body and psyche, with the traits and hysteria of the Jewish female. For their remarks, see Sander Gilman, ‘Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess’, in The Jew in the Text, ed. Tamar

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Garb and Linda Nochlin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 198; Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin eds., Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), vii–xxii; Jay Geller, On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 17. 13 On Rahel see James Agate, Rachel (New York: Viking Press, 1928); Rachel M. Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995). 14 Pellegrini, ‘Whiteface Performances’, 110. George Eliot (1819–1880) and Henry James (1843–1916). 15 This novel was unusual, even controversial for its time. It was a sympathetic rendering of proto-Zionist thought and Jewish communal life in England towards the end of the nineteenth century. Until that time, only a few Jewish characters had appeared in British novels and they were not the major character. Eliot also linked the Sephardic Jewish community of England (the name Deronda is derived from Spanish Sephardim who were ordered out of Catholic Spain in 1492) and the move by Daniel and Mirah, by the end of the novel, to the ‘East’, to restore the Jewish nation. 16 Eli Ben-Joseph, Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews and Race (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), 100. 17 See James Mendelsohn, ‘Review of Eli Ben-Joseph, Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews, and Race’, The Henry James Review 18, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 200–3. 18 Henry James, The Tragic Muse (London; New York: Macmillan, 1891), 93. 19 Ben-Joseph, Aesthetic Persuasion, 101–7. 20 Carol Ockman et al., Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (New York; New Haven, CT: Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, 2005), 2, 101. 21 Bernhardt often played up the fact that she was the daughter of a courtesan. In fact, because of her mother’s connections, she had entered the revered Comédie Française, but left the elite troupe to make her fame and fortune in popular theatre and international tours, hence the need to advertise herself and her wares. See Ockman et al., Sarah Bernhardt. 22 There is a wealth of scholarship on Bernhardt. See Gilman, Salome, 115; Ockman et al., Sarah Bernhardt; Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Finde-Siècle France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). 23 Gilman, Salome, 113; Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, The Divine Sarah: A Life of Sarah Bernhardt (New York: Knopf, 1991), 315; Pellegrini, ‘Whiteface Performances’. On la belle juive see Marie Lathers, ‘Posing the “Belle Juive”: Jewish Models in 19thCentury France’, Woman’s Art Journal 21, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2000): 27–32. 24 Frübis, ‘Die Schöne Jüdin – Bilder Vom Eigen Und Vom Fremden’, 112–25; ‘Ephraim Moses Lilien: The Figure of the “Beautiful Jewess,” the Orient, the Bible, and Zionism’, in Brunotte, Ludewig and Stähler, Orientalism, 84–85. 25 Luce Klein, Portrait de la juive dans literature francoise (Paris: Nizet, 1970), 205–6; Lathers, ‘Posing the “Belle Juive”: Jewish Models in 19th-Century France’, 27. 26 Gilman, Salome, 113. Examples of this dangerous transformation include not only Beardsley’s depiction of Salome in his play, but also Wagner’s opera Salome, both discussed below. 27 The connection between Bernhardt and Salome was tenuous because Bernhardt never actually played Salome in London’s Palace Theatre in 1892 – British censorship laws forbade the representation of biblical figures onstage. Ibid.

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28 Ibid., 100, 114; Carol Ockman, ‘When Is a Jewish Star Just a Star? Interpreting Images of Sarah Bernhardt’, in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Tamar Garb and Linda Nochlin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 123; Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 107–64. Also see Neil R. Davison, ‘“The Jew” as Homme/ Femme-Fatale: Jewish (Art)ifice, Trilby, and Dreyfus’, Jewish Social Studies 8, nos. 2–3 (2002): 75. 29 Roberts proposes in Disruptive Acts (240–41) that the ‘New Woman’ is best laid bare in the unsettling acts of theatre. 30 Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) was an Austrian poet, born in Vienna. Gilman, Salome, 108. Grillparzer adapted a Spanish play, possibly based on King Alfonso VIII (1155–1215), about his affair with the Jewess Raquel of Toledo. Alfonso was involved with the reconquest of Spain from the Moors. The play was rewritten by the German Jewish Weimar writer and expat Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958) in 1955. 31 Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 240–41. 32 On the powerful sexuality of Beardsley’s drawings, see Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990). 33 Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, 152. 34 The Jewish Encyclopaedia, 468, explains the mistranslation of the Hebrew word keren (lit. to shine) in the Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible as ‘horns’. The statue of Moses by Michelangelo with two horns, commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1505, is the most well-known example of this mistranslation. Horns were also associated in the ancient Near East as signifying a deity such as Sin or Ammon. http://www. jewishencyclopedia.com/view, updated 2011, viewed 12 December 2013. 35 Freud’s theory was a way of internalising sexual difference. The misogyny associated with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of castration anxiety is not the subject here but does dovetail into non-Jewish attitudes to circumcision, the feminisation of the Jewish man, and Freud’s subconscious fear of being a feminised Jewish man – that is, one who has been already castrated. On Freud’s patriarchal psychoanalytic doctrine and the Oedipus complex see Barnaby Baratt and Barrie Ruth Strauss, ‘Toward Postmodern Masculinities’, American Imago 51 (1994): 38; ‘You May Not Tell the Boys: The Diaspora Politics of a Bitextual Jew’, in Daniel Boyarin Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 221–71; Geller, On Freud’s Jewish Body: Mitigating Circumcisions, 1–42. 36 George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 17; Doron J. Lurie, Femme Fatale (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2006), 183. 37 Gilman, Salome, 101–08. First performed in Dresden at the Opera House in 1905. 38 Ibid. My analysis also parallels the recent study on Salomonia by Ulrike Brunotte, ‘Unveiling Salome 1900. Weibliche Entschleierungen Zwischen Sexualität, Pathosformel Und Oriental Dance’, in Veiled Orient, Unveiled Occident? (Un) Visibility in Politics, Law, Art and Culture since the 19th Century, ed. E. Frietsch, B. Dennerlein, and T. Steffen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), 95–115. See also Robert’s discussion of the links between the politics of the Third Republic in France and the Dreyfus case and the tensions between the idea of the ‘real nation of “eternal France”’ and the alien or foreign nature of French Jews. The antisemitic publication

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La Libre Parole conflated the sexual purity of Joan of Arc, the ‘Mother’ of the French Republic with the sexual promiscuity of the Jewess, the degeneration of the French people, and the ‘new women’ who worked outside the home. Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 116–27. 39 Walden was Else Lasker-Schüler’s second husband. 40 For this information, see The Museum of Modern Art: German Expressionism, Works from the Collection at http://www.moma.org/collection_ge/object.php?object_ id=6395, updated December 2013, viewed 18 December 2013. 41 The one performance was on 5 July 1909. Dieblod was born Bernhard Dreifus in Switzerland and worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung; and Robert Breuer was a critic for the social democratic Vorwärts (Forward). Henry I. Schvey, Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), 35. 42 Encyclopedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 20: 722. 43 Edward Ross Dickinson, ‘“A Dark, Impenetrable Wall of Complete Incomprehension”: The Impossibility of Heterosexual Love in Imperial Germany’, Central European History 40 (2007): 495. See also Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture and Claude Cemuschi, ‘Pseudo-Science and Mythic Misogyny’; Oskar Kokoschka’s ‘Murderer, Hope of Women’, The Art Bulletin 81, no. 1 (March 1999): 126–48. 44 Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 17. See also Paul Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985), 17. 45 Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, 195–96. 46 Sherwin Simmons, ‘Ernst Kirchner’s Streetwalkers: Art, Luxury and Immorality in Berlin, 1913–1916’, Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March 2000): 117–48. 47 Ibid. 48 See chapter 1, page 5. 49 Simmons, ‘Ernst Kirchner’s Streetwalkers’, 117–18; Deborah Wye, Kirchner and the Berlin Street (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008); Norbert Wolf, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938): On the Edge of the Abyss of Time (London: Taschen Basic Art, 2003). 50 Lurie, ‘Femme Fatale’, 184. 51 For more on his images for the Song of Songs, see chapter 7. 52 Lurie, ‘Femme Fatale’, 184. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 194. 55 Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, June 1908, cited in Anne-Marie O’Conner, The Lady in Gold (New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 2013), 58. 56 When Klimt painted Judith, there were a few hints at the identity of the model. See Felix Salten’s review, ‘In His Judith’ which suggests she was a Viennese socialite. Susanna Partsch, Gustav Klimt: Painter of Women (Prestel: New York, 2012) cited in O’Conner, Lady in Gold, 52. Also, see Arthur Schnitzler’s play Komödie der Verführung (The Comedy of Seduction, 1924). Both paintings later became part of a restitution case waged by Adele’s niece, Maria Altmann, against the Austrian

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government who had acquired the works after they were stolen by the Nazis in 1938. In 2006, Ms Altmann won the case. The paintings were restored to her. 57 Rainer Metzger, Gustav Klimt: Drawings and Watercolours (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005) cited in O’Conner, The Lady in Gold, 61. 58 There does not seem to be consensus either way. If she was an Israelite, then a bribe to cut his hair makes sense, but if she was a treacherous Philistine woman, then this may also make sense. See Jewish Women’s Archive online encyclopaedia at https://jwa.org/ encyclopedia/article/delilah-bible, viewed 31 August 2017. 59 The Berlin secessionists had withdrawn from the Berlin Art Academy, and the Artists’ Society. Progressive artists throughout German-speaking Europe had already established similar independent exhibition groups in Munich (1892) and Vienna (1897). Bernd Küster and Max Liebermann, Max Liebermann: Ein Maler-Leben (Hamburg: Ellert & Richter, 1988), 134. 60 Quoted by art critic Fritz Servaes on 12 November1902. Küster and Liebermann, Max Liebermann, 134; Felix Krämer and Max Hollein eds., European Masters: Städel Museum 19th–20th Century (Melbourne: National Gallery International, 2010), 114. The words Philistines and Moabites used by Liebermann seem to be one and the same, suggesting a nineteenth-century reading of the term, meaning someone who opposed culture and the avantgarde. Seen in the culture wars of the 1820s and the writings of Goethe, Jonathan Swift, and Matthew Arnold. 61 Chana Schütz, ‘Max Liebermann as “Jewish” Painter: The Artist’s Reception in His Time’, in Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press/The Jewish Museum, New York, 2000), 146–63; Margaret Olin, ‘From Bezal’el to Max Liebermann: Jewish Art in Nineteenth-Century Art Historical Texts’, in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine Soussloff (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1999), 19–41. The image of Jesus was reworked by Liebermann for the 1884 Paris Exhibition. An original sketch shows Liebermann changed Jesus’s hair from short, unruly dark hair to straight and blonde. He also changed his more assertive argumentative stance. Irwin Lewis, Art for All? The Collision of Modern Art and the Public in Late-Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 49. 62 Cited in ibid., 46–54. Friedrich Pecht (1814–1903). 63 Ibid., 47. 64 In a letter to the art historian, curator, and educator Alfred Lichtwark (1852–1914). Schütz, ‘Max Liebermann as “Jewish” Painter’, 149. 65 On Liebermann’s early work in light of these differences, see Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 42–49. 66 See chapter 3. 67 On Ost und West and Buber’s ‘Address on Jewish Art’, see chapter 6. Liebermann, on the other hand, does not appear to have been friends with Lilien, although it was well known that Liebermann had been friendly with Lesser Ury, the other important cultural Zionist figure. When both Liebermann and Lesser Ury’s work was on show in London at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1906, only Liebermann was invited to attend. Chana C. Schütz, ‘Lesser Ury and the Jewish Renaissance’, Jewish Studies Quarterly 10, no. 4 (2004): 365.

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68 On the connection between the Orient, Jewish identity, and orientalism, see chapters 5 and 6. Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’; Donna K. Heizer, Jewish-German Identity in the Orientalist Literature of Else Lasker-Schüler, Friedrich Wolf, and Franz Werfel (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996). Heizer mentions three literary figures besides Lasker-Schüler who wrote on oriental themes: the playwright Friedrich Wolff (1888–1953), who wrote Mohammed (1917), Jacob Wasserman (1887–1934) the writer and critic, who wrote Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (My Life as a German and Jew, 1921), about the fraught relationship between being Jewish and German, and Franz Werfel (1890–1945), the Prague-born novelist and poet, who wrote a novel on oriental themes entitled The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933), where he discussed the monotheism of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaton and the Armenian massacre of 1915. 69 For a critical study of Lasker-Schüler as both a woman and a Jew in German society, see Sigrid Bauschinger, ed., Ich Bin Jude. Gott Sei Dank (Königstein/Ts: Athenäum, 1985). 70 Sigrid Bauschinger, Else Lasker-Schüler, Ihr Werk und Ihre Zeit (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1980). Ricarda Dick, Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Judischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010), 11. For a chronology of her life and works, see also Erika Klüsener and Friedrich Pfäfflin, Else Lasker-Schüler 1869–1945 (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schiller-Ges, 1994). On Lasker-Schüler’s reception in Germany after the Second World War, see Jakob Hessing, Die Heimkehr Einer Jüdischen Emigrantin. Else Lasker-Schüler’s Mythisierende Rezeption 1945–1971 (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1993). 71 Betty Falkenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler: A Life (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2003); Dick, ‘Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder’. 72 Astrid Schmetterling, ‘“I Am Jussuf of Egypt”: Orientalism in Else Lasker-Schüler’s Drawings’, Ars Judaica, The Bar Ilan Journal of Jewish Art 8 (2012): 81–98. Sonja Hedgepeth also wrote an essay in English but this concentrated on her ‘national’ vision as part of an expressionist fairy tale rather than an attempt to come to terms with her German Jewish identity. Ernst Schürer and Sonja Hedgepeth, eds., Else Lasker-Schüler: Ansichten Und Perspektiven, Views and Reviews (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 1999), 249–65. 73 Heizer, Jewish-German Identity. For the reception of Lasker-Schüler’s work before 1945, see Eric Klüsener and Friedrich Pfäfflin, ‘Else Lasker-Schüler’, Marbacher Magazin 71 (1995): A special issue of letters, texts, and pictures by or pertaining to Lasker-Schüler. 74 Mark H. Gelber, ‘Jewish, Erotic, Female: Else Lasker-Shüler in the Context of Cultural Zionism’, in Else Lasker-Schüler: Ansichten Und Perspektiven, Views and Reviews, ed. Ernst Schürer and Sonja Hedgepeth (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 1999), 27–43. 75 Often known by its ancient name as St Vitus’s Dance, and marked by involuntary, jerky movements, especially of the arms, legs, and face, as if the patient was dancing. The disorder may have been the result of an acute reaction to rheumatic fever. Now known as Sydenham’s Chorea. Jewish Women’s Archive: A Comprehensive Jewish Women’s Encyclopedia at http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lasker-schueler-else, updated 2 December 2013, viewed 20 December 2013. 76 According to Falkenberg, Paul may or may not have been Lasker’s child; he died from tuberculosis in 1927. Falkenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler: A Life, 48–59.

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77 Sigrid Bauschinger, ‘The Berlin Moderns – Else Lasker-Schüler and Café Culture’, In Emily Bilski, ed., Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918, 58–102. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 78 Die Neue Gemeinschaft was a group of Neo-Romantics, who ‘propagated radical social ideas, vegetarian lifestyles and liberation from social constraints’. They went on outings together and gave readings outdoors, like other back-to-nature movements. Bauschinger, ‘The Berlin Moderns – Elsa Lasker-Schüler and Café Culture’, 67. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 59–80. 81 Falkenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler: A Life, 75. 82 These ideas are discussed in more detail in chapters 5, 6, and 7. 83 Two of her poems, Das Lied des Gesalbten (The Song of the Anointed) and Sulamith appear in OW, Issue 6, June 1901, 457–58. Lilien’s illustration of the Chanukkahlichter (Hanukkah Lights) appears on pages 893–94 and Else Lasker-Schüler’s on pages 931–34. OW, Issue 12, December 1901. Another work by Lilien, a bookplate for the editor, Leo Winz, appears on page 955. 84 Samuel Lublinski Die Bilanz der Moderne (Berlin: Verlag Siegfried Cronbach, 1904), 108, 164, cited in Gelber, ‘Jewish, Erotic, Female: Else Lasker-Shüler in the Context of Cutural Zionism’, 32. 85 I am not the first to notice that both their work appeared in the journal. See Gelber, 29. Lasker-Schüler argued with Buber about the unification of the East and the West in the German Jewish imagination. She argued that the unification of East and West was impossible due to the bourgeois nature of German Jewry who would ‘prefer to listen to cretins and jargon’, than listen to her voice. Frederic V. Grunfeld, Prophets without Honour: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 110, cited in Heizer, Jewish-German Identity, 34. 86 On the influences of The Arabian Nights on German literature, see Wolfgang Köhler, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal Und ‘Tausendeine Nacht’: Untersuchungen Zur Rezeption Des Orients Im Epischen Und Essayistischen Werk. Mit Einem Einleitenden Überblick Über Den Einfluss Von ‘Tausendeine Nacht’ Auf Die Deutsche Literatur (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1972). 87 Heizer, Jewish-German Identity, 34–35. 88 Ibid., 36–38. 89 There are no published drawings of herself as Princess Tino until her book of poems titled Der Prinz von Theben was released in 1913. Both were reissued with minor changes. Die Nächte von Tino von Baghdads (1919) and Der Prinz von Theben: Ein Geschichtsbuch (1920). 90 Between 1907 and 1910. 91 Dick, ‘Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder’, 123. 92 In a letter to Max Brod in 1910, she mentions she will ‘speak in Syrian’ and ‘play the flute and beat the drums’. Margaret Kupper, ed., Briefe von else Lasker-Schüler (Letters from Else Lasker-Schüler) cited in Falkenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler: A Life, 73. 93 According to Teo Otto in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 February 1969, reprinted as ‘Ein Bergische Kräther Berichten’, in Else Lasker–Schüler. Ein Buch zum 100 Geburstag, ed. Michael Schmid, cited in Heizer, Jewish-German Identity, 45. 94 The image appeared just prior to the publication of Styx. Dick, ‘Else Lasker-Schüler: Die Bilder’, 119.

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95 These figures were probably from the Armana period of Akhenaton or Amenophis IV. Ibid., 130. 96 Ibid., 200. 97 This illustration also appears in later illustrations for her poems Mein Herz (My Heart). 98 Bauschinger, ‘The Berlin Moderns – Else Lasker-Schüler and Café Culture’, 77. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. See also Heizer’s assessment in Heizer, Jewish-German Identity, 40. 101 Oscar Kokoschka, My Life, trans. David Britt (New York: Macmillan, 1974), cited in Falkenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler: A Life, 68. 102 Heizer, Jewish-German Identity, 33. 103 Oscar Kokoschka, ‘Essays’, in Kritische Ausgabe, Prosa 1903–1920 (Critical edition, Prose 1903–1920, ed. Norbert Oellers, Heinz Rölleke and Itta Shedlezky ([Frankfurt: Jüdischer Verlag/ Suhrkamp, 1996–2000], 147), cited in Falkenberg, Else LaskerSchüler: A Life, 68. 104 Bauschinger, ‘The Berlin Moderns – Elsa Lasker-Schüler and Café Culture’, 65. 105 Roberts, Disruptive Acts; Antje Lindenemeyer, ‘“I Am Prince Jussuf ”: Else LaskerSchüler’s Autobiographical Performance’, Biography 24, no. 1 (2001): 25–29; Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270–82. 106 Ibid., 278. 107 Misme wrote for La Fronde (The Sling), a women’s daily newspaper published in Paris between 1897 and 1905. See Roberts’s discussion of Misme’s piece in La Fronde in Roberts, Disruptive Acts, 19–20. 108 Ibid. See also Lindenmeyer, ‘“I Am Prince Jussuf ”’, 25–29. 109 This story was published later as the novel Der Malik: Eine Kaisergeschicte (The Malik: An Emperor’s Story, 1919). See Inca Rumold, ‘Der Malik: Else LaskerSchüler’s Anti-War Novel’, Women in German Year Book 14 (1998): 143–61. 110 Lindenemeyer, ‘“I Am Prince Jussuf ”’, 28. 111 For instance, Princess Tino reports on violent sexual scenes in the harem in Die Nächte von Tino von Baghdad. 112 Calvin N. Jones, The Literary Reputation of Else Lasker-Schüler: Criticism, 1901–1993 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1994), 16. 113 Randi Quanbeck, ‘The Prophetic Voice of Else Lasker-Schüler: Biblical Imagery in the Hebrew Ballads’, in Else Lasker-Schüler: Ansichten Und Perspektiven, Views and Reviews, ed. Ernst Schürer and Sonja Hedgepeth (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 1999), 119. 114 Cristanne Miller, ‘Reading the Politics of Else Lasker-Schüler’s 1914 Hebrew Ballads’, Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 141. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., 135. 117 See, for example, Heizer, Jewish-German Identity.

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Biblical Illustrations, Biblical Heroines, and the Search for Meaning

The Bible is the book through which the world of the West, even in times of the most melancholy isolation, remains persistently tied to the Orient … [and] reawakens in the Aryans of the West, who have deserted their homeland, that longing for the Orient. ―Hermann Brunnhofer, ‘Die Heiligen Bücher des Orients’ Zionist discourse concerning a ‘return to the mother land’ suggests a double relation to that land, where the East is simultaneously the place of Judaic origins and the locus for implementing the West … [It is] associated on the one hand with backwardness and underdevelopment [and] … on the other with oasis and solacea return to geographical origins and reunification with the biblical past. ―Ella Shohat, ‘Black, Jew, Arab: Postscript to “the Wretched of the Earth”’ Theodor Herzl’s desire to bring together the Western tradition of the Enlightenment and the ancient history of the Jewish people in the Near East echoed the engagement with the Orient by many Central European Jewish biblical scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Numerous non-Jewish German scholars such as Hermann Brunnhofer (1841–1916) believed that the ‘melancholy longing for the Orient’ was resolutely tied to the books of the Bible.1 This chapter considers important variations between the conceptions of the East and the West in the German Christian and German Jewish understanding of the Bible, alongside the differences in the way these two groups of scholars engaged with the Orient and the Holy Land. These variations are crucial to a proper understanding of Lilien’s imagery and social identity. As Ella Shohat articulates, early German Jewish Zionists such as Lilien believed that the ‘return to the motherland … [was a return to] geographical origins and a reunification with the biblical past’.2 Following up on his commercial success with Juda, Lilien embarked on what became known as his ‘biblical project’. It resulted in a three-volume, illustrated Christian and Jewish edition of the German Bible, Die Bücher der Bibel (The Books of the Bible).3 Constructed over four years, the work wove together Jugendstil and Orientalism into a new and innovative Jewish style that merged Jewish nationalism with modern German and Jewish culture.

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Although the outbreak of the First World War prevented Lilien from finishing the project, the three volumes completed (out of a projected ten) were popular throughout the German-speaking world.4 The wide-ranging reception of Lilien’s illustrations for Die Bücher der Bibel suggested that Lilien’s illustrations were popular among Jews and non-Jews alike. His audience included religious Christians, secular Zionists, German and European cultural modernists, and anyone who loved richly decorated illustrations to the stories of the Bible.5 The groundbreaking project was a collaborative effort between a German Jewish artist and a Protestant pastor, Ferdinand Rahlwes. The possibility of an ecumenical relationship between someone who represented the institution of the Christian church and a Galician-born German Jew was unusual given German Jewry’s precarious position at the time, poised between acculturation and the spectre of antisemitism, yet still excluded from important areas in German public life such as the judiciary, the military, and the state bureaucracy.6 Their collaboration was a metaphor for all that was possible within a German state that promised equal (male) citizenship, regardless of religion or race.7 This was the first time in modern Jewish and European art history that the Hebrew Bible had been fully illustrated by one of its very own people, a Jewish artist.8 Lilien’s biblical artworks follow the path of his more famous Christian contemporaries in England and France, in particular Gustave Doré (1832–1883) and James Jacques Tissot (1836–1902). A comparison of the work of these three artists reveals Lilien’s novel treatment of the biblical heroine. These heroines gaze defiantly at some distant point outside of the picture frame and evoke the image of the proud, heroic ‘Woman of Valour’ encountered in biblical literature.9 Lilien appears to have derived his concept of the new Jewish biblical woman from the reference in the Book of Proverbs, portraying her as energetic, righteous, and capable: the ideal Jewish woman.10 In these illustrations, the new modern woman appears less femme fatale, less sensual being than in the images examined in the previous chapter, yet she remains feminine. Lilien’s depictions of biblical men, and in particular biblical women, signalled a more positive and legitimate modern Jewish search for roots or Heimat that incorporated what it meant to be both Asiatic and Westerner, occidental and oriental, at the fin de siècle.

Zionism, orientalism, and the Jews To understand Lilien’s biblical images, it is crucial to consider the intellectual, political, and aesthetic ramifications of Western Europe’s interest in the Orient at the fin de siècle. Edward Said argued, ‘Orientalism, particularly in visual culture, was a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the East’.11 Said maintained that this understanding of the Orient was based on a hegemonic system of knowledge under the colonial rubric of imperialism, where the West always held the superior position.12 Said did not discuss German orientalism because he did not count Germany among those who had engaged in colonial projects.13 However, oriental scholarship and literature in Germany was one of the most sophisticated in Europe during the

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eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, the interest in orientalism among German scholars continued until the fin de siècle and beyond, as the study of the origins of Christianity, of Jesus, and of the Muslim ‘other’ was of great concern to both German Christian and German Jewish oriental scholars.14 The issues of originality and ‘authenticity’ in the biblical text became central to political, theological, intellectual, and national interests in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Germany. They featured in the ongoing debates about the emancipation of the Jews in Germany, the Jewish question, and German Jewish identity.15 Just as German Christian oriental scholars began to imagine how an ancient, utopian, Christian world might parallel a vision of a new, modern, cultured, and Christian Europe, European artists also attempted to re-draw, re-paint, and re-invent the people and places of the ancient Near East. Often, they were intent on re-creating the biblical world, so that the events that happened there were no longer associated with the classical world as imagined in the Renaissance, or by the neoclassical painters of the conservative art academies in Britain or France. They envisaged that the events of the Bible took place in the more contemporary world of the Middle East, and attempted to position their art within the modernist movement of Realism. Artists such as Doré and Tissot, like their scholarly European orientalist counterparts in the academy, sought to re-imagine what it meant to be heirs to a culture that was centred around the ancient Near East before the civilisations of Greece and Rome took precedence. This new, positive image of the Orient that gained momentum at the turn of the twentieth century was associated with mysticism and anti-rationalism embodied in Eastern religions. It was also associated, particularly in Vienna and Berlin, with an enormous literary and artistic activity that was part of the youthful rebellion against political conservatism, bourgeois stagnation, and the dehumanisation of the sacred.16 Many Jewish artists such as Lilien also sought to re-evaluate the image of the Jew as oriental. Lilien was part of an emergent group of Jewish writers, poets, and artists (including Else Lasker-Schüler, Friedrich Wolff, Franz Werfel, Jacob Wasserman, and Lionel Feuchtwanger), whose response to the problems of Jewish otherness was to view German orientalism as an inspiration that would help explain their transnational identities.17 Austro-Hungarian by state, Jewish by birth, and German by culture, Lilien valued the East or Orient, as did his artistic colleagues and German Jewish scholars such as Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and Ignaz Goldziher. The East gave birth to Judaism as well as to Christianity. Unlike their contemporary position in Christian Europe, Islam also deserved study because as Eastern, or Mizrahi Jews living in Palestine, Yemen or Persia, they had once been a respected part of the Muslim world.18 This interest in the East allowed many Western Jews to value both the mystical and spiritual heritage of both their Eastern European and Mizrahi brethren, together with the rational tradition of European Bildung. German Jewish artists and oriental scholars were interested in the East, because they were fuelled by a search for ‘roots, for authenticity and oriental role models’.19 Lilien’s interest in the Orient, inspired by similar thinking, linked his artistic orientalist sensibilities to his knowledge and appreciation of secular Jewish nationalism.

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Lilien’s biblical project In one of Lilien’s letters to Helene Magnus written in 1906 during his first trip to Palestine, he mentioned that he had already taken 500 photographic plates that would be useful when beginning his biblical project upon his return.20 Lilien had already signed a contract the year before to publish a ten-volume, illustrated edition of the Bible, a project that would dominate his career for the next seven years.21 The first volume was published in 1908, and incorporated the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses and the Book of Joshua. This was followed one year later by Volume ‘Six’, containing the Psalms, Lamentations, and The Song of Songs. Finally, Volume ‘Seven’, containing Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Ruth, Jonah, Esther, and Daniel, went to press in 1912.22 As with all Lilien’s publications, this was a collaboration between illustrator and writer, in this case the editor and Lutheran pastor Ferdinand Rahlwes. It is not clear why Lilien and Rahlwes chose to work together. Rahlwes was neither a Jewish scholar nor a rabbi. It could have been a case of convenience, as both Rahlwes (the local pastor at St Ulrici) and the publisher (Westermann Verlag) were located in Braunschweig where Lilien’s fiancée Helene had grown up, and where her parents, Otto and Sophie Magnus, still lived.23 Even though Lilien kept a studio in Berlin, he and Helene spent a great deal of time at her parents’ home at Wolfenbütteler Straße 3, especially once their two children were born. Lilien often travelled the 200 kilometres from Berlin, though it was not until 1920 that Lilien, Helene, and the children lived permanently in Braunschweig.24 Very little is known about either Rahlwes or the reasons behind the decision to publish a German Christian translation of the Hebrew text. We do know that Rahlwes was not the original author of the text used in the project. The manuscript was the work of the liberal Lutheran theologian Edouard Reuss (1803–1891), whose German translations of the Bible divided the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) into six volumes. This work formed the basis of Rahlwes and Lilien’s six-volume edited version.25 The decision may well have been pragmatic on all sides; in a bid to maximise purchases, Lilien most likely made a deal with the pastor and his publisher to create a popular, widely circulated, German Christian edition of the Bible, with one section that covered the Hebrew Bible. Westermann and Rahlwes already had Reuss’s recently published German version of the Old Testament on hand in Braunschweig.26 It is not entirely clear whether the project was the initiative of Rahlwes or Lilien, but illustrators were usually hired by the editor/publisher.27 This was not the first time Lilien had collaborated with a German Christian on a biblically themed project. As we have seen, Lilien’s Juda illustrations, which circulated widely among both Jewish and non-Jewish circles, were the product of an intellectual collaboration with the aristocrat, Baron von Münchhausen. As if to underscore the unusual nature of this collaboration, as well as the increasingly hostile climate towards Jews in Germany, in 1933 von Münchhausen became a Nazi sympathiser and distanced himself from both the creation of his Hebrew ballads and his partnership with a Jewish artist.28 The collaboration between Lilien and Rahlwes across national, religious, and class boundaries was unexpected. What was equally unexpected was the fact that until this brief, seminal moment in the flowering

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of German cultural Zionism, Hebrew translations of the Bible with illustrations were still reasonably rare. Most Jewish and Christian European artists, art historians, theologians, and intellectuals still believed that the second commandment prohibited Jews from visually representing anything that is ‘in the heavens above, on the earth beneath, or in the waters beneath the earth’.29 Jewish artists before Lilien had illustrated important narratives from the Hebrew Bible. Yet, there was still no modern German Hebrew Bible with illustrations by a modern Jewish artist to cater to the growing assimilated middle-class Jewish audience for whom German was the mother tongue and Hebrew a little-used language. Lilien’s biblical project was, therefore, both innovative and unique.30

The modern history of Jewish biblical illustration By the late nineteenth century, German Hebrew translations of the Hebrew Bible had existed for over a century. The best known of these, Moses Mendelssohn’s Bi’ur edition (1780–1783), was the first attempt to translate the Bible from Hebrew into German; it was written in Hebrew characters, with a Hebrew commentary in High German using German characters.31 Between the Bi’ur and Lilien’s edition at least another halfdozen translations from Hebrew into German were published, but only three included illustrations of the people and landscapes of the Holy Land.32 The first of these was the Pracht Bibel, published posthumously by the Jewish orientalist Julius Fürst (1805–1873) in 1874, the year Lilien was born. Fürst was a distinguished scholar of Semitic languages and literature at the University of Leipzig and the chief editor of the periodical Der Orient.33 His two-volume Pracht Bible had parallel German and Hebrew texts in two columns, and 600 black-and-white engravings, a large number of images even by the generous standards of this period.34 The target audience was both acculturated and religious Jews who still read Hebrew but preferred German. A few illustrations depicted richly detailed representations of biblical events and figures; a surprisingly Semitic likeness of Rebeka (Rebecca) was included. Yet, none of the illustrations were by Jewish artists, even though the publication itself was proclaimed as an important Jewish reference source (Figs. 5.1a and 5.1b).35 The second publication was the Philippson Bible by the reformist Rabbi Ludwig Philippson (1811–1889). The Philippson Bible was originally published in 1839 in a single volume with woodcuts and additional commentary by Philippson.36 Woodcuts were added to make the text more understandable for the general reader and there were approximately 100,000 copies sold.37 Another 1874 edition contained images by the French artist Gustave Doré and was known as Die Heilige Schrift des Israelit (The Holy Scriptures of the Israelites).38 The print run for the Heilige Schrift was also around 100,000.39 Certainly, Philippson’s idea was to make his Bible available to everyone at a very low cost, though illustrated editions would have been much more expensive than editions without the 154 plates.40 The large print run for the Philippson Bible does show that the book was widely read and extremely popular at the time – so much so that a specific edition with Doré’s images was published. Most importantly, the 1874

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Figure 5.1a  Title Page, Pracht Bibel, 1894 edition, Karlo Vegelahn, Bibel Archive, 12 March 2014. Available at: http://www.bibelarchiv-vegelahn.de/bibel/Fuerst_Julius-Leipzig-000_ small.jpg, accessed 16 June 2014.

Figure 5.1b  Rebekah wird als Braut geschmückt (Rebecca as the adorned bride) from the Pracht Bibel, c. 1874. Courtesy of Eric Chaim Kline.

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illustrated edition of the Philippson Bible became known as the Doré Bible and was also printed in other Protestant and Catholic editions.41 Doré’s images in Philippson’s translation brought abstract words to life in a way never before imagined for many traditional and acculturated German Jews during the mid-nineteenth century. They offered the reader ‘gripping and true-to-life depictions of biblical figures and stories, unencumbered by complex symbolism’, which ‘anchored the text in Egyptian and romantic visions’.42 As proof of the penetration of this edition into Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish bourgeois circles, Freud’s father reportedly used the 1859 illustrated edition to educate ‘the young Sigmund’.43 By the turn of the twentieth century, there was still no German Hebrew Bible with illustrations by a Jewish artist that might have given the largely assimilated, middleclass Jewish audience positive Jewish role models of heroes and heroines grounded in Jewish Scripture. This would have troubled the cultural Zionists who wished to champion modern Jewish art and culture and desired positive images of themselves as modern, acculturated German Jews. It would also surely have concerned German Jewish historians and orientalists such as Abraham Geiger and Ignaz Goldziher. They saw modern Jews as the original heirs to the ancient Christian narrative that was the source of such interest and veneration by their German Christian neighbours, particularly those German Christian oriental scholars who were often intent on denying the importance of Judaism for Christian scholarship.44 In 1904, another illustrated Hebrew Bible was published with illustrations by the Christian French-English artist James Tissot. His images displayed striking and detailed observations of original biblical sites in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.45 Published in the United States two years after the artist died and titled The Old Testament (1904), it was based on his earlier Life of Christ project (1886–1894).46 Tissot’s images of biblical scenes, created only two years before Lilien left for his first trip to Palestine and four years before his first illustrations in Die Bücher der Bibel were published, may well have been the final impetus for Lilien’s ten-volume biblical project. Lilien would have been acutely aware by 1904 that while Doré and Tissot had produced images of biblical scenes, no Jewish Bible existed that was illustrated by a Jewish artist. Very few European Jewish artists had illustrated stories from the Bible prior to the modern era (mainly due to the supposed prohibition against making images), and no one had tried to create an entire Hebrew Bible with illustrations of all the major Jewish figures. Since 1860, however, modern Jewish artists such as the PreRaphaelite Simeon Solomon in England, the impressionist painters Max Liebermann and Lesser Ury in Germany, Josef Israels in Holland, and Maurycy Gottlieb in Galicia began creating paintings and drawings of individual biblical scenes. They attempted to imbue well-known scenes with a more genuine Jewish, ethnic, and religious meaning through the use of appropriate and authentic costumes and realistic scenery researched from recent archaeological excavations or photographs.47 Solomon’s 1860 rendition of the Mother of Moses or Gottlieb’s Christ Preaching at Capernaum (1878– 1879) suggests how dark-haired, Jewish, ‘ethnic’ types were an important element

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Figure 5.2  Simeon Solomon, The Mother of Moses, 1860, oil on canvas, 59.7 × 48.3 cm. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington. Bequest of Robert Louis Isaacson, 1999. Object No. 19999–1. http://emuseum.delart.org:8080/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/items$0040:8619.

of Jewish artists’ creation of genuine biblical depictions of Jewish women and men (Figs. 5.2 and 5.3). Details such as simple woven garments and reed baskets, in the case of Solomon’s painting, and the prayer shawl that forms a type of ancient Near Eastern oriental costume worn by Jesus, were precursors to Lilien’s attempts to depict authenticated ancient Jewish costumes. At the fin de siècle, illustrations of Old Testament scenes and figures were also becoming more accessible as engravings and photographs of art and artefacts from antiquity and the Byzantine, medieval, and Renaissance periods appeared in magazines and illustrated journals.48 Despite this rich tradition of biblical imagery, there were few illustrated editions of the Christian Bible in the modern European era apart from Doré’s La Saint Bible of 1865 and its English translation in 1866, and Tissot’s illustrated editions of The Life of Christ (1894) and The Old Testament (1904). There do not appear to be any other Christian artists who illustrated a printed edition of the Old and New Testament. Other French artists such as Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Émile Jean-Horace

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Figure 5.3  Maurycy Gottlieb, Christ Preaching at Capernaum, oil on canvas, 110 × 80 cm. National Museum of Warsaw, Warsaw. Collection no. MP 431.

Vernet (1789–1863) chronicled important individual events or scenes from the Holy Land. Later, contemporaries of Tissot such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh also produced biblical images, but only Marc Chagall and Georges Rouault in the first third of the twentieth century came close to Tissot in the quantity of their biblically based output.49

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The situation in France was replicated in both England and Germany. The English poet and printmaker William Blake (1757–1827) created watercolours and drawings; David Roberts (1796–1864) produced lithographs of the Holy Land and Egypt in the 1840s from his long tours in the region, yet neither created a book of biblical art. Only the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, who wanted to distance themselves from the treatment of biblical scenes in the Renaissance and Baroque period, helped foster an interest in the genuine dress of biblical figures and the true-to-life scenery of the Holy Land. The Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt (1927–1910), for instance, travelled to the Middle East in 1853, from 1869 to 1873, and from 1874 to 1887.50 His detailed painting of religious Jews surrounding Jesus in the Temple remains an extremely positive representation of ancient Jews (Fig. 5.4).51 Like their French counterparts, none of these artists focused exclusively on biblical book illustration. In Germany, although there was a thriving graphic arts industry and strong tradition of book art that stretched back to medieval wood block prints, there were few New Testament books published containing biblical illustrations. Only one of these, by the Jugendstil book artist Friedrich Wilhelm Kleukens (1878–1956), stands out as a possible comparison to Tissot and Doré’s imagery. Kleukens’s most wellknown work is his 1908 Book of Esther, which has richly decorated borders and intricate designs and is reminiscent of Lilien’s early work for Juda. The erotically charged Persian princess, her cloak open to reveal a detailed array of peacock eyes and bared breasts, appears to mimic the sexual intensity of Mucha’s and Beardsley’s femmes fatales (Fig. 5.5).

Figure 5.4  William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1854–55, oil on canvas, 141 × 85.7 cm. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham. Public domain.

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Figure 5.5  Friedrich Williams Kleukens, Esther. In The Book of Esther, c. 1908. Insel- Verlag, Leipzig. XXIX S: 2 ganzseitige Holzschnitte mit Golddruck. Gedruckt als erstes Buch der Ernst Ludwig Presse, Darmstadt. Courtesy of Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin.

Gustave Doré’s biblical illustrations and Christian orientalism Doré’s religious artworks, first published in French as La Saint Bible (The Holy Bible) in 1865, proved popular with both Christian and Jewish audiences.52 Within a year, the English edition was available, coinciding with an exhibition of Doré’s work in London.53 The response to his illustrations was overwhelmingly positive.54 Even a cursory glance at some of the 240 illustrations reveals the reason for Doré’s popularity. His images captured the unfolding of dramatic moments in the biblical narrative using theatrical lighting as well as detailed costumes and landscapes of the ‘real world’ of the Orient. Doré had never actually travelled to the Holy Land himself. Images of fragments of ancient Egyptian columns or Assyrian reliefs had been accessible to the public in books and museums since the Napoleonic campaigns. Doré’s images helped renew an interest in the Near East as the major setting for the story of the ‘real’ Jesus and Christianity

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that had already been on the increase in the West from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.55 Doré’s illustrations, particularly of the Old Testament, mesmerised the public. The dramatic lighting clearly captivated Lilien who adapted Doré’s scenes to his own graphic style.56 Compare Lilien’s handling of the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (Fig. 2.16), where the sword-wielding archangel Gabriel is enveloped in a halo of white light while Adam and Eve recoil in the darkness, to Doré’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (Fig. 5.6). In Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law (Fig. 2.5), Lilien translates Doré’s thunderbolt of light piercing the illuminated patch of clouds behind Moses into steep diagonal lines that cut behind his raised arms, highlighting Moses’s theatrical gesture before hurling the tablets (Fig. 5.7).

Figure 5.6  Gustave Doré, Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, Sainte Bible, 1865, n.p.

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Figure 5.7  Gustave Doré, Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law, Sainte Bible, 1865, n.p.

Doré’s recasting of the biblical narrative in the contemporary Levant was not entirely novel. Vernet in France and Roberts in England had already envisioned biblical scenes peopled with Levantine Jews and Arabs drawn from their trips to Palestine (Vernet in 1833 and 1839, and David Roberts between 1839 and 1842).57 But Doré’s ‘contemporary’ Realism offered a populist, easily affordable (in increments of half a crown for every sixty-four parts), and complete illustrated Bible, which had never before been achieved. His illustrations envisaged the Levant as peopled with Jews and Arabs in ‘authenticated’ oriental costumes. Even twenty-seven years later, when the Chicago Daily Tribune reported on the arrival of Doré’s work at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, his biblical images were believed to accurately describe ‘the passion and triumph of the savior and the progress of Christianity’.58

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In reality, Doré had created a new oriental fantasy that could have come straight out of the stories of the Arabian Nights.59 His work used the Bedouin, the epitome of the desert Arab, as a stand-in for the biblical Jew, because the Bedouin had become the mid-nineteenth-century living example of the fossilised Jewish Semite.60 Doré assumed that the post-biblical Jew was more ‘corrupted’ by modernity than the Bedouin, an ancient desert-dwelling, nomadic group of Arabs. Thus, nearly every Jew in Doré’s black and white illustrations is dressed in Arab costume and headdress.61 By conflating the Arab with the Jew (since both were apparently Semitic in race), Kalmar argues, Doré created a romantic fantasy world of ancient Jews and Judaism where the Old Testament oriental Jew was replaced with a new version that further displaced the Jew from the Western Christian imagination. In turn, Doré’s imagery was heavily influenced by the ideas of the French Christian orientalist scholar Ernest Renan (1823–1892).62 Renan wrote his Life of Jesus in 1863, only a few years before Doré’s populist images appeared. His book caused an uproar because it described Jesus realistically, that is, in his Jewish surroundings, just as Doré did a few years later.63 Renan’s amalgamation of the world of the contemporary Middle East with the ancient Near East influenced Doré, who also attempted to situate Jesus in a setting that was more realistic than the marble porticos imagined by artists since the Italian Renaissance. Renan was a philologist, historian, and writer, a moderate conservative and a nineteenth-century man of science who flirted with the new concept of race since he saw it as a cornerstone of ‘civilisation’.64 Importantly, Renan’s antisemitism should not be confused with the rabid, racial antisemitism of Nazi Germany; nevertheless, his interest in the pseudo-science of race and ethnological studies led him to declare that the Jew was inferior to the Aryan race.65 According to Renan, the ‘progress of the human mind toward truth, science, and philosophy, was foreign to them [the Jews]’.66 For Renan, as for so many other Christian oriental scholars of this period, Christianity was the only true religion and the only theological system capable of objective and disinterested scholarship, to say nothing of moral virtue. Judaism, on the other hand, was worthy of study only for what it could illuminate about Christianity.67 Doré’s portrayal of the Jewish Jesus is a seamless example of this idea in visual terms (Fig. 5.8). The only Jewish person who appears without his Arab/Semitic head covering is Jesus, who, with his blonde hair, beard, and Roman toga, is pictured in the background framed by the classical door lintel and bathed in a halo of soft light. By contrast, the Jewish Pharisee appears in the darkened foreground in his kaffiyeh and Jewish prayer shawl. Furthermore, Jesus is portrayed in the metaphoric light of moral Truth while the Pharisee – already more despised in Christian theology than the Sadducees because of their reliance on Jewish law – is depicted surrounded by the darkness of moral ineptitude or Untruth. Inevitably, Christian orientalists such as Renan focused on the Jews of the Old Testament and not the Jews of the Greco-Roman, medieval, or modern worlds. Their specific view of the Orient combined the world of the ancient Christian Bible with the nineteenth-century world of the Levant in a narrative supported by the theological superiority of Christianity. Christian orientalists believed that the

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Figure 5.8  Gustave Doré, The Pharisee and the Publican, Sainte Bible, 1865, n.p.

covenantal relationship between Judaism and God was superseded by that of Jesus and Christianity: the ‘old’ superseded by the ‘new’. On a theological level, Christian orientalism insisted that Christianity’s mission was to convert the Jews, and it used the methodology of science, or positivism, to try to prove its theological superiority. As Susannah Heschel explains, for nineteenth-century Christian scholars, modern Judaism functioned indirectly as the ‘abject of the Christian West’.68 By the end of the nineteenth century, Christian orientalism, assisted by Renan and antisemitic German orientalists such as Friedrich Delitzsch (1850–1922), transformed the debate from an argument about the superiority of theology to an argument about race: Aryan versus Semite.69 Doré’s biblical images of Jesus were examples of Renan’s Christian orientalism at work in visual culture. In the wake of Renan’s thinking, Doré constructed a strikingly new image of Jesus as a white,

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bareheaded, blonde-haired Westerner. In this iconography of Jesus, he has left behind the confines of the Old Testament, the outdated locus of Truth, and the outworn location of the Orient. The biblical Jew is no longer compatible with the tradition of the enlightenment and civilisation. Instead, he mirrors the Arab Bedouin (wearing their headdress, the symbol of an outmoded, simple, even barbaric tribal costume), who is part of a backward-looking, orientalist desert culture. This image of the oriental Arab other, mirrored in the works of British, French, and even Australian painters such as Emile Glockner, has been discussed by Said and others.70 With Doré, however, these negative and positive tropes of the oriental Arab as romantic, exotic, and sensual, as well as dangerous and uncultured, were now also applied to the biblical Jew.71 No wonder that Lilien was so intent on showing that the biblical story of the Jews was far from barbaric. The German orientalist Delitzsch went further and denied the Jewish authorship of Western ideas such as monotheism and the laws or codes of European (and Christian) morality. An Assyriologist and son of a Lutheran minister, his controversial and antisemitic book Babel und Bibel (1902) argued that the culture of Babylon and the code of Hammurabi had greatly influenced the Hebrew Bible. However, according to his research, the Hebrew Bible turned the civilising rhetoric of Hammurabi into a primitive, chauvinistic belief that was, in many aspects, immoral. Buber, Lilien’s mentor, strongly argued against these ideas by stating that Judaism and monotheism played a very strong role in the history of religions and religious ideas, and was not immoral.72 It may well have been Delitzsch’s antisemitic diatribes and Doré’s images depicting the Eastern Jew as a barbaric, uncultured Arab that prompted Lilien to create a very different visual interpretation of biblical Jews and ancient Judaism that was based not on Christian scholarship, but on the new rhetoric of Jewish nationalism. Martin Buber, Lilien’s friend and mentor, had already articulated a response to Delitzsch’s chauvinistic denunciations.73 Lilien’s reaction was stylistic. He seemed bent on capturing the drama and romanticism of Doré’s biblical scenes while harbouring a political and educational intent quite different from Doré’s religious narrative. As a secular Zionist, Lilien intended his biblical heroes and heroines of religious Judaism to give non-Jewish German-speaking men and women positive examples of the early, courageous character and corporeal strength of the ancient Jewish people. They were also a way to refute antisemitic charges of Judaism’s barbaric beginnings and dearth of morality. At the same time, his illustrations for a German Bible provided strong and heroic role models for a modern, urban, acculturated Germanspeaking Jewry who no longer read or understood the text in its original Hebrew, yet who still yearned for a connection to their Jewishness.74 As early as 1901, Buber noted (in an article for Ost und West, and reiterated in his inaugural address to the Fifth Zionist Congress days later), the Jüdisch renaissance of art occurring at the time, exemplified by Lilien’s output, demonstrated that Germany’s Jews were as secular, as modern, as creative, and as cultured as their Christian German brethren. As Buber had observed, the hope of this modern Jewish regeneration rested on Lilien’s shoulders.75

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Tissot’s attempts to paint a more authentic oriental Another French artist of biblical illustrations, James Tissot created religious images for the Old and New Testaments that were the exact opposite of Doré’s more heavily fictionalised world of the Middle East. Tissot’s images have endured in the popular imagination because filmmakers such as D.W. Griffith (Intolerance, 1916), Steven Spielberg (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981), and Mel Gibson (Passion of the Christ, 2004) have used his detailed observations of the biblical settings and costumes of the Holy Land as an important source of their iconography.76 Tissot’s research was based on the most contemporary readings available to a latenineteenth-century orientalist and was almost certainly influenced by the French artist Vernet and his biblical images (Fig. 5.9).77 Vernet was one of the first French artists to illustrate the Bible, and his trip to the Middle East (Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine) in 1833 chronicled the manners and customs of the Arabs as if their physiognomy mirrored that of the ancient Hebrews.78 With the help of his nephew, the photographer Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, Vernet took the very first photographs of the Holy Land in daguerreotype on his 1839 trip, the same year photography was introduced to the European public.79 Tissot not only travelled to the Middle East to visit biblical sites three times (in 1886, 1887, and 1889), but also consulted rabbis on the question of priestly robes and Jewish ritual, sketched artefacts and fabrics in Cairo, and photographed the necropolis of Petra and the tombs in the valley of Jehoshapat.80 He also read the Talmud, the Jewish history of Josephus Flavius, and the Apocrypha, as well as the Old and New Testaments.81 Tissot’s religious illustrations, the result of a conversion to Catholicism at the age of fortyeight, culminated in an illustrated account of the life of Christ, entitled The Life of Christ.82 In October 1886, at the age of fifty, Tissot departed for Egypt and Palestine, returning to Paris in March of the next year to exhibit this new series of artworks.83 He exhibited his initial research drawings at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 and a further 270 drawings from the series at the Salon du Champs de Mars in Paris in 1894, which later travelled to London and the United States.84 The New York Times hailed these illustrations as a seminal religious tour de force of the Middle East, as viewers and artists alike were overwhelmed by them.85 The reception of Tissot’s Christian imagery suggests that contemporary European audiences had an appetite for biblical images of the Middle East that was similar to their growing interest in the colonial material remains of the past accumulating in their national museums. The series was eventually published as two volumes between 1897 and 1898 and included reproductions of 365 gouache and watercolour drawings.86 Perhaps because of the attention gained by his Life of Christ series, in 1896, at the age of sixty, Tissot returned to Palestine to begin a series of similar watercolours and drawings for an Old Testament edition, which was finally published in 1904, two years after his death.87 About 100 of Tissot’s Old Testament illustrations were exhibited in London, the same year (Fig. 5.10).88 The art critic Bernard Berenson asserted that Tissot’s work helped to ‘uproot from the public mind the ideas of biblical illustrations introduced and stereotyped by Raphael and his followers (of the Italian Renaissance)’.89 Berenson was referring to the importance Tissot placed on the historical accuracy of his Old Testament images, particularly in their depiction of the geography, architecture

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Figure 5.9  Horace Vernet, Judah and Tamar, 1840, oil on canvas, 129 × 97.5 cm. The Wallace Collection, London.

and clothing of the Levant. For example, in the scene The Plague of Locusts, both the grey-haired Moses and his brother, the High Priest Aaron, are portrayed in typical ancient Israelite attire (Fig. 5.11). Moses holds his rod and Aaron covers his head with his tallit (prayer shawl), an ancient gesture that must have been known to Tissot from his study of Jewish history (as it was to other contemporary artists, such as William Holman Hunt [Fig.5.4]). Moses gestures with his rod towards the heavens, and in the distance, stand the three pyramids of Giza. Below the brothers’ heavenward gesticulations appears a reconstruction of Egyptian urban housing, gleaned from Tissot’s experience of contemporary life in the Middle East as well as his study of the monuments and history of ancient Egyptian cities.90 Tissot’s popular style conjured up a fresh image of the ancient biblical world. His Victorian eye for detail encompassed and combined early-nineteenth-century

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Figure 5.10  J. James Tissot, Adam and Eve Driven from Paradise, c. 1896–1902. Collection of The Jewish Museum, New York.

Figure 5.11  J. James Tissot, The Plague of Locusts (Exodus 10:13), c. 1896–1902. Collection of the Jewish Museum, New York.

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historical realism and the more fashionable styles of the second half of the nineteenth century, such as naturalism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Japonisme, and Impressionism.91 Tissot’s images were popular precisely because they continued to uproot the Western European obsession with the East as a classical Greek or Roman stage set.92 They built upon Doré’s reconstructions some forty years earlier but established more precise details regarding costume, geography, and architecture in the biblical world. Tissot’s imagery continued to portray biblical Jews in the tradition of Chateaubriand and later Vernet and Doré as if they were latter-day Arab Bedouins. The conflation of Arabs and Jews was applauded by journalists and art critics who could not see any difference between them. As The Times critic commented, Tissot’s illustrations were based on present-day Syrian and Palestinian daily life, which was ‘a life that has gone on practically unchanged since the days of the Patriarchs’. He declared that Tissot had studied ‘the habits of the Bedouins in the desert … to revive the appearance of the tribes which founded the Jewish Race’, maintaining once again that ‘in a country so sterile, where people live so simply, existence remains always just about the same’.93 It often seems as if Tissot’s Old Testament illustrations were regarded as nothing more than an updated version of Doré’s portrayals of the Jewish people in the 1860s. At least one critic, Charles de Kay (writing in The New York Times), understood that the contemporary Levant was not simply a complete cultural wasteland. To de Kay, Tissot’s genius lay in his ability to reconstruct ‘a vanished civilization, hints of which still linger in some parts of the East’.94 The complete series of 372 gouaches toured the United States to popular acclaim in the ensuing years. The images were eventually bought by Jewish philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff for the New York Public Library, and in 1944 the Library donated them to the new Jewish Museum set up in the former house of Schiff ’s daughter, Frieda Schiff Warburg.95 It is not entirely surprising, given the dearth of imagery depicting biblical Jews in a positive light, that Tissot’s last suite of paintings was recast for an entirely new and appreciative Jewish audience who were eager to buy his work, even though he often confused the world of the ancient Jews with their contemporary Arab brethren. Interest in Tissot’s work faded quickly as his style went out of fashion.96 Later critics found Tissot’s work monotonous and pedantic, and this may help explain why there was no mention of Tissot’s influence on Lilien’s biblical imagery during the first two decades of the twentieth century. If it was Tissot’s and Doré’s illustrations, as well as the Pracht Bible’s non-Jewish engravings of biblical subjects that provided Lilien with the impetus for producing his own visual representations, how different were Lilien’s depictions of these ancient biblical sites and the Jewish heroes and heroines who lived there?

Lilien’s biblical illustrations Lilien’s three-volume Book of the Bible series created strong images of Jewish men and women. The patriarchs Abraham, Jacob, Joshua, Moses, Solomon, and David were muscular, handsome heroes who were not members of an archaic, outmoded form of

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Judaism that had been superseded by Christianity as Christian orientalism implied, but rather were a link to the modern and contemporary Jews of fin-de-siècle Central Europe.97 And yet, oriental motifs remain in many of Lilien’s images, for example, his mythic portrayals of Moses dressed in Assyrian headdress breaking the tablets on top of Mount Sinai (Fig. 2.5) or King Solomon dictating his Proverbs (Fig. 5.12). A musclebound Solomon sports an Assyrian curled beard and antique-style leather thong sandals. Behind him, an incongruous rose window features an Islamic geometric design, with two strange twisted-branch columns on either side. These twisted spiral columns resemble columns from eastern architecture in late antiquity (and are also found in Byzantine art and architecture).98 On the floor to the right sits a Hebrew scribe in a turban writing on a scroll with a stylus. Like the work of Doré and Tissot, Lilien’s biblical images are an amalgamation of cultures, styles, sights, and values fused with contemporary and archaeological findings. However, there was an important difference. Lilien attempted to situate his Jewish heroes in a more authentic Jewish geographic and architectural setting because he wished to emphasise the historic, pedagogical, and political connection between the modern Jewish people and the ancient tribal nation that once dwelt in this region. He often portrayed Moses or King Solomon in Assyrian dress because the cultures of Assyria were older than those of Greece, Rome, or Islam. Depicting them this way also indicated the connection of the Jews to the ancient religions of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation that at that time was being rediscovered and lauded by leading biblical and Semitic studies scholars (often, however, without enough critical comparison with the more familiar biblical material).99 Lilien also deliberately focused on portraying contemporary Jewish (as well as Arab, Bedouin, and Samaritan) Palestinians, offering a nuanced depiction of the biblical world and the people who populated it. The inspirations for many of Lilien’s biblical figures were the photographs he took during his first visit to Palestine in 1906. Lilien used the new technology of photography to document the differing ethnic clothing, hair, jewellery, and scenery of Palestine, and often superimposed various photographs of scenery and people to reconstruct his biblical heroes and heroines. The inspiration for the biblical Daniel seemed to be an Arab figure dressed in an abbaya, a long tunic of a type worn by Arab inhabitants of Palestine at that period (Figs. 5.13a and 5.13b). The Samaritan high priest Amram Ben Itzhak appears as The Thinker in the Book of Psalms, 1909, and a Yemenite Jew appears in a full tribal costume, reading (Figs. 5.14a–b, and 5.15a–b).100 Although, with the exception Ben Itzhak, there are no names associated with the images of the ‘ethnic’ types he photographed during his first visit to Palestine, Lilien, like other artists who worked at the new Bezalel School in Jerusalem, often used local Jewish models from the surrounding area to create his biblical illustrations of the New Jew.101 In fact, the model in the right foreground in a photograph of a drawing class taken in 1906, the same year that Lilien worked at Bezalel, looks similar to Lilien’s photograph of a Yemenite Jew discussed above (Fig. 5.16).

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Figure 5.12  E. M. Lilien, Sprüche Salmos, das Sohnes Davids, des Königs von Israel (The Proverbs of Solomon, The Son of David, The King of Israel), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1912), 12–13.

Figure 5.13a  E. M. Lilien, Daniel, Das Buch Daniel (The Book of Daniel), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1912), 264.

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Figure 5.13b  E. M. Lilien, Arab Figure in an Abbaya, photograph, 1906, TAMA No. 88. Courtesy of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tel Aviv.

Figure 5.14a  E. M. Lilien, Illustration for Die Psalmen (The Book of Psalms), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VI (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1909), 109.

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Figure 5.14b E. M. Lilien, The Thinker (Samaritan High Priest Amram Ben Itzhak), photograph, 1906, TAMA No. 135. Courtesy of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tel Aviv.

Figure 5.15a  E. M. Lilien, Illustration from Die Psalmen (The Book of Psalms), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VI (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1909), 21.

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Figure 5.15b  E. M. Lilien, Jew from Yemen, photograph, 1906, TAMA No. 28. Courtesy of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tel Aviv.

Figure 5.16  Drawing class at the Bezalel School, photograph, 1906. Courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

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Postcards of Lilien’s drawings and etchings of oriental Jewish men and women as well as many of his well-known illustrations from Juda and Lieder des Ghetto became popular in Germany during the 1920s.102 There is some evidence of what Lilien thought of the local Jews (Middle Eastern or otherwise) whom he encountered. When Lilien returned to Germany in 1906, he commented on their faces for an article entitled ‘Journey to Jerusalem’. He stated that the local inhabitants were: a delight to the eyes of all artists … their brows are high and wide. Their gaze proud and free. Their noses are not long and hooked, as one might expect among Jews, but wide and straight. As a general rule, the Asiatic Jew is marked, like his Levantine counterpart, by great physical beauty, a proud and feather light gait and nimble, graceful movements.103

Lilien’s use of the poor Jews of Palestine as a ‘relic’ of the ancient ‘noble savage’ certainly mirrored Christian orientalist and Western fantasies of the exotic East, as manifested in their images of the desert-dwelling Bedouin. Nonetheless, Lilien used the image of the Eastern Jew as noble savage to appeal to the new romanticism inherent in German and Jewish orientalism. Lilien seems to differentiate between ‘Asiatic Jews’, perhaps returning to Herder’s reference to all Jews as generically of the East, and the Eastern Levantine Jew. Lilien may have harboured a desire to explain further to Christian Germans, in a visual sense and using handsome, Eastern Jews, the cultural and theological importance of biblical Judaism and the Land of Israel to the narrative of Jesus and the New Testament. He would also have been aware that Christian Germans, raised on a diet of Protestant Lutheranism or Catholicism, might not have been aware of the similarities in their religious genealogy.104 Lilien was also well aware of the antisemitism inherent in Christian orientalism, which denied that the Jews belonged to the pre-Greek and pre-Roman world of Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians, and were a significant part of the ‘civilising’ force of Western civilisation and history of religious beliefs.

Lilien’s biblical heroines The three volumes of Lilien’s biblical project comprise only sixteen images of women as opposed to the roughly forty images of men and forty-two images of the fauna, flora, and architecture of Palestine. Although this may reflect the gender bias of the biblical narrative, most of these images of women appear in narrative scenes alongside their male partner, a few show sensual portraits of a woman and man embracing, and only six appear to be portraits of individual Jewish women.105 The narrative scenes depict such themes as the creation of Adam and Eve, Eve (with Adam) holding the fruit of knowledge in the garden of Paradise, and Jacob and Rachel at the well. Though this means there are only a small number of archetypal portraits of women

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in Lilien’s biblical oeuvre to draw upon, there are four single, representational figures of Esther, Rahab, Miriam, and Ruth that portray with clarity, the image of a unique and authentically Jewish biblical heroine.106 Depicted as a gender equal to Lilien’s’ new iconic male biblical heroes, these heroines take up the same amount of the picture space and are portrayed with equal attention to detail. Perhaps because of the gendered connotations associated with the seductive and sensual style of British and French orientalism, which so often created images of the Arab woman as a type of exotic, belly-dancing, sexual predator, Lilien’s biblical heroines may have been ignored on the grounds that they represent the Jewish woman as this self-same sexual interloper. At first glance, the images of these women conjure up romantic, contemporary Bedouin women; yet, on closer inspection, these four figures appear to be graceful, attractive Women of Valour. All four women depicted were strong and courageous. Esther and Rahab save the Jewish people from possible annihilation, and Miriam and Ruth perform acts of bravery and loyalty. Garbed in oriental attire, they do not make eye contact with the viewer and are not objectified in a sexual way. Lilien depicts them from below so the viewer appears to look up at them, as if they are on a pedestal. Unlike Tissot’s or Doré’s biblical women, they are neither sex symbols nor pale imitations of dangerous femmes fatales. Lilien seems to be reviving the visual tradition of Old Testament heroines, who were more common in European Christian art from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Often the heroines were shown as a single representative figure with a narrative element behind them. Lilien appears to reclaim this tradition of painting women of the Old Testament for a modern German and Jewish audience who would have been familiar with such quintessential images as Giorgio Vasari’s Judith and Holofernes (1554), Rembrandt’s Bathseba Bathing (1654), or The Jewish Bride (Esther; c. 1665–9). With their dark hair, oriental appearance, authentic clothing, and jewellery, his depictions of Esther and Rahab, in particular, as well as Miriam and Ruth, are by far his most powerful portrayals of biblical women. Lilien transforms these heroines into fearless role models for the modern twentiethcentury acculturated Jewish woman.

Esther Esther, immortalised in the Hebrew Bible by an entire book named after her, has been portrayed frequently in literature, art, and music. Indeed, her beauty, courage, and selfsacrifice have inspired numerous paintings and drawings.107 In the biblical narrative, Esther, the Jewish Queen of Persia, not only saves her people but also questions male authority. It is a tale of a skilled ‘other’ who rewrites the laws of the oppressors by a radical subversion: a tale of Jewish survival in Persia.108 Esther is an orphan; brought up by her cousin Mordechai. She is taken to the court of the King of Persia (Ahasuerus or Ahashverot) and is chosen by the king as his wife. On the advice of Mordechai, she keeps her Jewish identity secret. Esther finds out that Haman, the king’s adviser,

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is about to issue an edict to exterminate the Jews. She goes before the king without being summoned by him, an act she knows is punishable by death, and invites him and Haman to two banquets. She reveals her origins, begs that the edict be lifted, and asks for revenge on Haman. Haman, his family, and many of his followers who persecuted the Jews are killed, and Mordechai is elevated to the role of king’s adviser. Esther has remained a popular subject in books and images throughout Western art history, often seen as a proto-Christian heroine.109 In Jewish tradition, she is the focus of the Jewish holiday Purim, and her combination of seductive beauty and deliberate manipulation for such an unselfish and divinely inspired purpose have made her a constant source of interest, particularly in feminist biblical scholarship.110 Lilien included two portraits of Esther in Die Bücher der Bibel. In the first, Esther is portrayed as she is about to approach the king to tell him of Haman’s duplicity (Fig. 5.17).

Figure 5.17 E. M. Lilien, Esther, Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1908), 236.

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Figure 5.18 E. M. Lilien, Esther, Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1908), 254.

The only hint of the narrative is the crowd of women behind her who we assume are from the king’s harem.111 In the final image placed at the end of the book, like so many of Lilien’s smaller vignettes, Esther appears in profile (Fig. 5.18). Both illustrations create a new ideal representational image of Esther as a proud Jewish heroine. Her headdress, the same in both images, combines an Arab headband with the stripes associated with the Jewish prayer shawl and the ancient Israelite tribe, but the headdress appears to also mimic traditional head coverings worn by Galician Jewish women that Maurycy Gottlieb recorded in a work titled Jewish Woman from the East (c. 1878) (Fig. 5.19). Perhaps, Lilien was thinking back to his own mother’s similar head covering worn on Sabbath eve in Drohobycz, while lighting the Sabbath candles. In this way, Lilien fuses the image of the proud religious Eastern European Eshet Hayil with her oriental Levantine sister as part of his new representation of the modern Jewish woman. The model for Esther may well have been his wife, Helene.112 A tender etching of Helene as a respectable middle-class wife of the well-to-do artist wearing a large fashionable hat appears around the same period (1909) (Fig. 5.20). Lilien’s wife is certainly a more conservative and fitting inspiration for the portrait of Esther than Kleuken’s image, which preceded Lilien’s Bible illustration by four years (Fig. 5.5). Kleuken’s bare

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Figure 5.19  Maurycy Gottlieb, Jewish Women from the East, c. 1878, oil on wood, 20.7 × 15.6 cm. Anonymous private collection, Israel.

Figure 5.20  E. M. Lilien, Portrait of Helene Lilien with Hat, 1909, etching in red-brown. P74.092460. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

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breasted Esther is a sexually charged femme fatale. Lilien’s Esther is a new revitalised biblical heroine. His final image of her in profile seems to celebrate and accentuate her Jewish features: a pronounced nose, dark eyes, and voluptuous mouth.113 The women behind Esther in the first illustration, presumably from King Ahasuerus’s harem, are dressed in an array of ethnically inspired costumes, headdresses, and jewellery. The woman in the lower right has a henna design on her chin and wears a nose ring in the tradition of the Bedouin, while her filigree diadem recalls early-twentiethcentury Moroccan jewellery.114 At the top, a girl wears an embroidered cap recalling the tilted headdresses worn by Yemenite and Sephardic women, and the woman to the left wears a cap with a veil under her chin in the manner of Bedouin or Arab Muslim women.115 Lilien amassed a collection of jewellery and costumes in the local Jerusalem markets during his visit to Ottoman Palestine to be used on his photographic models and these would have served as inspiration for Esther’s supporters gathered behind her, even though they are an amalgam of styles and types.116 Foreshadowing his use of Esther as the heroic new Jewish woman par excellence, Lilien had already designed an image of Esther and the Persian King Ahasuerus prior to his trip to Jerusalem. Lilien wrote a letter to Helene from Berlin on 27 November 1905, where he mentions an ‘Ahaswerosch-Teppich’ (Ahasuerus tapestry) that he had created for the anniversary of David Wolfsohn and his wife Fruma.117 Wolfsohn was the head of the executive Committee of German Zionists, and Herzl’s successor as president to the World Zionist Organisation. The sketch, now displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, was intended to be woven into a tapestry for his silver wedding anniversary (Fig. 5.21). As

Figure 5.21  E. M. Lilien, Study for a Carpet, dedicated to Mr and Mrs David Wolffson, 1906, oil chalk and graphite on canvas, 185 × 305.5 cm, B88.027. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner.

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Figure 5.22 Drawing of Xerxes, after relief in Persepolis. After A. B. Tilda. Studies and Restorations of Persepolis and other Sites of Fars II, 54, Figure 6. Courtesy of the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East, Rome.

Yigal Zalmona recently pointed out, the sketch ‘makes sense as a political manifesto since it conveys the conception that political Zionism was obtaining governmental support from the established powers that controlled the area. Ahasuerus is an efficient symbol standing for a gentile leader of a super power supporting the Jewish people’.118 The king in Lilien’s drawing wears a costume that looks similar to one on a relief of Xerxes in the hall of the Palace of Persepolis (Fig. 5.22), while Esther looks like the perfect ‘icon of the virtuous Jewish woman’.119 Lilien’s drawing merges oriental motifs from Egypt (the men holding the wedding canopy) and Persia (the groom) with the image of Esther (the bride) bedecked in a tunic with her hair plaited with pearls and connected to her headdress as if she is a medieval or Renaissance heroine. This sketch of Esther with pearls hanging from her headdress also recalls an earlier image of Prinzessin Sabbat (Princess Sabbath), which Lilien created for Juda in c. 1900 (Fig. 6.8).120 Lilien seems intent on fashioning a female canon of biblical Jewesses who mirror the idea of the belle juive.121 He merges an oriental aesthetic with the Western tradition for iconic representations of biblical women, with a Jewish and nationalistic agenda.

Rahab In contrast to Esther, Rahab (from the Book of Joshua) was neither Jewish nor noble. A mixture of harlot and heroine, traitor of the Canaanites, saviour of the Jews, and perhaps victim of the entire narrative, she has been as fascinating a subject as Esther

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for artists since the sixteenth century.122 Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute and a central figure in Joshua’s conquest of Canaan (Joshua: 2–6),123 hid the two Hebrew spies sent by Joshua to survey the land in Jericho, thus saving them from death at the hands of the king of Jericho. The spies promise to spare her and her family following the battle of Jericho and Joshua’s conquest of Canaan. In the Aggadah, Rahab is one of the four most beautiful women in history.124 She became a prostitute at the age of ten, but in the unfolding narrative, she eventually becomes a righteous proselyte, marries Joshua, and is the ancestress of eight prophets including Jeremiah and Huldah.125 In Lilien’s image for Die Bücher der Bible, he depicts Rahab as a brave heroine after the battle of Jericho has ended (Fig. 5.23). Rahab’s three-quarter portrait fills the foreground. Like the bust-length image of Esther, Rahab occupies most of the pictorial space, and she becomes an iconic representational figure. Lilien seems to be imitating earlier depictions of celebrated women of the Old Testament who appear in a full-length format with some narrative detail in the background. In Figure 5.24, for instance, the Flemish engraver Hans (Jan) Collaert II (1566–1628) depicts Rabab in a similar pictorial space, with a walled city in the background.126 In Lilien’s illustration, the walled city of Jericho burns, and the outline of white smoke mimics the soft curves of her alluring body. Rahab nonetheless appears fully clothed and chaste for a prostitute. In earlier depictions that Lilien created for Juda, she is anything but chaste. In Rahab von Jericho (Fig. 5.25), our gaze is drawn to Rahab’s pointed bare breasts as she bows before a male figure who holds a phallic-looking sword (recalling Von Stuck’s symbolist painting The Guardian of Paradise, 1899).127 While in Rahab die Jerochinitan

Figure 5.23 E. M. Lilien, Rahab, Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. I (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1908), 502.

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Figure 5.24  Hans (Jan) Collaert II, Rabab, c. 1591. Engraving after Marten de Vos, c. 1581. Plate 8 in the series Icones Illustrium Feminarum Veteris Testamenti (The Celebrated Women of the Old Testament), consisting of twenty engravings (plus frontispiece) by Hans or Adrien Collaert and Carel van Mallery, published in Antwerp by Phillips Galle (1537–1612).

Figure 5.25  E. M. Lilien, Rahab von Jericho (Rahab of Jericho), Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p.

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Figure 5.26 E. M. Lilien, Rahab die Jerochinitan (Rahab the Jerochinian), Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p.

(Rahab the Jerochinian), she appears naked, her nude body displayed on a marble slab as if she is about to be sacrificed to a heathen God. In the foreground, Joshua (or is it Juda?) seems to ruminate over her fate (Fig. 5.26). In Die Bücher der Bible, Rahab is a saviour not a traitor. She is no longer a decadent bare-breasted femme fatale from Juda (1901) in Fig. 5.25 or 5.26. These earlier images of Rahab seem closer to Aubrey Beardsley’s erotic, licentious and submissive females who, like Beardsley’s image of Salome, are a visible reminder of the dangerous, seductive power of women. Lilien’s biblical illustration of Rahab as the righteous proselyte has more in common with the narrative of the Aggadah; here, Lilien appears to whitewash her role as prostitute. As if he understood that her status as a Jewish convert may be an important metaphor for brotherly love between contemporary German Jews and non-Jews alike. Lilien seems to be presenting an iconic heroine, remaking the ‘old masters’ Old Testament series into a new and contemporary Jewish version.

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Figure 5.27  E. M. Lilien, Miriam, Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. I (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1908), 187.

Ruth and Miriam Both Ruth and Miriam are also depicted by Lilien as loyal and important biblical role models for contemporary Zionist women. Miriam, the sister of Moses celebrated for saving his life by placing him in the basket in the bulrushes (when all first-born Jewish male babies were ordered to be killed by Pharaoh’s decree), was also hailed as a great poet. In Lilien’s image, she is portrayed dancing in joy at the moment the Israelites are safe, having crossed the Dead Sea and singing her Song of the Sea (sometimes known as Mi Chamocha, Exodus 15:1–18), where she takes her timbrel and inspires all the other women to sing and dance with her (Fig. 5.27). Ruth, like Esther, has an entire book devoted to her story in the Bible. She is also a convert to Judaism and another well-known biblical Eshet Hayil. She is the foreign-born Moabite who is responsible for creating the Davidic line, giving birth to the grandfather of King David, Obed. Naomi (Ruth’s future mother-in-law) goes with her husband Elimelech and her two sons to Moab when there is a famine in the land of ancient Israel. Elimelech dies and both sons marry Moabite women.

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Figure 5.28 E. M. Lilien, Ruth, Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1912), 206. Etching, c. 1911, P74.09.2476. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

Ruth marries Naomi’s son Mahlon, and Orpah marries Chiliah. Lilien devotes two illustrations to the story of Ruth. The first is a narrative scene: Orpah sets out to return to Moab after the death of her husband. Ruth, a loyal daughter-in-law, and perhaps more importantly, a symbolic ‘Jew by choice,’ clings to Naomi. She is most probably depicted after she has proclaimed to Naomi, in a now famous line in Ruth 1:16–17, that if Naomi intends to travel back to Bethlehem, she will go with her, ‘for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people [shall be] my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, [if aught] but death part thee and me’.128 In the second illustration, Ruth stands alone against a night sky, carrying a Sheaf of wheat (after gleaning the fields of Boaz, who would be her second husband) (Fig. 5.28). As in a similar image by Jan Collaert II of Ruth, she becomes an archetypal figure standing alone in a field of wheat.129 ***

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Figure 5.29  E. M. Lilien, Photographs of sitters for his biblical illustrations, 1906. TAMA No. 87 and TAMA No. 91. Courtesy of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Tel Aviv.

Lilien’s drawings of Rahab and Esther were based on photographic images taken in 1906. There is no record of who these female sitters were, but they are strictly European ‘types’ rather than local Jewish or Arabic women, who might have been uninclined to sit for him (Fig. 5.29). The model for Rahab, with her upturned nose, seems to have inspired his iconic illustration of Rahab (Fig. 5.23), and she wears the exact same decorative diadem. The photographs could have been taken in Germany with models wearing the jewellery he had brought back with him from his travels. Lilien certainly dressed many of his female models in what he supposed were genuine examples of local oriental dress so that they could be an aide-memoire for his illustrative work. The features of these models imply that Lilien’s imagery of Jewish biblical women remained European in sentiment even as they strove to re-imagine the landscape and architecture of Palestine with a Jewish legitimacy. Most of his oriental male figures, on the other hand, were photographed in the Middle East.130 They also suggest the struggle by the cultural Zionists to make connections between the ancient Jewish world and the contemporary world of Central Europe, where they were still considered aliens and Asiatic ‘others.’ As mentioned earlier in this chapter, antisemitic German orientalists often oscillated between Eurocentrism and an anti-Western, antisemitic, Indo-Germanicism. Delitzsch and many others tried to argue that the Hebrew Bible was based on primitive, chauvinistic beliefs that were often immoral in parts. Lilien dresses his women in Eastern clothing with ethnographic jewellery to mirror the civilising rhetoric of ancient Judaism. His images of women were not meant to mirror white, Western or Christian oriental

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fantasies of the Muslim ‘other’, even though he was happy to use whatever models he could find. After all, he was an artist more than a theorist and certainly not a ‘purist’. Lilien’s images of Esther, Rahab, Miriam, and Ruth appear to be a contemporary parable for Jewish life in fin-de-siècle Germany. In the new German diaspora, their roles may have appealed to both secular and religious Jews as a larger than life depiction of Jewish bravery and a ‘self-help manual for Jewish survival’.131 As Tivka Frymer-Kensky, a leading feminist scholar on women in the Hebrew Bible proposes, women are written as a metaphor, an archetype, or paradigm for understanding ancient Israel’s destiny.132 Esther, the ‘secret’ or assimilated Jewess, protects her people, no matter the cost. Rahab the non-Jewish prostitute together with Ruth become converts, marry and strengthen Jewish familial lines. And Miriam, the songwriter/poetess, weaves together, music, and poetry, with the divine, recalling the German literary tradition of song cycles.133 Lilien’s choice of four archetypal Jewish heroines models the behaviour (and therefore the salvation) that Jews in the Diaspora would do well to copy.

Conclusions The biblical illustrations of Doré and Tissot were important proto-models for Lilien’s biblical project. They inspired him to produce a Jewish version of a fully illustrated Christian edition of the Old and New Testaments. They also motivated him to bring the ancient stories of the Bible to life through the contemporary costumes, landscapes, and architectural details of the Middle East to evoke a purely Jewish and nationalistic, oriental aesthetic. Lilien’s biblical project illustrates an internal search for meaning and Heimat, even as his Western European background and sense of a romantic, Jewish nationalism and orientalist fervour created such obvious inconsistencies. Lilien’s aesthetic was based on a radical, new Jewish style of book art that merged the rebellious Jugendstil with his nascent interest in the cultural project of Zionism. His fusion of book art, Jugendstil, and Zionism transformed the nineteenth-century genre of biblical book illustration fashionable under Doré and reworked by Tissot into a new and dynamic national Jewish aesthetic that had not been conceptualised previously. Lothar Brieger, the art critic and biographer of Lilien, understood how groundbreaking Lilien’s project was when, in 1922, he described Lilien’s ‘Bibelplan’ as the ‘großes Werk’ (great work), and the ‘große Idee’ (great idea).134 Brieger knew that the appeal of Lilien’s project rested on his ability to integrate a fashionable artistic style and a simple, straightforward translation. Though Brieger did not spell out exactly what that meant, he did say that Lilien’s plan ‘not only included the Old Testament, but also completely recognised the Jewish character of the New Testament’.135 This new field of modern biblical Jewish book art was groundbreaking not only because it produced the first contemporary, German Hebrew translation of the Bible with illustrations by a Jewish artist, but also for another reason altogether. Lilien most likely undertook the collaboration with Rahlwes, even if it seemed to pander

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to Christian taste by using a Lutheran translation, because he imagined that strong muscular Jewish men (as seen in his illustrations for Juda and Lieder des Ghetto) and courageous Jewish women were positive Jewish role models for both modern Jewish and modern non-Jewish Germans. For Lilien who, like Freud, had probably grown up on a diet of Doré’s simple and dramatic images, this was an act of visual redemption.136 Reclaiming the Hebrew Bible for German secular modernists and Zionists alike, as well as re-presenting Jewish biblical heroes and heroines for a Christian audience, was a radical step forward that secured in the minds and hearts of many German Jews the ecumenical appeal of cultural Zionism. The reason Lilien was eager to work with the Christian pastor Ferdinand Rahlwes was to create a better dialogue between Jews and Christians. After all, his last collaboration with a Christian, Baron von Münchhausen, had been extremely successful. Lilien’s images of Jewish heroes and heroines from the ‘Old Testament’ were meant to appeal to a Christian audience, which was less familiar with positive images of contemporary Jews. His strong, beautiful images of sensual and exotic heroes and heroines would certainly have reinvigorated a long and powerful tradition of positive representations of Old Testament figures in Christian art. His images appear to encourage the cultivation of a non-Jewish audience that he hoped would rethink their negative views of modern Jews. Rahlwes’s reasons for working with a Jewish illustrator remain unexplained. Perhaps he chose Lilien because he was well known and at the height of his popularity and had recently returned from a visit to the Holy Land. Lilien’s well-researched and detailed drawings may have given his illustrations of Jewish heroes and heroines an ‘authentic’ flavour whose geographical setting and costuming, Rahlwes hoped, would remind his constituents of the ‘authenticity’ of Christianity’s vision. Perhaps, Rahlwes was a Freemason who understood the Jewish roots of the New Testament.137 Invigorated by the prospect of creating a committed dialogue between Jews and Christians, Lilien may have unwittingly fallen into a trap that helped fuel the theological argument that Judaism was superseded by Christianity. German Christians such as Rahlwes, who welcomed the Jews as the ‘People of the Book’, had a rather different book in mind.138 Tissot’s oriental imagery, though stressing the Semitic character of the New Testament, was created in the service of a Catholic Church that at the time was rabidly antisemitic.139 Rahlwes and Lilien did argue over some of the illustrations. One incident, mentioned in three letters between Westermann Press, Lilien, and Rahlwes, was over Lilien’s use of the Jewish motif of the Priestly blessing.140 Lilien also reluctantly undertook a few engravings of Christian holy sites specifically for Rahlwes’s New Testament edition.141 However, he only created one image of a crucifixion. This appears in the Book of Esther and depicts the villain of the book Haman on a cross with his head bowed and covered. Mordechai turns his back on Haman on the cross and looks at the spectator with a critical gaze. Lilien was aware of the long history within Judaism that linked the crucifixion of Jesus to Haman.142 In the Hebrew text, it is understood that Haman met his end by hanging, but both the Septuagint (the Greek Jewish translation of the Hebrew Bible) and the Vulgate (The Latin Christian translation by Jerome) state that he was crucified.143 Perhaps, Lilien was reacting to the pogroms of 1905 in Russia and chose to equate Haman with the Christian perpetrators

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of the pogroms there.144 If Ziva Amishai-Maisels is right, then it appears that Lilien was quite prepared, when the occasion warranted, to use a non-ecumenical depiction of the crucifixion, despite his collaboration with Rahlwes. Notwithstanding these differences, and given the tenor of these times, the partnership produced an unprecedented positive and radical representation of modern Jews. Lilien’s biblical project was a serious attempt to integrate Jewish artistic culture with European modernism. His initial foray into the genre of biblical book art, motivated by the alleged absence of a rich tradition of Jewish illustrations and illustrators, but based on the modern Jugendstil, set his work apart from the more outdated imagery of Tissot and Doré. His work was grounded in a search for Jewish identity, roots, and authenticity. Lilien’s biblical images were a visual form of Zionist cultural politics, Jewish identity, and cultural education. They constituted a visual example of the beneficial potential of Jewish integration into German society. Created to win over Jewish and non-Jewish support for the fledging Zionist movement, and to negate ongoing myths about Jewish identity, the images embodied cultural and religious tolerance and emphasised the importance of Jewish artistic sensibility in the face of growing antisemitism.145 His biblical illustrations were exactly what cultural Zionism, as spearheaded by Buber and imagined by Lilien, promised German Jewry: a modern Jewish Renaissance of visual arts and literature that would help create an entirely new kind of individual Jew and, in the process, a new kind of Jewish community.146 Lilien’s biblical images, imbued with the new political and educational rhetoric of cultural Zionism, emphasised that Jews were more than a nation of shopkeepers, bourgeois capitalists, and intellectual, cosmopolitan effetes. In fact, it is significant how similar Lilien’s imagery of the biblical history of courageous oriental Jewish heroes and heroines is to the ideas of the Jewish Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars, Geiger, Graetz, and Goldziher. These scholars called themselves Oriental as a ‘badge of honour’, preferring to be labelled as part of the ‘derogatory world’ of Arab and Islamic orientalism rather than part of the European Christian world where they personally experienced domination and frustration with their inferior position.147 Lilien’s images not only served as a form of visual redemption; they were created as a form of resistance, as a way of redefining the antisemitic views held by these German orientalists about the supposed inferiority of the modern Jewish body, about Judaism as an inferior religion, about the ‘otherness’ of the perceived ‘Asiatic’ Jew in German society, and about the perceived insignificance of Jewish art. In response, Lilien’s women as well as his strong, corporeal men have dark rather than blonde hair, and dark rather than Aryan eyes. Lilien’s women, depicted as proud, heroic figures in the tradition of the belle juive, defend their people and portray a Judaism that is neither as ancient nor as outmoded as his German secular audience may have thought. Lilien’s Jewish heroines remain a peculiar combination of an ‘authentic’ Eastern Jewish gaze and an inherently gendered and conservative Eurocentric view of women as sexually alluring, yet maternally disposed and innately religious. In his images, Lilien nonetheless sought to connect these earlier women of Zion, the matriarchs of a proud, Jewish, biblical nation, with his newfound secular politics of Zionism and attempted

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to reinvigorate and regenerate this age-old religious narrative with an updated secular story of Romantic nationalism: a story in which the Jewish people rise up and go back to where they originally came from – the East.

Notes 1

German Jewish scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentum movement such as Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and Ignaz Goldziher used scientific methods to analyse Jewish tradition. See Susannah Heschel, ‘Revolt of the Colonized: Abraham Geiger’s Wissenschaft Des Judentums as a Challenge to Christian Hegemony in the Academy’, New German Critique 77 (Spring–Summer 1999): 61–86; John Efron, ‘Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze’, in Kalmar and Penslar, OJ, 81–93. On Hermann Brunnhofer, whose quote appears in the epigraph, see Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship (New York: German Historical Institute; Cambridge University Press, 2009), 25–27. 2 Ella Shohat, ‘Black, Jew, Arab: Postscript to “the Wretched of the Earth”’, Arena Journal 33, no. 4 (2009): 56. 3 Ferdinand Rahlwes, ed., Die Bücher Der Bibel, 3 vols. (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1908–1912). Volume I, Überlieferung und Gesetz – das Fünfbuch Mose und das Buch Josua. Nach der Übersetzung von Reuss (Tradition and Law: The Five Books of Moses and the Book of Joshua. After the translation by Reuss), 1908, Volume VI, Die Liederdichtung: Die Psalmen, Die Klagelieder, Das Hohelied. Nach der Übersetzung von Reuss (The Songs of Poetry: Psalms, Lamentations, Song of Solomon. After the translation by Reuss), 1909. Volume VII, Die Lehrdichtung; Die Sprüche, Hiobe, Die Prediger, Ruth, Jona, Esther, Daniel. Nach der Übersetzung von Reuss (The Songs of Poetry; Proverbs, Job, The Preacher, Ruth, Jonah, Esther, Daniel. After the translation by Reuss), 1912. 4 Bar-Am, PwL, 33. Each volume of the initial cloth-covered edition sold for 25 marks. Cornelia Hoffmann, Information Services and Reading Room, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Leipzig, 17 October 2012. 5 Many reviews of Lilien’s illustrations were collected by his son Otto Lilien in E. M. Lilien’s Nachlass, which is held at the Museum of German-speaking Jewry, Tefen, Israel. There are over eighty contemporary reviews in English, German, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and Hebrew from Jewish and non-Jewish newspapers, magazines and journals. A small pamphlet of sixty-seven excerpts from these positive reviews was published as part of the initial marketing by the publisher Westermann. Reviews from Christian newspapers include the Berliner Lokalenzeiger, Der Tag, Die christliche Welt, Protestantenblatt, Evangelische Kirchenzeitung für Osterreich, Evangelisches Gemeindblatt, München, and Evangelisch-prostestantisches Kirchenblatt. 6 See discussion on diasporic identity and transnationalism in chapter 1. 7 David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: Modern Encounters, A New History, Vol. 3 (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 3. 8 Ze’ev Raban (1890–1970) created an edition for the Song of Songs, but that was in 1923. For more on the Song of Songs, see chapter 7. 9 In Hebrew, Eshet Hayil. The twenty-two-word poem is in the Book of Proverbs (Proverbs 31) and is said to have been written by King Solomon.

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10 There is a wealth of feminist discussion on the Eshet Hayil text examining the tensions between the original text, traditional Jewish commentary, and modern feminist voices. For a brief history of Eshet Hayil see Carol Goodman Kaufman, Sins of Omission: The Jewish Community’s Reaction to Domestic Violence (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 61. 11 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 5–7. 12 Ibid., 6–8. 13 See Susanne Zantop, ‘Colonial Fantasies’: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Heschel, ‘Revolt of the Colonized’; Todd Curtis Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire; Efron, ‘Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze’, 80. Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism, 2. 14 Efron, ‘Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze’, 80; Heschel, ‘Revolt of the Colonized’. Biblical historicity was also used to restore religious faith that was being eroded by Darwinism. See Vivian Lipmann, ‘The Origins of the Palestine Exploration Fund’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 75 (1988): 557–74, cited in Adel H. Yahya, ‘Archaeology and Nationalism in the Holy Land’, in Archaeologies of the Middle East: Critical Perspectives, ed. Reinhard Bernbeck and Susan Pollock (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 66–77. 15 Heschel, ‘Revolt of the Colonized’, 62–63. 16 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). There was a huge interest in the occult, myths, and folklore from the East, including the Hindu Upanishads, the Mahayana Sutras, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Central Europeans explored these ideas in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarasthustra, Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, and Martin Buber’s Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, 1906) and Ekstatiche Konfessionen (Ecstatic Confessions, 1909). Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’, 96–139. 17 See earlier discussion in chapter 4. Donna K. Heizer, Jewish-German Identity in the Orientalist Literature of Else Lasker-Schüler, Friedrich Wolf, and Franz Werfel (Columbia: Camden House, 1996). The relationship between orientalism, mysticism, the Ostjuden, and German Jewish identity is explored in the next chapter. 18 For a recent discussion on the connection between the Muslim ‘other’ and the Jewish ‘other’ and Christian/European thought, in regard to the conflation of the Jew as an oriental Asiatic, see Achim Rohde, ‘Asians in Europe: Reading German-Jewish History through a Post-Colonial Lens’, in Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism, 3. See also the discussion of Else Lasker-Schüler’s alter-ego Jussuf in chapter 4. 19 Efron, ‘Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze’, 80. 20 Lilien, Briefe, 83–85. 21 It was with the publisher Insel and the contract was transferred to Westermann Publishers in 1907; cited in Bar-Am, PwL. 22 Reprinted in 1923. There does not seem to be an explanation as to why Lilien and Rahlwes chose to publish volume I, followed by volumes VI and VII. 23 Rahlwes was the Pastor at St Ulrici from 1895 to 1909. Karlo Vegelahn, German Bibles, Rahlwes bibliographic notes at http://www.bibelarciv-vegelahn.de/bibel-r. html#rahlwes-Ferdinand, updated 12 March 2013, viewed 20 March 2013. On Helene’s life and family, see chapter 3.

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24 Documents from the Braunschweig Museum archive, with the help of Jürgen; BarAm, PwL, 43. 25 Edouard Ruess’s German translation of the Old Testament was published posthumously between 1892 and 1894. Karlo Vegelahn, German Bibles, Ruess at http://bibelarchiv-vegelahn.de/bibel, updated 12 March 2013, viewed 19 March 2013. Ruess was influenced by the ideas of the leading German nineteenth-century biblical scholar and orientalist Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). Rahlwes had written a small pamphlet on German culture and the Reformation, Die Reformation als Kultur Kampf that was published by C. A. Schwetschke and Sohn in 1897. He praises Protestant modern life as a reflection of the ancients’ ‘senses’ and the medieval ‘spirit’. Both can be found in the modern earthy life of Protestantism where they are integrated. F. Schwill, ‘Die Reformation als Kuturkampf ’, The American Journal of Theology 2, no. 1 (January 1898): 216–17. 26 Reuss’s 1892–1894 editions were published in Braunschweig by C. A. Schwetschke and Sohn. This was created with the help of the family and estate of Ruess under Erichson, Director of the Theological Study group and Pastor Dr Horst in Strasbourg. Vegelahn, http://bibelarchiv-vegelahn.de/bibel, updated January 2013, viewed 19 March 2013. 27 The Westermann Verlag may also have had an early Jewish connection. According to the Dictionary of German Biography, Georg Westermann, was in charge when Lilien’s illustrations were published. Georg’s grandfather was most probably a Jewish goldsmith. Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Georg Westermann’, in Dictionary of German Biography, ed. Walther Killy and Rudolf Vierhaus (Munich: K. G. Saur Verlag, 2006), 480. 28 For background to their partnership, see Mark H. Gelber, Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000). 29 Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 5:8. Also, see the discussion on Jews and art in chapter 1. 30 Richard I. Cohen, ‘Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions’, in Cultures of the Jews, a New History. Vol. 3, Modern Encounters, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 59. 31 It was not until after 1783 that a translation from Hebrew to German was undertaken using Latin letters at the request of Christian Hebraists. David Sorkin, ‘The Mendelssohn Myth and Its Method’, New German Critique 77 (1999): 7–28. 32 On the number and type of German translations, see Cohen, ‘Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions’, 45–46; Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, The Legacy of German Jewry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 85–86. 33 Correspondence with Eric Chaim Klein, 15 January 2012. He suggested I look at the Pracht Bible and I thank him for this lead. 34 See title page of the Pracht Bible mentioned in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica where it states: ‘with more than 100 separate plates, and 600 in-text illustrations (unsigned)’. The reproductions were made from steel plate and woodcut engravings. Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘Julius Fürst’ at http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Julius_ Furst (based on the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica), updated 2013, viewed 2 May 2012. There were two editions, one published in Leipzig and one published in Prague. The first edition was published in Leipzig from 1868 to 1872, and edged with gold. The second edition, published in Leipzig from 1873 to 1876, also

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36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

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came with fifty-eight booklets and cost 75 pfennigs. The third edition was published in Prague by Pascheles in 1884, in fifty-eight booklets also and cost 70 pfennigs per issue and bound in linen. Peter Geils, Willy Gormy, and Reinhard Oberschelp, Gesamtverzeichnis Der Deutschsprachigen Schrifttums: 1700–1965 (Munich; London: Saur, 1979–1983). The title page as mentioned in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica states: ‘For Israelites, with Masoretic text and a new German translation and additional commentary by Professor Dr Julius Fürst’. As chair of the Department of Oriental Languages and Literature, University of Leipzig (1864–73), Fürst wrote his most significant works including the Bibliotheca Judaica (Leipzig, 1849–1863) and Kultur und Literaturgeschichte der Juden in Asien (Cultural and Literary History of the Jews in Asia, 1849). Email correspondence with Daniel Vorphal, 10 March 2014. Vorphal has been involved with the new translation of the Philippson Bible together with Professor Dr Rüdiger Liwak, School of Jewish Theology, University of Potsdam. Correspondence, Daniel Vorphal. According to Richard I. Cohen, three well-known editions were printed in1854, 1859 and 1974. Cohen, ‘Cultures of the Jews’, 46. Richard I. Cohen cites the edition as 1875 while Eric Chaim Kline’s online bookseller’s catalogue states that it is 1874. See http://www.klinebooks.com/cgi-bin/kline/30741. html?id=NgeNvp7j, viewed 9 October 2012. See also a ‘Select Bibliography of Doré’s work’ online at: http://catholic-resources.org/Art/Dore.htm, viewed 9 October 2012. The full title is Die Heilige Schrift des Israeliten, in deutscher Übertragung von Ludwig Philippson; mit Einhundert vier und fünfzig Bildern von Gustave Doré, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Eduard Hallberger, c. 1874). The large folio edition had 154 plates and was in the Hebrew Bible edition only. Correspondence, Daniel Vorphal, 10 March 2014. See Appendix C for the exact number of Philippson editions that were published between 1839 and 1913. Email correspondence with Dr Christian Hermann at the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart. Hermann suggested that the price, equivalent to between 500 and 1000 euros today, would have limited the edition to upper middle-class Germans only. According to the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Doré edition cost between 83 and 89 marks per volume. Correspondence with Vorphal. Cohen, ‘Cultures of the Jews’, 45–46. Cohen may have used the words ‘complex symbolism’ to describe Doré’s images because they were by a non-Jewish artist who was unencumbered by the more multifarious textual understanding/s of the historical events. Ibid. See also Naomi Seidman’s discussion of intricacies both of translation and of Jewish-Christian relations in Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006). Heschel, ‘Revolt of the Colonized’, 61–86; Efron, ‘Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze’, 81–93. Gert Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, in J. James Tissot, Biblical Paintings, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt (New York: The Jewish Museum; Publishing Center for Cultural Resources, 1982), 19–46. James Jacques Tissot, The Old Testament: Three Hundred and Ninety-Six Compositions Illustrating the Old Testament (Paris; London; New York: M. De Brunoff, Art Publisher, 1904). This edition contained 396 illustrations in two volumes.

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47 Simeon Solomon’s (1840–1905) Mother of Moses, 1860; Lesser Ury’s Rebecca at the Well, 1908; and Maurycy Gottlieb’s Christ Preaching at Capernaum. 48 See popular German magazines such as Kunst für Alle (1885–1944) (Munich: Bruckmann Verlag). In England, The Burlington Magazine, published from 1903 onwards, was originally established as a journal of ancient art inspired by German periodicals, as was British magazine The Connoisseur. See also publications by well-known British and French photographers of the Holy Land in Yeshayahu Nir, The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land 1839–1899 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1985), xiii–xv. 49 Karen Sue Smith, ‘The Artist as Believer: James Tissot’s Visionary Paintings of Jesus’, America 202, no. 11 (5 April 2010): 23. 50 Though not intent on complete historical accuracy, Hunt often integrated nineteenthcentury Bedouin costumes and headgear with historically accurate ancient Jewish coins. See the Bride of Bethlehem (the Virgin Mary) (1879–84) in Nicholas Hardwick, ‘Ancient Jewish Coins in the Work of William Holman Hunt’, The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1261 (British Art and Architecture) (April 2008): 252–55. 51 The image of Mary on Jesus’s right side does seem to suggest the importance placed upon the recognition of the Jewish Jesus as part of the Christian narrative, suggesting that Christianity supersedes Judaism as the religion of ‘Truth’. 52 As stated earlier, Doré’s illustrations were already being used in German editions of the Jewish illustrated bible, for instance, in the 1874 edition, Die Heilige Schrift des Israelite. 53 The Holy Bible, with Illustrations by Gustave Doré (London & New York: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1866–70). A large folio edition (38 cm) published in London in sixty-four parts at half a crown each. The Times, Monday, 16 April 1866, 12. 54 The publisher took out a full-page advertisement in The Times, citing more than twenty-five newspapers and journals with enthusiastic reviews. Ibid. The bookseller D. Appleton and Co. of New York also advertised in The New York Times and mentioned three of the same positive reviews in its advertisement. The New York Times, 22 November 1866, 5. 55 Sarah Schaefer, ‘“From the Smallest Fragment”: The Archeology of the Doré Bible’, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide (Spring 2014): 1. 56 On the public reception and fascination of Doré’s images, see ibid., 21. 57 Vernet wrote from Damascus in 1833 that ‘the country has no epochs. Transport yourselves a few thousand years back, it is always the same physiognomy … Pharaoh persecuting the Hebrews, sitting on his chariot, stirred up the same dust as the artillery of Mohammed-Ali. The Arabs have not changed’. Gazette des Beaux Arts (1863): 455 as quoted in Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 25. Roberts created two books of engraved views of the Levant: The Holy Land (1842–49) and Egypt and Nubia (1864–69). On observing a caravan from Cario to Mecca, he recalled ‘vividly the children of Israel bearing the Ark through the Wilderness’. From Kenneth Paul Bendiner, ‘The Portrayal of the Middle East in British Painting, 1835–1860’ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1979), as quoted in Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 26. 58 ‘To Show Doré’s Art. Religious Works of the Painter secured for the Fair’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 26 February 1893, 6. 59 Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 28.

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60 Ivan Davidson Kalmar, ‘Jesus Did Not Wear a Turban: Orientalism, the Jews and Christian Art’, in Kalmar and Penslar, OJ, 3–31. 61 Ibid., 20–24. 62 Ibid.; Heschel, ‘Revolt of the Colonized’, 63. 63 Efron, ‘Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze’, 18. 64 Shmuel Almog, ‘The Racial Motif in Renan’s Attitude to Jews and Judaism’, in Antisemitism through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 255–78. Also, see Shmuel Almog, ‘Vagaries of Scientific Antisemitism’ at http://sicsa. huji.ac.il/vagaries.htm, viewed 23 May 2013. 65 General History and Comparative System of Semitic Languages, 5th ed., 1878, 4. His first important book was Studies of Religious History, published in Paris in 1862. General History was his follow-up book. 66 Renan, General History, 3. See also ‘Anti-Semitism’ at http://Jewish Encyclopaedia. com com/articles/1603-anti-semitism, updated 2011, viewed 23 May 2013. 67 On the modern invention of Judaism as a religion, see especially Heschel, ‘Revolt of the Colonized’, 61–63. 68 Ibid. 69 Antisemitic German orientalists often oscillated between a Eurocentrism and an anti-Western, antisemitic Indo-Germanicism, as pointed out by Kontje, German Orientalisms, 4. A German antisemite in this category was Frederic Delitzsch. For a discussion on him see below and fn. 73. On Delitzsch and Germany’s interest in Mesopotamia, see Frederick N. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 272–313. 70 See images by Gustav Moreau, Salome (Dancing before Herod), 1876; Léon Gérôme The Almeh (with Pipe), 1873, Emile Glockner, A Fine Blade, c. 1900; or even E. M. Lilien, Die Natur (Nature), Book of the Bible, Vol. V, 1909. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 29; Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds., Orientalism’s Interlocuter’s: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 16–17; Linda Nochlin, ‘The Imaginary Orient’, Art in America 71, no. 5 (1983): 118–31; Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London; New York: Routledge, 1994); Roger Benjamin et al., Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997). 71 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. 72 Yigal Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art (Jerusalem: Lund Humphries; Israel Museum, 2013), 20–21. As co-founder of the Deutschen Orientgesellschaft (German Oriental Society) and director of the Vorderasiatische Abteilung (Near Eastern Department) of the Royal Museum, Delitzsch’s influence was widespread. Kaiser Wilhelm II attended his lecture on the subject, asking him to repeat the lecture before the Royal Palace at Berlin. Bill T. Arnold and David B. Weisberg, ‘A Centennial Review of Friedrich Delitzsch’s “Babel Und Bibel” Lectures’, Journal of Biblical Literature 121, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 441–47. 73 Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, 20–21. 74 See chapter 2. 75 Ibid., where Buber pronounced that the cultural Zionist movement, ‘put our all hope in him [Lilien]’. Buber, ‘Address on Jewish Art’, in The First Buber, Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber, ed. Gilya Gerda Schmidt (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 57.

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76 Joseph Henabery – Griffith’s collaborator – apparently drew on Doré’s images for his Life of Christ project. Cited in Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 23. 77 Vernet painted many biblical images apart from the example of Judith and Tamar, above. See also Judith and Holofernes, 1828 and Abraham Turning Away Hagar, 1837. 78 Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 25. See also Bar-Am, PwL, 62. 79 Eyal Onne, Photographic Heritage of the Holy Land, 1839–1914 (Manchester: Institute of Advanced Studies, Manchester Polytechnic, 1980), 104; Bar-Am, PwL, 62. 80 Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 25. 81 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire. Texte intégrale, établi et annoté par Robert Ricatte, cited in Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 23. 82 Apparently after a mass at the church of St Sulpice in Paris. Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz, ed., James Tissot 1836–1902 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 86. 83 Ian Thompson, ‘Tissot as a Religious Artist’, in Matyjaszkiewicz, James Tissot 1836– 1902, 91. 84 These works were known as the Prodigal Son in Modern Life series. 85 See ‘The Champs des Mars Salon. Women weep as they pass from picture to picture ... .’ The New York Times, June 10, 1894; ‘Art Notes’, The New York Times, 16 December 1894. Also, see de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, cited in Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 23. 86 Thompson, ‘Tissot as a Religious Artist’, 91. 87 See the critic’s perception of the reception to his work in ‘Tissot’s Old Testament. Last Works of the Illustrator of the New Testament on View’, The New York Times, 26 November 1904, 9. Ninety-five of these illustrations apparently appeared at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1901. See The New York Times, 26 November 1904, 6. 88 Ibid., 9 89 The Times, London, 22 February 1904, 4. 90 Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 37; The Times, 22 February 1904. The city seems to contain multiple images of the Temple of Khonsu at Karnak squashed between flat roofed houses that are evocative of a modern Arab town. 91 Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 19. 92 Though Berenson suggested it would require not 1,000 but 10,000 Tissots to change the public mind, the idea that Tissot’s work was helping to change this idea is clear. The Times, London, 22 February 1904, 4. 93 Ibid. 94 Charles de Kay, The New York Times, 11 December 1904, 1. 95 Schiff, ‘Tissot’s Illustrations for the Hebrew Bible’, 19. Jacob Schiff came from a distinguished German Jewish banking family; Frieda married the German-born businessman and philanthropist, Felix Warburg, brother of Aby, the art historian and cultural theorist. 96 Ibid., 19. 97 See chapter 2 on the Jewish body politics of Lilien’s muscular male images and also Stanislawski, Zionism; Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London; New York: Routledge, 2007); Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art.

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98 Similar to the ones on a pier in St Peter’s Basilica, that were brought back to Rome by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century CE. These columns were incorrectly called Solomonic, as Constantine’s columns were thought to have been brought back from the Second Temple (70 CE), not the First Temple in Jerusalem, often called Solomon’s Temple. Richard Durham, ‘Spiral Columns in Salisbury Cathedral’, Ecclesiology Today, Journal of the Ecclesiological Society 29 (September 2002): 29. 99 On the importance of Mesopotamia, Assyriology, and the use of comparative studies between Assyriology and biblical studies under the antisemite Frederic Delitzsch, and the Jewish reaction to this, see nn. 69, 71, and 73. See also Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Ninteenth Century Europe, 272–313. 100 Arab Figure in an Abbaya; The Thinker; The Samaritan High Priest (Amram Ben Itzhak); Jew From Yemen in Bar-Am, PwL, 54. 101 Dalia Manor points this out in relation to the Bezalel Academy. See ‘Orientalism and Jewish National Art: The Case of Bezalel’, in Kalmar and Penslar, Orientalism, 145. 102 Many were printed by Cavalry and Company in Berlin. There seems to have been a collection of at least forty-eight or so images. 103 Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, no. 35, cited in Bar-Am, PwL, 37. 104 Cohen, ‘Cultures of the Jews’, 52. Cohen mentions the fin-de-siècle debates in Germany regarding Adolf Harnack’s claim that Liberal Protestantism should disassociate itself from the Old Testament. Lilien was well aware of the increasing antisemitism, though he may not have realised it was due to race politics. See also Seidman’s discussion of German Christian relations at the beginning of the twentieth century in ‘A Translator Culture’, Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 161. 105 Two of these, from the Song of Songs, will be discussed in chapter 7. 106 There are two single images of Esther; the second is a profile of her at the end of The Book of Esther, Die Bücher der Bibel, 254. See later discussion. There are also two images of Ruth, but the first is a narrative scene with two other female figures. The Book of Ruth, Die Bücher der Bibel, 202. 107 The Book of Esther appears in the third section of the Hebrew Bible, in Ketuvim (Writings), dated to around the third or fourth century BCE. Esther also appears in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible with additions by Jerome to the Latin Vulgate. David Noel Freedman, Allen C. Myers, and Astrid B. Beck, eds., Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2000), 427–28. The earliest known image of Esther comes from frescoes on the walls of the Dura-Europas synagogue, third century CE. 108 Drora Oren, ‘Esther; the Jewish Queen of Persia’, Nashim 18 (2009): 140. 109 For instance, from the art of Renaissance painters such as Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510) and Filippino Lippi (c. 1458–1504), who both collaborated on The Story of Esther, 1475; Jacopo Tintoretto (c. 1518–1594) Esther Before Ahasuerus, 1547; and Paolo Veronese (c. 1528–1588) Esther Crowned by Ahasuerus. For a complete list of artists who created images of Esther see Vera B. Moreen in Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender (Detroit: Macmillan References, 2007), 2: 484–86. 110 Susan Ackerman, Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and Biblical Israel (New York: Doubleday, 1998); Alice Ogden Bellis, Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994); Leila Leah Bronner, From Eve to Esther: Rabbinic Reconstructions

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of Biblical Women (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994); Norma Rosen, Biblical Women Unbound: Counter-Tales (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2001); and Tivka Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories (New York: Shocken Books, 2002). 111 Monika Czekanowska-Gutman, ‘Challenging the Non-Jewish Images of a Jewish Queen: Portrayals of Esther by Early Twentieth-Century Jewish Artists’, Ars Judaica 12 (2016): 75. 112 Dirk Heisserer mentions this in his Introduction to Galerie Michal Hasenclever, E. M. Lilien. Unterwegs Im Alten Orient. Der Radierer Und Lichtzeichner Ephraim Moses Lilien (Munich: Galerie Michal Hasenclever, 2004), 100. 113 Czekanowska-Gutman, ‘Challenging the Non-Jewish Images of a Jewish Queen’, 83. 114 Ibid., 76. 115 Yedida Kalfon Stillman, Arab Dress: A Short History from the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times (Leiden: Boston and Cologne, 2000), Figure 19, cited in Czekanowska-Gutman, ‘Challenging the Non-Jewish Images of a Jewish Queen’. I thank Czekanowska-Gutman for pointing this out. 116 Bar-Am, PwL, 52. 117 Lilien, Briefe, 55. I thank Yigal Zalmona for pointing out in email correspondence, 10 April 2018 that Lilien had spoken of a major large work in his letters to his wife prior to travelling to Jerusalem. 118 Zalmona, in the same email. 119 Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, 18–19. In a recent conversation with the author, Zalmona revised his idea of her as a study in ‘the metaphoric marriage between Zionism and the Jewish people’; nevertheless, his original idea of her as an icon of the virtuous Jewish woman remains. November 2017, Jerusalem. 120 Princess Sabbath is discussed in detail in chapter 7. 121 Hildegard Frübis, ‘Ephraim Moses Lilien: The Figure of the “Beautiful Jewess,” the Orient, the Bible, and Zionism’, in Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism, 94. 122 Judith McKinly, ‘Rahab: Hero/ine?’, Biblical Interpretation 7, no. 1 (1999): 44–57. 123 Judith Baskin, ‘Rahab’, in Encyclopedia Judaica, ed. Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 2006), 66. 124 The Aggadah originated as a religious method for religious instruction but usually refers to the non-legalistic texts in Rabbinic literature. Martina Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturkritik (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 183. 125 Baskin, ‘Rahab’, 66. 126 Hans (Jan) Collaert II, Icones Illustrium Feminarum Veteris Testamenti (Celebrated Women of the Old Testament), Rahab, c. 1591 and Jacob Matham’s series of Old Testament women, such as Judith, c. 1585–1589, engraving, Rijksmuseum, after Goltzius. 127 Haim Finkelstein, ‘Lilien and Zionism’, Assaph 3 (1998): 195–216. 128 Harold Frisch ed., The Jerusalem Bible (Jerusalem: Koren Publishers, 1984), 863. 129 Hans (Jan) Collaert II, Ruth, from Icones Illustrium Feminarum Veteris Testamenti (Celebrated Women of the Old Testament), Ruth at centre, carrying a sheaf of wheat, a tent with Ruth and Boaz in background; after Maarten de Vos, c. 1590–95, British Museum. 130 Finkelstein, ‘Lilien and Zionism’, 209.

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131 Sylvia Barak Fishman suggests that medieval commentators such as Maimonides used this approach to interpret the role of Esther before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Sylvia Barak Fishman, Reading Esther: Cultural Impacts on Responses to Biblical Heroines (Boston: Hadassah International Research Institute, 2002), 5. 132 Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible, xvii, 334–8. 133 See Friedrich Schiller’s An die Freude (Ode to Joy), 1786 or Heinrich Heine’s poem Prinzessin Sabbat, 1851. See chapter 7 for further discussion on Lilien’s image of the Prinzessin Sabbat. 134 Brieger, EML, 209. 135 Ibid. 136 Margaret Olin uses the words ‘visual redemption’ to describe Martin Buber’s cultural Renaissance of Jewish art. Margaret Rose Olin, ‘Martin Buber: Jewish Art as Visual Redemption’, in The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 99–126. 137 Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, 15. 138 Seidman, Faithful Renderings, 161. 139 Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed., J. James Tissot, Biblical Paintings (New York: Publishing Center for Cultural Resources, 1982), 24. 140 Appendix II in Lilien, Briefe an seine Frau, 1905–1925, 277–82. They are from Handbuch der Christlich- kirchlichen Altertümer von Karl Christian Friedrich Siegel (Hamburg, 1701), 655. In these letters, Lilien writes to Rahlwes that his use of the Priestly Blessing hand gesture is deeply and authentically Jewish. Rahlwes argues that they were used not only by the ancient Israelites but also by the Egyptians and Assyrians. Lilien’s family came from the kohanim, or priestly class, and he remains quite indignant about their use as legitimate and original Jewish motifs in his vignettes and borders. Lilien also quotes a significant Christian oriental scholar to give his argument further legitimacy. 141 See E. M. Lilien’s illustration for the New Testament, The Holy Sepulchre, 1912. 142 Amitai Mendelsohn, Behold the Man: Jesus in Israeli Art (Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Israel Museum, 2017), 80. 143 Ibid., 80. For the connection between Jesus, Haman, and Purim see T. C. G. Thornton, ‘The Crucifixion of Haman and the Scandal of the Cross’, The Journal of Theological Studies 37, no. 2 (1986): 419–26. For further discussion of the Haman on the cross see Milly Heyd, ‘Lilien: Between Herzl and Ahasver’, in Theodor Herzl, Visionary of the Jewish State, ed. Gideon Shimoni and Robert S. Wistrich (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnus Press, 1999), 283–84. 144 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, ‘Origins of the Jewish Jesus’, in Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, ed. Mathew Baigel and Milly Heyd (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 75. 145 Brieger described Lilien’s wide appeal for his Book of the Bible images, ‘it is to be hoped that the continuation of [Lilien’s] bible project will … lead again to a particular kind of Jewish contribution to world culture’ (Es ist zu wünschen, daB die Zeit der Forschung des Bibelwerkes wieder … werde … Vielleicht führt hier wieder der Weg zu einem besonders gearteten Beitrage des Judentums zu Kultur der Welt). Brieger, EML, 232. 146 Olin, Nation without Art, 99–126. 147 Efron, ‘Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze’, 93.

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Ost und West, Zionism, and the Construction of German Jewish Orientalism

For the Jew has remained an Oriental.

—Martin Buber, Vom Geist des Judentums

Zionism has a large historical-cultural mission. Jews are as a people Oriental – from the East – who have lived for centuries in Europe, the most suitable mediators between the cultures of the Orient and the Occident. —E. M. Lilien, Briefe an seiner Frau East and West are not categories that reflect reality, at best they are terms that encapsulate a number of agreed upon ideas, a set of attitudes and images … The Zionist approach to the East is a particular instance of the Orientalist ideology, that is, the way in which the West relates to the East or more precisely, the eastern region of the Mediterranean. It is, however, an approach far more complex than the classic European Orientalism, since the East is concerned not only as the locus of the ancient history of the Jewish people, but also as the supreme aim of the people’s envisaged return to itself. —Yigal Zalmona, ‘To the East: Orientalism in Art in Israel’

Introduction This chapter considers how Orientalism was imagined and employed by Jewish artists in literature and the visual arts at the fin de siècle, with particular reference to the cultural Zionist journal Ost und West. Published from 1901 to 1923, this monthly journal popularised the connections between the East and the West in the German Jewish imagination. Ost und West was suffused with the artwork of its art editor E. M. Lilien, the writings of Martin Buber, as well as poems, essays, and illustrations by many other leading literary and artistic figures of the day. All contributors concurred with Buber’s promotion of Jewish culture, described in the first edition of Ost und West as a ‘Jüdische Renaissance’.1 Buber’s ideology became the political and cultural platform of the magazine. Interest and enthusiasm for Jewish aesthetics and Jewish culture had already formed part of a fledgling interest in the creation of a modern Jewish national identity at the end of the

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nineteenth century. Buber, whose ideas were carefully written to promote a revival of this enthusiasm, speculated that German-speaking Jewry was uniquely placed to mediate between the East (meaning Eastern Europe and the Middle East) and the West.2 Jews were both of the West as well as from the East. As Buber succinctly explains in the opening epigraph, ‘Denn der Jude ist Orientale geblieben’ (For the Jew has remained an Oriental).3 For Buber, it was the eighteenth-century mystics from Poland, the Hasidim, who truly typified the mythos, mystical forces, or Geist of the Jewish Volk.4 These ideas were central to Buber’s Zionism and paralleled similar concepts that were incorporated into the new Romanticism.5 Buber’s views on the relationship between orientalism and Jewish culture have been discussed by several scholars.6 What remains clear is that many German Jewish fin-de-siècle writers (in the wake of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer) valorised the exotic East in an effort to reconnect with their internal, ‘oriental’ selves. These intellectuals transformed the anti-Jewish orientalism of European culture into a counter-orientalism, a phenomenon now known as Jewish orientalism.7 Most references to the role of the journal Ost und West have been brief.8 Marc Gelber traces its development and defines the parameters of the cultural Zionist movement in relation to Jewish nationalism and to the theories of literary Rassenkraft (racial power) and Jewish Volkpersönlichkeit (people’s personalities).9 There has been little written on the relationship between German orientalism, the artistic Jugendstil movement, and the influence of the journal Ost und West in the construction of a fresh and ‘authentic’ Jewish self, one that incorporated the Jews’ dualistic or hybrid identity as both of the East and of the West.10 The art editor, Ephraim Moses Lilien, was one of the prime creative advocates for the young journal. Buber’s positioning of German Jewry as oriental is reflected in the epigraph at the start of this chapter from a 1905 letter by Lilien to his wife Helene. Here Lilien proclaimed definitively that Jews are ‘from the East – who have lived for centuries in Europe, the most suitable mediators between the cultures of the Orient and the Occident.’11 Like many of the other literary and artistic contributors to Ost und West, both Buber and Lilien had grown up in Eastern Europe, as opposed to the ‘eastern region of the Mediterranean’ or the Middle East. They understood the neoRomantic mysticism and appeal of the earthy Hasidic tradition. Ahad Ha’am – the pen name of Asher Ginsburg (1856–1927) – an important spiritual influence on Buber and the cultural Zionists, was also an Eastern European Jew, born in Skvira near Kiev in the Ukraine. Both Buber and Lilien understood the importance of the Middle East as central to the creation of a modern Jewish and Zionist identity. Buber and Lilien were important Berlin-based contributors to Ost und West. Their ideas, specifically in relation to how orientalism was imagined and employed by Western Jewry, are explored below.12

The cultural Zionists’ vision in Ost und West The early German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant and later German Romantic philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel considered German Jews to be ‘of the East’, and thus oriental or

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Asiatic interlopers  in Western and Christian Europe.13 Christian Wilhelm Dohm (1751–1820), a Prussian diplomat who had a brief correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn, understood the ‘degenerate and Asiatic character of the Jewish nation’ as a product of political and historical circumstance, even though he advocated for Jewish emancipation based on Enlightenment principles of universal rights and religious toleration.14 As Dohm saw it, the improvement of the Jews would require ‘the soldierly courage and physical fitness’ for the corporeal necessity of military service.15 Even as acculturated middle-class burghers who had participated in Germany’s rise to power as a mercantile, industrial, and modern nation by the end of the nineteenth century, the Jews’ ‘oriental provenance’ was neither ‘forgiven nor forgotten.’16 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Berlin lawyer Karl W. F. Grattenauer referred to the Jews as ‘an alien Asiatic people’ (Orientalisches Fremdlingsvolk) in his Wider die Juden (Against the Jews, 1803). Towards the end of the same century, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke pronounced that despite efforts at assimilation, German Jews were ‘incorrigibly oriental’ (unverfälschte Orientalen).17 No wonder the introduction of the racial term ‘antisemitism’ by Wilhelm Marr that same year was so insidious, as it focused on the oriental, Eastern, or racial origins of the Jews and thus recast Jews and Judaism as an ethnic people, a race apart. The implication that Jews were differentiated by race alone linked Marr’s racial epithet to the pseudo-scientific theories of Jewish racial inferiority that were endemic at the fin de siècle.18 Marr’s use of the classification ‘Semite,’ marked Jews as a Semitic race and deemed them to be Asiatic foreigners, destined to be outside the boundaries of the German nation and the German Volk altogether.19 The categorisation of Jews as an Eastern ‘other’ was difficult or problematic for a number of reasons. German-speaking Jews did not want to be reduced to a racial Asiatic category. Yet most Central European political and cultural Zionists, like Herzl, Nordau, Buber, and Lilien, looked towards the East as the source of national and secular Jewish identity. It was the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, the seat of ancient Jewish wisdom, and ‘the locus of the ancient history of the Jewish people.’20 The idea of the East provided a counterbalance to increasing antisemitism both in Germany (particularly after 1895) and in Eastern Europe. Jewish nationalism promised an inbuilt national identity, a source of moral regeneration, and a cure for the plight of the Jewish people in exile.21 Tensions between the goals of progress and Jewish renewal were exacerbated by the neo-Romantic, mystical, or anti-progressive ideas that were associated with the East, and embraced by cultural Zionists such as Buber and Lilien. These tensions between progress and renewal made arguments such as Marr’s racial epithets or issues surrounding what exactly constituted an Eastern/Oriental Jew even more complex. The tensions between progress and Romantic revivalism also reflected British, French, Russian, and German political and cultural engagement with the East, which continued during the nineteenth century. Each of these nineteenth-century major powers vied for colonial trade and national self-interest in the remaining eastern and southern regions of Europe and the Middle East. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, they were collapsing under the strained leadership of the last remaining Ottoman ruler, Sultan Abdul-Hamid II of Turkey. At the time of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, just after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878, the British tried to curb Russian control in Eastern

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Europe by occupying Cyprus, eventually taking control of Egypt in 1882.22 By the end of the century, and particularly after the Young Turks’ revolt in 1908, the image of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’ predominated. This added to the notion of the East (and parts of Eastern Europe) as a weak, backwards, static culture lacking both the industrialisation of the West and its cultural sophistication. The trope of the barbaric East and the sophisticated West (and vice versa) harks back to the earliest divisions created by the Christian church in the fourth century CE.23 From 1869 onwards, many leaders and well-off English travellers journeyed east to Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and Egypt as had earlier European pilgrims such as Chateaubriand.24 Their imagination was fired by the archaeological fragments on display in the British Museum and the Louvre that seemed to confirm the historical credibility of the biblical narratives about the Egyptian pharaohs of Exodus, the Assyrian Empire, and the cultures surrounding the Sea of Galilee at the time of Jesus. Europeans, like the fledgling Jewish nationalists, were fascinated by a similar quest to authenticate biblical narratives, geographical places, and the living ‘presence’ of the Scriptures through the new ‘science’ of archaeology. By the 1890s, the list of imperial adventurers included the future heir to the British throne, George, his older brother, Prince Albert Victor, and their cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II (Fig. 6.1).25

Figure 6.1  The Kaiser and Kaiserin at the Tomb of King David in Jerusalem. Photograph from a personal collection compiled by the Kaiserin and presented by her to Hugh, 5th Earl of Lonsdale. Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London, http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/ object/205018343, accessed 19 March 2014.

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These modern-day pilgrims were aided in the illusion of the East as an oriental fantasy after they stepped from the gates of Jerusalem’s Old City into Jaffa Road, where they could buy photographs of Arabs in ‘biblical poses’ or dress up in biblical costume (Fig. 6.2).26 The two Jerusalem studios located there were owned by Khalid Raad and Garabed Krikorian, both trained by the Armenian patriarch Yessayi Garabedian, one of the earliest photographic pioneers in Palestine.27 For these late-nineteenth-century Western travellers, the pungent smells, alien customs, overwhelming poverty, and the romantic adventure of seeing for oneself the ancient archaeology of the biblical period helped create a heady mix of ‘genuine’ history and exotic orientalism. This same sense of an ‘authentic’ national history gripped the imagination of some of the younger Jewish Zionists, including Buber and Lilien. Like other young European and nationalist groups agitating for self-determination, such as Young Italy (founded in 1832), Young Germany (Jung Deutschland, c. 1830–1850), and the Young Turks (formed after the political revolt of 1908), the Jungjüdische Bewegung was interested in modern, secular notions of democracy, socialism, and political freedom. Like other artistic and cultural breakaway movements such as Jung Wien (Young Vienna) and Jugendstil itself, Buber, Lilien, and the cultural Zionists were most interested in the promotion of a new type of secular and contemporary Jewish culture.28 As their counterparts in other nineteenth-century nationalist movements, such as the Magyar’s interest in folk music, they understood that the revival or preservation of peasant or Eastern European Jewish folk culture was a way to give ‘authentic expression to a way of life now past or about to disappear.’29

Figure 6.2  Garabed Krikorian (before 1914), cabinet portrait of the photographer’s niece and friend from Germany in local dresses kept at the studio for customers (Armenian Patriarchy, Jerusalem). Unknown photographer at the Armenian Convent (before 1914), Unknown female tourist in male Bedouin dress with accessories, dry-gelatin glass negative, modern print. Yeshayahu Nir, The Bible and Its Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land 1839–1899, 125. Courtesy of The National Library, Jerusalem.

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This fledgling group of cultural Zionists was actively involved in the creation of Ost und West, though not all the contributors were Zionists or members of the Jungjüdische Bewegung. Ost und West, as its title implies, was created to document the relationship and linkages between Eastern and Western Jews. Ost und West was co-edited in its first two years by the writers Davis Trietsch (1870–1935) and Leo Winz (1876–1952) and published under the auspices of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Berlin.30 Trietsch was from Dresden, a member of the Jungjüdische Bewegung, and the oldest of the group at thirty-one. He represented West European Jewry while Winz, at twenty-five and originally from the Ukraine, was the East European editor.31 At the age of twenty-seven, Lilien became the magazine’s official art editor, and Martin Buber, at twenty-three, the youngest of them all and the hero of the cultural Zionist movement was appointed to the editorial board.32 As if to highlight the importance of their mission to unite Eastern and Western Jews through the creation of a Jewish national culture, the first editorial was dedicated to ‘ancient Jewish life’ (altjüdische Leben). In the opening sentence, the journal declared that, ‘in our time, a noteworthy transformation is taking place’ (In unseren Tagen vollzieht sich eine bemerkenswerte Umwandlung). The religious Jewish life of old was being replaced by a modern Jewish Kulturnuance: The ancient Jewish life that has long been scorned and humiliated gets up and wraps itself in the robes of the new time and takes slow, incremental but firm steps up the stairs to the throne. Individual works that reflect the new creative forces are just now emerging, but every day brings us new signs of its impact on all areas. Our magazine wants to place itself in the service of this new sprit to which the future of Judaism belongs.33

The task of Ost und West was to restore the old life, ‘once humiliated and scorned’ (das hat lange verschmäht und erniedrigt gewesen), with the ‘modern clothes’ of a new spirit (neuen Geistes). Like Buber’s Jewish Renaissance, a term coined in the first journal’s article, it was dedicated to the regeneration of the positive values of the Orient. These values existed within the mystical and Romantic tradition that surrounded the Hasidim in Europe and paralleled the original authentic crucible of Jewish life in the Levant, as well as within the highly prized cultural, intellectual, cosmopolitan, and secular life of Central European Jewry. Most German-born Jews felt estranged from their Eastern European co-religionists, invoking and internalising the racist rhetoric of High German culture to condemn them (and not themselves) as a semi-Asian, negative stereotype in need of Western culture and education. The novelist Karl Emil Franzos, born and raised in Galicia like Lilien, referred to Polish Jews who lived in the Austro-Hungarian region of Galicia as Halb-Asien (half-Asian) and characterised them as ignorant Ostjuden who lived in squalor and superstition.34 Their lifestyle, clothing, and religious habits upset many Western Jews. These Eastern European Jews sought work and safety in the emerging cosmopolitan cities of Berlin, Munich, or Frankfurt, following the pogroms of 1881–1882, the October Revolution of 1905, and then the First World War. They were not only an embarrassing reminder to the more

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acculturated German Jews of an outdated way of life, but these interlopers came in an apparently never-ending stream. Whether they were just passing through Berlin, on their way westwards, or setting up home in the Scheunenviertel of Berlin, their numbers slowly increased in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.35 By 1910, nearly 21 per cent of Berlin’s Jewish population was foreign born.36 The vast majority of foreign-born Jews came from the Hapsburg Empire and Tsarist Russia.37 Most of the Austrian Jews came not only from Galicia, but also from Bohemia, Moravia, and Bukovina in Romania.38 They were from various strata of society ranging from religious or Orthodox Jewish homes to secular and socialist backgrounds. There were highly educated secular intellectuals, artists from the educated middle class, and students from Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and St Petersburg, studying at German universities. There were wealthy merchants, artisans, and very poor traders.39 With varying degrees of unity, many of the Eastern Europeanborn writers and intellectuals mingled with their Western-educated German brethren, on the editorial board of Ost und West. In the very first volume, there were only five or six (if one counts Buber) out of seventeen on the editorial board who either were born or had lived a significant part of their life in Eastern Europe. By the September issue of the first year, this had changed (Fig. 6.3). There were then twenty-seven board members of which fourteen (including Buber) came from Eastern Europe. Membership was now truly equitable. There was also an attempt to internationalise the board membership so that it included contributors from London, St Petersburg, Vienna, and Budapest.40 The most surprising choice for membership on the board was the philosemite and only female member, Nahida Remy, who had converted to Judaism in 1894. To appoint a female to the board in 1901 was a forward-thinking choice by the editors. Remy’s views still privileged the private role of the Jewish woman as wife and mother over her public role, even though by the time Ost und West was published she was already a well-known playwright and freelance writer. Her own gender ambivalence mirrored a similar trope among the male editors and board members of Ost und West, who seemed little interested in the social and political emancipation of Jewish women. The common theme that tied together this seemingly diverse group of Jews was their love of Jewish history, literature, art, and culture and the desire to reverse Jewish assimilation by constructing a new, modern, German Jewish identity that included both Eastern and Western forms of Jewishness.41 The subtitle of the monthly journal confirmed the importance of constructing a revitalised and reinvigorated modern Jewish identity: Illustrated Bimonthly Newsletter for Modern Judaism (Illustrierte Monatsschrift fur Modernes Judentum) remained the sub-heading and title page of the monthly magazine until 1906. After that, it was subtitled Illustrated Monthly Newsletter for the Whole of Judaism (Illustrierte Monatsschrift für das gesamte Judentum), a change that revealed a shift in emphasis, possibly to encourage a more general readership.42 Although these young German Jews may have been interested in building bridges between Eastern and Western Jewry in a universal message of Jewish unity, the journal was written in German and not Yiddish, Hebrew, or Arabic.43 The use of German was not a metaphor for domination, but a way of ensuring widespread

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Figure 6.3  Title Page, Ost und West, with list of sub-editors. Ost und West Issue 9, September 1901, 883–8 4. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica / http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/pageview/2584441, accessed 4 May 2018.

readership, because most Central European Jews read and communicated with each other in German. For their non-Jewish Central European brethren, German was also the common unifying language across disparate national and ethnic groups. They too were a possible source of readership. It is much harder to identify how many German-speaking Jews actually read Ost und West in those first ten years of its publication and were influenced by the construction of a counter-oriental Jewish identity. Ost und West certainly had a rather large readership within Germany and beyond its borders by 1906. According to the editor Leo Winz, between 1906 and 1914 the journal had anywhere between 16,000 and 23,000 subscribers.44 The Jewish population of Germany was 586,833 in 1900, 615,021 in 1910, and roughly 625,000 in 1914.45 Allowing for extra readership through families, cafés, reading rooms, and libraries, the subscriber numbers could be multiplied by three or more.46 The readership at its height was probably around 10 per cent of the German Jewish population, which suggests its appeal and influence was widespread.47 Ten per cent of Berlin’s Jews were employed in artistic or intellectual pursuits before the First World War, probably the main readers of the journal.48 Many of these Berlin Jews would also have come from Eastern Europe. In 1900, the number of non-German Jews or Eastern European Jews from Tsarist Russia, Galicia, Romania, Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary was around 41,000 or 7 per cent of the entire German population; this increased to 78,746 or 13 per cent of the

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population by 1910.49 By 1914, there were approximately 90,000 Jewish foreigners in the German Empire, or roughly just over 14 per cent of the population.50 The percentage of non-German Jews in Berlin was around 21 per cent by 1910, which meant that roughly one-fifth of Berlin’s Jewish community was foreign born. In other words, more German-born Jews read Ost und West than foreign, or Eastern European Jews, though in Berlin a proportionately large number of intellectuals and artists from Tsarist Russia and the Hapsburg monarchy regarded German language and culture with immense admiration.51 Writers, painters, actors, musicians, and journalists who ‘came to try their luck in the German capital’ would also have read Ost und West with interest.52 Outside the borders of Germany, in the Austrian-Hungarian territories of Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, and Hungary and in the Russian Empire, the readership of Ost und West is more difficult to determine. Special efforts were made to appeal to Russian readers in the hope that they would subscribe to the new journal.53 In the first year of publication, on the last page of the December issue, Ost und West advertised subscriptions to readers in various Russian cities including St Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Odessa, Riga, Vilna, Kiev, Charkow (Kharkov), Nizhny-Novgorod No.1,

Figure 6.4  Advertisement for Russian readers, Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 957–58. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica / http:// sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/pageview/2584920, accessed 4 May 2018.

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Kasan, and Tiflis (Tbilisi) (Fig. 6.4).54 This appeal to Russian Jews continued until 1906; the end was probably due to the increasing pogroms – beginning in Kishinev (Kishniev) in 1903, Kiev in 1905, and Bialystock in 1906 – which had reduced the size of the Russian readership. Russian readers at this time had enjoyed the fixed price of 4 rubles for a one-year subscription, but the turning point occurred when the pogroms affected Russian Jewish economic stability as people left their homes for safer surrounds.55 Ost und West seems to have countered this drop in Russian subscriptions by adding product advertisements. In 1907, illustrated advertisements appeared for the first time at the end of the journal, continuing until the journal’s demise in 1923.56

Lilien and Buber’s influence in the construction of a German Jewish Ost/West imagination One of the ‘unique features’ of Ost und West was the attention given to the visual arts.57 This was not accidental, as it was clear that Jewish artists were in the vanguard of the cultural Renaissance.58 The first editorial referred to the Jewish national soul as emanating from its art and poetry: ‘a Jewish art and poetry, which not merely by chance came from Jews … but [is the] one in which sobs the soul of the people and sings’ (Eine Jüdische Kunst und Dichtung, die nicht bloss zufällig von Juden stammt … in der die Volksseele schluchzt und singt).59 There were numerous articles on Jewish painters, sculptors, and illustrators, some of which occasionally extended beyond twenty pages. By 1902, the list of members on the editorial board included intellectuals attuned to the central concern of the journal, no matter where they were located. In the area of visual arts, this included the addition of Lilien, the Polish-born impressionist artist Lesser Ury, and the Russian orientalist scholar on Jewish art Baron David Günzburg.60 The board members also included the two leading Zionist thinkers on the importance of cultural revival, Russian-born Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg) (1856–1927), and Austrian-born Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937) (known by the pseudonym Mathias Acher). This emphasis on Jewish art and Jewish literature can be traced to the immense influence of Martin Buber.61 As the only cultural Zionist interested in the Hasidim, Buber, however, had a substantial intellectual influence on the Jungjüdische movement and on Ost und West. Buber idealised the pious, joyful Hasidim and admired their Yiddish culture. He sought to nurture in the West an interest in spiritual life similar to that of the Hasidim, and to make this focus, along with Hebrew, a crucial part of Jewish national culture.62 In the very first issue, Buber wrote his proclamation regarding a Jüdische Renaissance or Jewish rebirth, which also spoke of the inner yearnings of the Jewish folk for their Jewish soul.63 His ode to a Jüdische Renaissance was published in the first edition as a way of signalling the journal’s political platform. In the second issue of the journal (nine months before the Fifth Zionist Congress was to meet), Buber championed the artwork of Lesser Ury, whose paintings were less known than the leading German Jewish impressionist artist of the day, Max Liebermann.64 Buber argued that Ury’s large, monolithic re-creations of ancient, heroic

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biblical figures in Jerusalem (1896) and in the triptych The Human Being (1897), Adam and Eve (1898), and the brooding Jeremiah (1899) were all ‘monumental moments in eternity’ (monumentalen Momente in der Ewigkeit) (Fig. 6.5).65 Ury’s large-scale, Jewishthemed artworks were based on the Hebrew Bible, in contrast to his better-known impressionist scenes of everyday café life in the modern metropolis of Berlin. Buber claimed that Ury’s art was a perfect example of the way modernist German Jewish art and culture should be experienced. According to Buber, Jewish art should have Jewish themes that are articulated through the use of metaphor, colour, and form.66 In addition to his praise of Ury’s monumental art works in Ost und West, Buber idealised the religious life of Eastern European Jews while abhorring their silent, submissive behaviour. Buber was born in Vienna but, like Lilien, grew up surrounded by the spiritual traditions and customs of the Galician Hasidim, so he was influenced by their connection to a mystical God who required daily devotional practice. His Galician Jewish grandparents lived in Lwów (Lemberg), at that time part of the Hapsburg Empire, and were members of the Mitnagdim, the movement opposing Hasidism. His grandfather was a rabbinic scholar of Midrash.67 Buber’s interest in the religious traditions of mysticism was similar to other literary and artistic luminaries in Austria, Hungary, or Germany. Inspired by the neo-Romantic ideas of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the generation between 1890 and the First World War was fascinated

Figure 6.5 Postcard of the 1896 painting by Lesser Ury, Jerusalem, c. 1920, published by the Deutsch-Israelitischer gemeindebund, Berlin. Courtesy of Kedem Auction House, Ltd. Available at: https://www.kedem-auctions.com/content/eight-jewish-postcards-%E2%80%93published-deutsch-israelitischer-gemeindebund-berlin, accessed 4 May 2018.

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by oriental literature and traditions.68 Many fin-de-siècle artists and thinkers were as disenchanted with modernity as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and they yearned for an inner, or mystical ‘Salvation’ (Erlösung).69 What Buber uncovered and admired in the Hasidim was their ecstatic erlebnis, or lived experience, an inner, mystical sanctification of everyday life that paralleled the anti-positivist Lebensphilosophie of neo-Romanticism.70 Buber became one of the leading writers on mysticism and myth in pre-World War I Germany. Between 1906 and the outbreak of war, he produced numerous books on the mystical traditions of Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity, beginning with Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (The Tales of Rabbi Nachman, 1906) and Die Legende des Baalschem (The Legend of the Baal Shem Tov, 1908).71 This new positive image of the Orient, which preferred the spiritual realm to the progress of rationalism and the bourgeois materialism of conservative Vienna and Berlin, affected Western Jews such as Buber. They evaluated their oriental origins, and their relationship with their European brethren against the positive mysticism and myth of the Orient.72 In fact, Buber’s ideas on the importance of Eastern European Jews as the embodiment of Jewish authenticity lost to the world of Western Jews is one of the major tenets of cultural Zionism.73 These ideas were later published in the book Vom Judentum (1912–1914) by Kurt Wolff, himself a leading patron of Expressionism.74 The book’s three opening essays under the title Jüdische Wesen (Jewish Being) – written by Jacob Wasserman (1873–1934), Hans Kohn (1891–1971), and Karl Wolfskehl (1869–1948) – were all influenced by Buber’s ideas on cultural renewal. The titles of these pieces – Wasserman’s Der Jude als Orientale (The Jew as Oriental), Kohn’s Der Geist von der Orient (The Spirit of the Orient), and Wolfskehl’s poem, Das Geheimnis der Juden (The Secret of the Jews) – convey a newfound pride in Jewish metaphysics. They also recalled the völkish-racialist, anti-liberal, pan-German ideology of some Austrian and German politicians and writers such as Georg Ritter von Schönerer (1842–1921).75 Kohn, the only non-German among them (he was a Viennese scholar of modern nationalism), wrote the foreword in which he also acknowledged that ‘the Occident has turned to the Orient’ in order to revitalise European culture and spiritual sensibility.76 The same emphasis on race and a simple duality between the oriental and the occidental are reflected in Buber’s essay, ‘The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism,’ published in the same book. Buber challenges racial science with his own racial rhetoric as he defines the oriental as a man (sic) of motor faculties, in contrast to the Greek of the Periclean period, the Italian of the Trecento, or the contemporary German. Like other ‘Oriental types of human being,’ he states, ‘recognisable in the documents of Asia’s antiquity as well as in the Chinese or Indian or Jew of today,’ the motor man comprehends the world in terms of sensations, motion, fertility, and becoming. The occidental instead classifies things according to appearance and remains static and sterile; he can never become, but can only be.77 Buber fashions a new Jewish cultural and national identity based on ideas appropriated from European neo-Romanticism, Lebensphilosophie, and pseudo-racial theory. Buber preferred to maintain life and mystery over outdated Jewish law, Kantian logic, and German

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(Jewish) Bildung.78 Buber’s critique of the figures in Ury’s vision of Jerusalem reflects these similar contradictions.79 Ury’s monochromatic painting of Jerusalem depicts the mourners who have gathered by the river in Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem in approximately 586 BCE. Nine people sit on a low bench, like the bereaved at a Jewish funeral, staring into space. Buber interprets the painting as a metaphor for modern Jewish suffering, particularly that of his Eastern European brethren. The first figure, an old man, is described as being steadfast in his faith, gazing towards the Beyond, the place from ‘where the invisible One listens’ but is silent. Another old man is portrayed in biomedical terms: Here we see degeneration, but the specific Jewish degeneration that created sick, half-clever, half-crazy desire for life and a sick mysticism. Here we see the horrible wounds … that shook Shabbatai [Zvi]. Here we see the strongest representation of the galut (Diaspora) types in his peculiar pathology … completely filled with crippled possibilities, a horrible inner field of corpses.80

These Eastern European Jews are submissive, silent, degenerate types. Like his earlier dismissal of the ghetto or galut Jews in ‘Jüdischer Renaissance,’ they will be saved by the ‘fresh strength’ of  ‘the young, daring and hopeful through whose noble Semitic head  … who sings the song of the ‘‘New Jerusalem” .’81 Buber praises Ury’s work as ‘the work of a Jewish artist … the poet of a Jewish soul,’ but he also warns that Ury represents today’s new Jew ‘who is angry with his people because he loves them.’82 Lilien’s illustrations depict the same love–hate relationship between the Eastern European and Western European Jews, although his first image deliberately concentrated on the positive links between the Eastern European and Western European Jew (Fig. 6.6). A young woman appears on the left (or perhaps symbolically the western) side of the page. With her flowing hair, medieval blouse, and matching bejewelled cap, she recalls similar images of pure, pre-Raphaelite, virginal beauty by Dante Gabriel Rossetti or William Holman Hunt. Scattered over her dress is the symbol of the Magen David. Lilien had already used this motif in Juda to signify modern Jewish identity.83 The emblem also appears in her hair, on the wall behind her, and layered over the other significant icon of modern Judaism revived by Lilien – the Menorah. The young woman appears to be an early representation of Jewish nationalism, the Zionist equivalent of a Germania, Marianne, or Britannia. Although she appears to be hale and hearty, a metaphor for all things Western and Jewish, she is wrapped in thorns, a common Art Nouveau symbol for suffering (one usually linked to Christ). This is not the first time Lilien resorts to using thorns as a metaphor for Jewish suffering or the Magen David. In his Congresskarte (Fig. 2.6), an advertisement for the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, an old thin man with a long white beard and dressed in the kaftan of a religious Ostjuden is wrapped in thorns, looking to the East for salvation. Surrounding this pastoral utopia are the Hebrew words of the Amidah prayer, a part of the Jewish liturgy repeated three or more times on Sabbath

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Figure 6.6  E. M. Lilien, Cover illustration, Ost und West, 1901–1906.

mornings: ‘I lift my eyes to Zion in compassion and understanding’. The use of a liturgical quote by Lilien was meant to emphasise the importance placed upon a literary return to Zion. It also linked him with the thinking of rabbis Yehuda Hai Alkalai (1798–1878) and Zwi Hirsch Kalisher (1795–1874), both of whom belonged to an earlier generation of Jewish nationalists who helped associate religious orthodoxy with Jewish modernity.84 Lilien’s woman on the cover of Ost und West (Fig. 6.6) may not be from the West at all; she could be read as a young Jewish woman from Eastern Europe. She appears directly under the word Ost in the title of the journal (as opposed to the word West), and she points to the small growth that appears within the thorns, possibly a symbol for the growth of Zionism and the promise of a better connection between the East and the crucible of the West, a crowned enthroned bauble.85 She could represent the merging of both into a robust, unified, and healthy nation. Lilien’s cover for Ost und West also recalls the image of Princess Sabbath (Fig. 7.4) that he created for Juda. In Juda, however, Lilien’s Jewish woman is depicted as the spiritual muse for the Sabbath, a similar but slightly more mystical version of his Zionist metaphor for ancient Israel.86

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Just as Buber pointed out the common fate of all Jews through Jewish suffering in Ury’s work, the thorns in Lilien’s opening illustration reminded readers of the common link between all Jews. This would have been a deliberate ploy by Lilien, as he collaborated on the cover illustration with Leo Winz, the journal’s Eastern European editor. Indeed, Lilien worked with Winz on other art projects, including Winz’s logo for his Verlag, because they offered fresh opportunities for creative iconography and the chance for a struggling artist to be paid (Fig. 6.7).87 Lilien’s graphic illustrations appeared throughout the journal’s first seven years of publication. They were often taken from Juda or his next illustrated book, Lieder des Ghetto (Fig. 7.8).88 There were small vignettes throughout the journal, and together with his opening illustration, they formed the journals’ bookends (Fig. 6.9). Many of his bookplates were reviewed and documented in Ost und West, while articles on Lilien’s life and work continued to appear at least up until 1904.89 Overall, Lilien’s Jugendstil illustrations set the aesthetic tone of the journal. Buber, from the outset his main advocate and mentor, loved the Jugendstil aesthetic and later used leading Jugendstil artists to design his own book covers, lettering, and title pages. Buber commissioned Peter Behrens (1868–1940), a founding member of the Munich Secession movement and the Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst und Handwerk (United Workshop for Art and Craft), to create the cover and endpapers for each of the forty volumes of his work on sociology, Die Gesellschaft.90 Buber embraced Jugendstil for the same reasons he supported Lilien. Fashionable among the cultural bourgeoisie in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Jugendstil represented a revolt against the static, conservative, and imitative historicism that had been in vogue since the 1860s (though enthusiasm waned among the avant-garde by 1906 in favour of Expressionism).91

Figure 6.7  E. M. Lilien, Logo for Leo Winz & Co., Kunstverlag Phönix, Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 955. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica http://sammlunen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/preview/2584914, accessed 4 May 2018.

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Figure 6.8  E. M. Lilien, Cover illustration, Lieder des Ghetto, 1903. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 121.

For Buber, Lilien’s aesthetic was the most appropriate manifestation of this mindset: anti-bourgeois and anti-materialistic while engaged in a synthesis of a new national, spiritual, and cultural identity. Lilien, as the art editor, took the opportunity to educate the urbane Jewish readership on less well-known ancient and contemporary European Jewish artists’ work. The journal showcased many illustrations and photographs by leading Central European artists known in the non-Jewish world, such as the impressionist painter Max Liebermann, the nineteenth-century fresco painter Eduard Bendemann (1811–1889), and the Dutch painter Josef Israëls (1824–1911).92 Articles on up-and-coming Central European Jewish artists such as Isidor Kaufmann (1853–1921) from Hungary, Hermann Struck (1876–1944) from Germany, or Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879) from Drohobycz, who often created portraits of Eastern European shtetl Jews, appeared next to articles on less well-known Polish and Russian Jewish artists such as Samuel Hirszenberg (1865–1908), Leopold Pilichowski (1869–1933), and Leonid Pasternack, father of poet and novelist Boris Pasternack (1862–1945).93 In a bid to create a market for a Jewish art, Lilien also championed the work of young, struggling Jewish artists in Ost und West. In a letter to readers in the second year of publication, he angrily ridicules rich Berlin Jews who were neither

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Figure 6.9  Vignette by Lilien appearing on the last page of every issue of Ost und West Issue 1, January 1901, 297–98. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale SammlungenJudaica/http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/2608726, accessed 4 May 2018.

buying nor supporting Jewish artists.94 Their disloyalty, he opines, is a disgrace, and he chastises them saying: As long as the principle dominates among rich Jews … that they promote only non-Jewish art and science … Jewish artists will have to rely on themselves. Few will be able … to win the attention of non-Jewish circles … I myself have seen many gifted people die along the way. How much Jewish tragedy was present there, how much idealism, how much hope was buried there!95

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In the same letter, he asks the readers of Ost und West to support Regina Mundlak, a young, struggling, female artist from a small village near Lomza (a city in northeastern Poland) who needed financial help to remain in Berlin. He desperately pleads her case, arguing that although Max Liebermann has declared her talented and has given her some financial support, she still needed further patronage.96 The editors of Ost und West battled ‘against this attitude of neglect’ and apathy among many German Jews for their fellow Jewish artists.97 The journal sought to unite Western and Eastern Jews through the promotion of the artistic achievements of both Western and Eastern contemporary Jewish artists. Lilien’s cover (Fig. 6.6) illustrated the emphasis on Jewish suffering, another approach taken to unite these two differing groups. The first issue reinforced this common image of sorrow and anguish. The image of Die Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) forced to wander the world in exile was the first illustration to appear in the journal and became a prominent trope (Figs. 6.10 and 6.11).98 As a clarion call to unite all Jews under the umbrella of Zionism, the editors of Ost und West communicated that without a Jewish homeland, the wandering Jew could still apply. This rather modest sculpture by Nossig of an ancient bearded Jewish elder wandering the globe, clutching a Torah scroll in one hand and staff in the other, was replaced in 1902 by a more alarming version (Fig. 6.12). Harking back to the pogroms of 1881, Hirszenberg’s 1899 Der Ewige Jude runs wide-eyed through a valley of dead bodies dressed only in a loincloth.99

Figure 6.10  Alfred Nossig, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), Ost und West Issue 1, January 1901, 5. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/2608151, accessed 4 May 2018.

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Figure 6.11  Samuel Hirszenberg, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), Ost und West Issue 10, October 1902, 661–62. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/ Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/ titleinfo/2586159, accessed 4 May 2018.

Hirszenberg received a warm reception for this passionate polemic at the Paris Exposition of 1900.100 Holding his hand towards his face in shock, Hirszenberg’s bearded and religious eternal Jew is overshadowed by wooden crosses (or wooden telegraph poles) that bend eerily towards the stumbling figure. Possibly the judges thought his work paralleled the image of Christ on the Cross, recalling the wood engraving of The Wandering Jew by Doré. Both Buber and Lilien had already understood Hirszenberg’s artistic brilliance, as his work had appeared in their Jewish art exhibition at the Fifth Zionist Congress just ten months before the article in Ost und West was published. Like Nossig’s earlier image, Hirszenberg’s image of Jewish suffering subverted Doré’s staffholding Jew forced to wander the world with the sign of Cain on his forehead (until Jesus’s second coming) as a punishment for rejecting Jesus.101 Hirszenberg’s depiction of Jewish suffering hung in a prominent position at the Bezalel art school in Jerusalem. A few years later in 1906, the school’s director Boris Schatz ensured his photograph was taken with visiting dignitaries in front of the image. Winz’s press, the Kunstlerverlag Phönix, also featured a series of Hirszenberg’s works made into posters and postcards, including Doré’s engraving.102 Buber and Lilien’s relationship with Herzl and the political movement of Zionism changed with their first Jewish art exhibition. It was at this exhibition, while the Congress was under way, that Buber, Lilien, and the other members of the Jungjüdische Bewegung broke from the Zionist party, creating their own splinter group, the Democratic Fraction.103 Buber, Lilien, and their fellow cultural Zionists

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Berthold Feiwel, Chaim Weizmann, and Davis Trietsch believed that the importance of a spiritual and cultural Renaissance in Jewish culture was more important to them than their fellow political Zionists’ emphasis on political nationhood – an action that upset Herzl. For some time Buber and Lilien became Herzl’s bitter enemies.104 While there is no mention of the split in Herzl’s report on the December 1901 Congress in the first issue of Ost und West, the issue mentions, albeit only on the very last page, the establishment of the Jüdischer Verlag, the first Jewish press to publish complete anthologies of stories, poems, and artworks (Fig. 6.12).105 The essential premise of the Press was to ‘bring together and fulfil the deep needs – the creative need … and the people on the other hand.’106 Under Buber’s guidance, the first Jüdischer Almanach was published in 1902 and the second in 1904. Both of these yearbooks focused on showcasing artwork by new and promising Jewish artists. Many of these artworks had already appeared in both Ost und West and the exhibition at the Fifth Zionist Congress.107 The two Jewish almanacs used Lilien and Buber’s growing network of Jewish artists and writers to establish the Press’s ongoing success. By the time Herzl died (3 July 1904) at the age of forty-four, Buber – the inspiration for this young, short-lived movement – had thought a great deal about the political leader of Jewish nationalism. In the August/September issue of Ost und West, 1904, Buber dedicated one of his finest articles to Herzl.108 Entitled ‘Herzl und die Histoire’

Figure 6.12 Notice on the Jüdischer Verlag, Ost und West Issue 1, January 1902, 65–66. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http:// sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/2585060, accessed 4 May 2018.

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(Herzl and History), the article discussed Herzl as a great leader but not a great Jew.109 Knowing how important the merging of Eastern mysticism with Western neo-Romantic and Jewish national sentiments was to Buber, what appears striking is how clearly he differentiates between Eastern and Western Jewry in his criticism of Herzl: Herzl was a Western Jew without Jewish tradition, without Jewish childhood knowledge. He grew up in a non-Jewish environment and never interacted with the Jewish masses; no human being was as foreign to him as a working class Jew … he was a whole man, but he was not a whole Jew. … As a Jew he always seemed to be half and incomplete. It is fundamentally wrong to celebrate him as a Jewish personality. There was nothing fundamentally Jewish in Theodor Herzl.110

Buber’s criticism of Herzl’s Jewishness was not meant to detract from his importance as ‘the first Jew to conduct politics in exile.’111 This, he says, ‘will never be forgotten,’ as Herzl ‘has negotiated on behalf of our people with the rulers of Europe. This fact cannot remain unrecorded in our history.’112 Instead, Buber praises the three main contributors to Jewish nationalism and culture – Moses Hess, Leo Pinsker, and Nathan Birnbaum – for their integration of Western and Eastern Jewish learning rather than their political agility.113 Hess, Pinsker, and Birnbaum had a more nuanced understanding of the place that Jewish religious, spiritual, and cultural values had in the promotion of national ideals, something Buber attributes to birth and education: Hess was a Western Jew, who, as a descendant of Eastern Jewish rabbis, received the profound impressions that … the tenor of life in … living Judaism … is ultimately more national than religious. … Pinsker was an Eastern Jew with a Western education; he grew up amid the Jewish masses surrounded by their misery. … In this way the suffering of his tribe seeped into his blood and nerves. … Birnbaum [was the] … most fortunate mixture of Eastern and Western Judaism and the strongly instinctive understanding of the working class psyche, which is the basic problem of the Jewish movement.114

Buber suggests that the combination of Eastern European religious values and erlebnis, with Western principles of social equality, national self-determination, and neoRomantic longing, is essential to Jewish regeneration. The Eastern European Jew was the embodiment of the oriental Jew, even though the poor Mizrahi Jews of Palestine were considered a necessary and secondary part of Buber’s orientalist imagination.115 Buber composed a poem titled Elijahu (Elijah) that summed up his growing desire for a more mystical or Eastern relationship with God, which foreshadowed his move away from public life in 1905 to study and write about Hasidism and spirituality.116 Like Elijahu, Buber is being chastised by God for not seeking a more spiritual path. In the second last stanza, he writes: You (Elijah) wanted to see a young thing on fire with sudden force Towards the blessed poem of new growth.

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You searched for me in your fiery depths And did not find me.

In the last stanza God’s messenger, Elijah finds Buber and tells him to turn inwards: Then my messenger found you and put Your ear to the quiet life of my soil. There you felt the life in the seed, And you were enveloped in the aura of growth. Blood flowed and you were silent. Eternally full, soft and motherly, Then you had to turn to yourself; There you found me.117

Buber pulled away from public life at this point and remained as silent as Elijah. Only in 1916, in the middle of the First World War with increased German antisemitism, did Buber re-establish his public profile with the editorship of the Zionist, cultural, monthly journal Der Jude. The journal’s name was a courageous polemic given the heated debate about the Judenzählung (Jewish census) instigated by the Kaiser that year.118 Buber’s new journal reaffirmed that the discussion of literary, historical, philosophical, religious, political, and sociological issues begun in the pages of Ost und West a decade before were still relevant. The war years, with their ‘attendant antisemitism and particularly the encounter with the East European masses’ on the Eastern front gave Der Jude and the Jewish Renaissance an added impetus.119 The war had also led many German Jewish soldiers to meet with Eastern Jews; letters written home often spoke ‘in glowing terms of the Ur-Jews’ and their ‘ideal land of Judaism.’120 Eastern Jews were once again given special attention by assimilated and disaffected German Jews in the wake of Buber’s affirmative Jewish discourse. Moreover, Buber’s respectful approach to Eastern European Jewish culture was often absent from political Zionist rhetoric.

Lilien’s vision of the Ost (Mizrahi) Juden Two new artworks by Lilien were showcased in the same issue of Ost und West where Buber’s critique of Herzl had appeared. Both artworks reflected Buber’s idea that European Jews were the true beneficiaries of the spiritual life of their ancient Jewish ancestors. The images depict a yearning for their ancestors’ spiritual knowledge yet condemn them for their (Diaspora) mentality. Both images are entitled Father and Son, though in the second (Fig. 6.16), the title is in the plural, Väter und Söhne (Fathers and Sons). Vater und Sohn in Figure 6.13 depicts a father and son walking home in the snow, most probably from daily prayer at the local shule (synagogue). The son wears a woollen hat and coat as a protection against the cold, but the father holds his hand tightly as if to ward off any invasion of the religious sanctity that he has passed down

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Figure 6.13  E. M. Lilien, Vater und Sohn, Ost und West Issue 12, December 1904, 817–18. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Kunstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 141.

to his son. The father is dressed in the traditional outfit of the Hasidim, slippers and stockings on his feet, a fur streimel on his head signifying his particular sect, and a tallis (prayer shawl) around his shoulders. They are surrounded by a large expanse of white, presumably the snow that also has a ‘sublime,’ neo-Romantic quality as if the snow or picture space references the world of Geist. This image is only one of two surviving illustrations that were deliberately created for the Russian (later Soviet) political activist Maxim Gorki (1868–1936). In 1902, Lilien travelled to Russia with Gorki, the same year he created a personal bookplate for his friend. The image reveals a bare-chested Gorki breaking the whip of Tsarist tyranny (Fig. 6.14). Gorki already championed oppressed Jewish people in Russia, and Lilien went to Russia with the intention of illustrating an anthology of Jewish literature to be edited by Gorki.121 Entitled Zbornik, the collection was never published: their work was interrupted by the Kishinev pogrom (1903) when the Jewish community of Kishinev, the capital city of Bessarabia, was violently attacked. Many women, children, and men were killed, and the survivors were forced to flee. The pogrom was condemned by several Jewish and non-Jewish public figures, including Gorki, Leo Tolstoy, and Vladimir Korolenko, who wrote a poem about the tragedy (‘Dom trinadtsatyj’ [House No. 13]). Lilien reacted to the horrific event by creating a stark image of Jewish suffering (Fig. 6.15).122 The drawing evokes images of Jewish infidels being burnt alive

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Figure 6.14  E. M. Lilien, Ex-libris Maxim Gorki, 1902. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Kunstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 96.

in their prayer shawls during the Inquisition. Above the Jewish martyr is an angel who kisses his head and rescues the Torah, the holy word of God, from destruction. In the background lies the Russian city of Kishinev. Lilien’s second image for Ost und West titled Fathers and Sons, was also based on the Kishinev pogrom (Fig. 6.16). Jewish survivors are depicted on the left, trudging through snow, following the Nordic horseback-riding Angel of Death, who is brandishing a scythe. On the right, the Jewish sons of these Russian Jewish peasant survivors have joined the Tsar’s Russian army, compulsory for all first-born Jewish sons at this time. Although the soldiers are there to provide first aid, they no longer remain a part of their Jewish community. Both groups – the survivors and the soldiers – look at each other across the expanse of white page with suspicion and horror. A naked angel, perhaps mimicking the strength of those muscular Jewish soldiers (who look a little like Theodor Herzl himself), takes up a whip, while hiding his eyes to defend his ancient brood. Lilien’s imagery is a stark depiction of Buber’s Manichean divide, mentioned in Von Judentum, between ‘the spirit of the Orient’ as manifested

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Figure 6.15  E. M. Lilien, Le-Metim ‘al kidush ha-shem be-Kishinov (Dedicated to the Martyrs of Kishinev), Den Märtyrern von Kishinew, 1903. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Kunstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 137.

Figure 6.16  E. M. Lilien, Väter und Söhne, Ost und West Issue 12, December 1904, 813–14. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http:// sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/2591181, accessed 4 May 2018.

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in the customs and traditions of the pre-industrial East or Eastern European Jew, and the encroaching influence of the secular forces of the West.123 This work conveys Lilien’s own confusion over the Kishinev pogrom that may have challenged his interest in socialism and Zionism. He may have anguished over the notion that the nonJewish downtrodden or working classes were to blame for the horrors of Kishinev.124 Many Russian Jewish intellectuals and revolutionaries were more interested in classbased revolution from below rather than involving themselves in what they saw as a Jewish struggle for national self-determination. Lilien’s work sensitively portrays the complex issues surrounding secular and religious loyalties at play in Eastern European Jewish life. Buber’s accounts of the spiritual values of the Hasidim were read with growing curiosity in Ost und West. A similar groundswell of interest occurred in the Jewish communities, which lived in the Ottoman Empire of the East under Sultan AbdulHamid II, in places such as Turkey, Yemen, and Palestine. These original Oriental Jews, still living in the ancient lands of Jewish history, were often cited as the most authentic living example of the biblical Hebrews.125 Ost und West zealously dedicated itself to the regeneration of these Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews. In the first year of publication, Ost und West had published articles on exotic Jewry with titles such as ‘Betende Juden aus Kaukasien’ (The Jews of the Caucasus Mountains), ‘Eine Jüden aus Buchara’ (A Jewess from Bukhara), ‘Jüdische Mädchen aus Kurdistan’ (Jewish Girl from Kurdistan), and ‘Exotische Juden’ (Exotic Jews): these covered three Jewish female types: Cochin in India, Tétouan in Morocco, and China and Tangiers (Fig. 6.17).126 Many of these articles displayed photographs of Jewish people from Asia to Africa. They were often listed under the table of contents page for that year in Ost und West as Jüdische Typen (Jewish types), conjuring up images of the mysterious and colourful Orient with their exotic costumes and jewellery, also recalling the wider practice of classifying races using the new medium of photography. The fascination of the cultural Zionists with the remaining non-European Jewish communities in Central Asia, East Asia, North Africa, and Palestine harked back not only to the Western perception of the Orient as inherently primitive and barbaric (yet simultaneously alluring and exotic), but also to the regeneration of ancient Hebrew as a spoken language. This revival, begun by Ahad Ha’am, was based on the acceptance of the Eastern (or Sephardic) pronunciation of Hebrew rather than the Ashkenazic pronunciation. The remaining Mizrahi communities were the only Jewish people who still spoke Hebrew in this way – a further reason for German Jews to be captivated by them. Buber emphasised the importance of modern Hebrew for providing the ‘true words’ and an ‘internal home’ for Zionism. In his opening address in the first issue he states that ‘The [movement] will create an internal home … by giving us a modern language in modern Hebrew that can provide us alone with the true words for the pleasure and pain of our Soul.’127 Buber confirms the importance placed on modern Hebrew by calling the revival ‘the joy and sorrow of our soul’ (Freude und Leid unserer Seele).128 These images of oriental ‘ethnic types’ documented in Ost und West, became important models for the first generation of Palestinian Jewish artists who studied under Lilien and Boris Schatz when the Bezalel art school was opened.129

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Figure 6.17  3 Jüdische Frauentypen von Cochin in Indien (3 Jewish female types from Cochin in India), Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 933–34. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ cm/periodical/2584903, accessed 4 May 2018.

These photographs of ‘Jewish types’ have the appearance of being part of a large, empirical, racial study that used the new medium of photography to defend its cause. These pseudo-scientific studies investigated the bio-medical ideas of racial degeneration and often depicted their subjects in similar front-on (or side-on) facial portraits. Some of the most widely known examples of these portraits were Francis Galton’s photographs of Jewish students taken in London in 1891, which pathologised

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Jewish difference.130 The images of Jüdische Typen in Ost und West capture positive differences of Jewish racial characteristics, but seem uncomfortably similar to these pseudo-scientific studies (Fig. 6.18). Galton’s photographs also recall a study undertaken by the American anthropologist Maurice Fishberg (1872–1934) entitled The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (1911). Fishberg countered the pseudo-scientific racial theories prevalent at the fin de siècle with an empirical study that concluded that there were many different types of Jewish national physiognomy but no single unifying one. He used works by European Jewish artists, including Lilien, Maurycy Gottlieb, Samuel Hirszenberg, and Isidor Kaufmann to convey that they were ‘invariably caricature.’131 Fishberg also points out the danger these ‘Jewish nationalists’ caused by praising Jewish racial difference and thereby corroborating the opinion that they are aliens in Europe: It appears that the prevailing opinion is that the Jews, alleged to have maintained themselves in absolute racial purity for three or four thousand years, may prove hard to assimilate. On the one hand we have those Jews who take great pride in the purity of their breed, and, on the other hand, the people among whom they live who see a peculiar peril in the prospect of indefinitely harbouring an alien

Figure 6.18  Francis Galton, Photographs of Jewish Londoners, 1891. In Maurice Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (London; New York; Melbourne: The Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1911), 66–7. On the right are the original photographs of Jewish students at a London school. On the left Galton superimposed the original photographs to produce a multiple exposure that created just four ‘types’ of Jews.

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race which is not likely to mix with the general population. This apprehension is confirmed by the Jewish nationalists who look for repatriation in Palestine … thus corroborating the opinion that they are aliens in Europe … waiting for the opportunity to retreat to their natural home in Asia.132

The need to classify, order, and objectify ancient national characteristics and Jewish difference according to a similar system of pseudo-scientific analysis and fin-desiècle cultural anthropology confirms the racial contradiction at the heart of cultural Zionism. The desire to authenticate ancient oriental roots in response to ongoing racial vilification at home in Central and Eastern Europe was both compelling and urgent (Fig. 6.19). Artists such as Lilien were eager to visit Palestine and see for themselves some of these ‘genuine’ local ‘types.’ The irony was that so many of Lilien’s drawings from his first two trips to the Holy Land are carefully observed portraits of exotic Eastern Jews, recalling empirical photographs of ‘ethnic’ types encountered in Ost und West. The problematics of Jewish alterity in fin-de-siècle Europe led Lilien and Buber to applaud Jewish difference and accept notions of Jewish Rassenkraft or Jewish Volkpersönlichkeit. Lilien’s biblical illustrations for Die Bücher der Bibel may have helped perpetuate the notion of the Eastern Jew as an exotic, even backward oriental, as Fishberg’s study concluded. Nevertheless, the popularity of his images of

Figure 6.19  Maurice Fishberg, Photographs of a Polish Jew, a Galician Jew and a Russian Jewess. In Fishberg, The Jews, A Study of Race and Environment (London; New York; Melbourne: The Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1911), 115.

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genuine Jewish Asiatics/orientals encountered in Palestine meant a large amount of Lilien’s oeuvre – from the drawing of Vom Ghetto nach Zion (Fig. 2.6) to the portrayals of Jewish men and women from Jerusalem – were reprinted as a series of popular postcards in the early 1920s (Figs. 6.20 and 6.21). Ost und West also published scholarly articles on the architecture of the temple and early synagogues of Asia Minor as well as the origins of the Orient itself.133 These articles helped fuel Lilien’s interest in Jewish symbols and iconography and were among the first to appear on Judaica, medieval manuscripts, and evolving synagogue architecture.134 Baron David Günzburg, on the journal’s editorial board and an advocate for Jewish art, had just published a book on the oriental motifs of the Hebrews, L’ornament Hébreu (The Hebrew Ornament),135 which included examples of Jewish ornamentation from Syrian, African, and Yemenite manuscripts and would have impressed Lilien (Fig. 6.22).136 Many paintings of classical masters from the Renaissance onwards portraying biblical or oriental themes were reviewed in Ost und West. The journal highlighted many biblical female figures such as Eve, Rebecca, the daughters of Jethro, and Judith. These included Nicolas Poussin’s Moses beschützt Jethro’s Töchter (Moses Protecting

Figure 6.20 Postcard, Jude aus Jemen (Jew from Yemen), c. 1920s. Courtesy of Barbara Simon.

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Figure 6.21 Postcard, Kopf einer Jüdin (Head of a Jewess [from Jerusalem]), c. 1920s. Courtesy of Barbara Simon.

Figure 6.22  Jewish ornamentation from Syria? Parchment found in the Cairo Genizah, David Baron Günzburg, L’Ornament Hébreu (The Hebrew Ornament) (Berlin: Cavalry, 1905), 20. Courtesy of J. C. S., Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/ Digitale Sammlung Judaica/ http:// sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/freimann/content/pageview/265871, accessed 4 May 2018.

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Figure 6.23  Horace Vernet, Judith mit dem Haupte des Holofernes (Judith with the head of Holofernes), Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 693–94. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/ cm/periodical/pageview/2584467, accessed 4 May 2018.

Figure 6.24  Jean-François Portaels, Jüdin aus Tangiers (Jewess from Tangiers), Ost und West Issue 12, December 1901, 905–06. Courtesy of Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/Digitale Sammlungen Judaica/http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/ periodical/pageview/2584889/, accessed 4 May 2018.

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Jehtro’s Daughters), Peter Paul Ruben’s Die Tochter der Herodias (The Daughter of Herodias), and Adam und Eva im Paradies (Adam and Eve in Paradise), as well as Rembrandt’s (1606–1669) Adam und Eva.137 Ost und West also featured paintings of ‘Old Testament’ female figures from French Orientalists as varied as Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889), Horace Vernet, Eugene Delacroix, and the Belgian JeanFrançois Portael (1818–1895), whose work portrayed African Jews from Tangiers and Tetuan (Figs. 6.23 and 6.24).138

Conclusions Suffused with Buber’s valorisation of the Orient in Eastern Europe, together with Lilien’s concrete revival of Buber’s Orient/Occident divide, Ost und West popularised the connections between the East and the West in the German Jewish imagination. Creating a Rassenkraft of a new Jewish landscape populated by ancient heroic Jewish figures, Buber and Lilien helped fuel a fresh interest in the return to an authenticated Jewish East for a larger audience. Yet this cultural movement was both short-lived with overtones of fin-de-siècle völkish thinking, recreating notions of Western imperialism (like most Western nationalist projects), even as it tried to counter antisemitic projections of a degenerate oriental people. The cultural Zionists imagined and constructed a distinctly Jewish national political entity in the East, paradoxically as a means of joining the Christian West. They explicated themselves from the backwards, oriental, and Asiatic East as envisaged by antisemites, Christian orientalists, and British, French, German and even Russian colonisers. This resulted in a return to a Jewish East that was in opposition to the idea of the antisemitic Christian West and of a barbaric Ottoman/Muslim East.139 As the art editor of Ost und West, Lilien was well placed to observe and trace a vast range of styles and methods used by artists who created images of the Orient from the Renaissance onwards. The artworks depicted in this monthly journal ranged from the paintings of Rembrandt and Poussin to the later nineteenth-century French and Belgian orientalists. These artists recreated the exotic landscapes and figures of the ancient Near East. Along the way, they often incorporated ‘orientalised’ images of North African Sephardic Jews, as if they were part of the biblical East. The journal features contemporary paintings and drawings by prominent or emerging Jewish artists working in Berlin, Munich, and throughout Europe. Lilien and the readers of Ost und West had abundant opportunities to study images of Jewish women. Scholarly articles on the depictions of Jewish women in art history, such as Esther, Rachel, and Judith, appeared almost as soon as Ost und West began.140 This emphasis on Jewish biblical heroines continued over the entire course of the journal’s publication and full-page illustrations of many of these heroines were included. In the second year of publication, Lilien was already championing the cause of an Eastern European Jewish female artist who was a graphic illustrator in her own right. His sympathy for the plight of Jewish female artists reflected his own rather complex relationship with women that began in Munich and continued when he met

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his wife, who was also a young artist. According to his living relatives, Lilien not only loved women, but also was a womaniser, kept a studio in Berlin where he drew models, and fathered a child with his Munich mistress, who retains a place on Lilien’s (official) family tree.141 The journal did publish literary pieces and works by Jewish women artists, although infrequently. Else Lasker-Schüler’s poems, for instance, were published only twice, despite her growing acceptance in Germany after the First World War as a great woman poet. These poems focused on the connections between the German Jewish Occident and the Orient. As with other German Jewish poets such as Ben Israel and Ludwig Wihl, Lilien would have been acutely aware of Lasker-Schüler’s orientalist poems that spoke of the yearning for Jerusalem. Though none of her actual images from this period were published in the journal, the fact that Lilien’s artwork appears in the same issue in mid-1901 as her poems, indicates they were very aware of each other’s approaches. Lilien and Lasker-Schüler may have met in Berlin at the popular Café Nollendorf where Lasker-Schüler and other members of Die Kommenden drank and exchanged ideas. In any case, their appropriation of similar orientalist tropes was clear.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6

7

Buber, ‘Jüdische Renaissance,’ OW 1 (January 1901): 7–10. Written between 1912 and 1914 for the Prague Chapter of the Jungjüdsiche Bewegung (the Young Jewish Movement for Cultural Renewal) and were later published in the book Vom Geist des Judentums (The Spirit of Judaism) (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1916). Martin Buber, ‘The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism’ in Martin Buber, On Judaism, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: Shocken Book, Inc., 1967), 75. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966). Mosse suggests that early-nineteenth-century Romantic ideas on Germania, the Nation, and Volk, converged into a late-nineteenthcentury neo-Romantic Völkish ideology that incorporated race theory and national distinction. According to Mosse, the neo-Romantic sense of community or Geist (Spirit), was to be understood in terms of the soil, the earth, nature, and the people; Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism,’ 96–139; Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991). Like the German mystics, who understood the metaphysical impulse of the soul, Buber considered the God Yahweh, to be ‘the God of “all,” the God of humanity and the Lord of the soul.’ Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 63. Ibid.; Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Abigail Gillman, Viennese Jewish Modernism: Freud, Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hoffman and Schnitzler (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’; Divided Passions; Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism. Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’; Divided Passions. ‘Counter-orientalism’ is a term used by Gillman, Viennese Jewish Modernism, 138. See also the Introduction

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in Kalmar and Penslar, OJ. The term ‘Jewish orientalism’ is less common than the nineteenth-century term many scholars used to discuss the nineteenth-century German Jewish scholars of Islam known as Jewish orientalists. 8 Ascheim mentions the magazine sporadically but with no detailed analysis. See Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. Jack Wertheimer also mentions Ost und West mainly in relation to the journal’s intended mission to educate Western German intellectuals, liberals, and Zionists on Eastern Jews, concluding this was a ‘one-way bridge.’ Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers. East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 142–43. 9 Mark H. Gelber, ‘The Jungjüdische Bewegung: An Unexplored Chapter in GermanJewish Literary and Cultural History’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 31, no. 1 (1986): 112–13. Jewish Rassenkraft and Volkpersönlichkeit were explained by Gelber according to Hippolyte Taine’s ideas of ‘Blood and Spirit’. Taine (1828–1893) devised a formula based on three things: race, milieu, and moment to explain all literary works. See also Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘Defining “Jewish Art” in Ost Und West, 1901–1908. A Study in the Nationalisation of Jewish Culture’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 39, no. 1 (1994): 83–110. David Brenner’s Marketing Identites: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicities of Ost Und West (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999) discusses the magazine but not its cultural significance. 10 On the relationship between German orientalism and Jewish writers, see Donna K. Heizer, Jewish-German Identity in the Orientalist Literature of Else Lasker-Schüler, Friedrich Wolf, and Franz Werfel (Columbia: Camden House, 1996); Gillman, Viennese Jewish Modernism, 128–49. See also Astrid Schmetterling’s recent work on orientalism in the early artwork of Lasker-Schüler. Astrid Schmetterling, “‘I Am Jussuf of Egypt”: Orientalism in Else Lasker-Schüler’s Drawings,’ Ars Judaica, The Bar Ilan Journal of Jewish Art 8 (2012): 81–98. 11 Lilien, Breife an seine Frau, 1905–1925, 40. 12 They were not alone: many other Jewish artistic figures during the fin de siècle such as Jacob Wassermann (1873–1934), a Viennese writer; Hans Kohn (1891–1971), a nationalist scholar from Prague; Karl Wolfskehl (1869–1948); and Elsa LaskerSchüler (1869–1945), both German poets; as well as Kurt Wolff (1887–1963), a German-born publisher, explored their oriental and occidental heritage. Even nonJewish literary figures such as Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932), who wrote Der Golem, were fascinated by similar ideas of Jewish occultism encountered in the Prague ghetto. Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism,’ 83–84; Gillman, Viennese Jewish Modernism, 138–40. 13 On eighteenth-century race theory in Germany, see Susanne Zantop, ‘Colonial Fantasies’: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). See also the Introduction in Yaron Peleg, Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 1–14. 14 Jonathan Hess, ‘Sugar Island Jews? Jewish Colonialism and the Rhetoric of Civic Improvement’, Eighteenth Century Studies 32, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 92. Hess translates these words from the original German. 15 Über die Bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civic Improvement of the Jews), 1781, in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul MendesFlohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 34.

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16 Mendes-Flohr’s erudite discussion on Jews and Orientalism forms the basic groundwork for this chapter. See particularly the section I quote from here in Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions, 81; ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’, 100. 17 Mendes-Flohr, Divided Passions, 101; ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’, 81. 18 Hegel also stated that ‘Europe is plainly the goal of history … The Orientals were the childhood of the world, the Greeks and Romans in its youth and manhood, the Christian peoples are its maturity’. ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’, 81. On fin-desiècle racial theories, see Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 19 Jonathan Hess, ‘Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 56–101. 20 Yigal Zalmona, To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum 1998), ix. 21 Ibid. 22 By the 1820s, the Turkish Empire was fast losing a grip on its Christian European strongholds in Southern and Eastern Europe that included Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and parts of Serbia. The Greek revolts of the 1820s, the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), the 1908 Revolution against Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and the Balkan Wars of 1912 shrank the Ottoman Empire back to the borders of Europe. 23 The split between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Western Roman Catholic Church, begun with Constantine’s conversion to Christianity (313 CE) and his subsequent movement East to his new capitol in Constantinople (330 CE), continued to exacerbate the East–West divide long into the medieval period. It continued under the Ottomans, with their capture of Constantinople and the fall of Byzantium in 1453 under Mehmet II. On the history of Christianity and the attitudes of the Catholic Church towards the Eastern Church, see Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 1–151. I am grateful to Dr Penny Nash for this information. 24 Often aided by the northern English Baptist Minister Thomas Cook’s tours. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 379–80. 25 Montefiore, Jerusalem, 379–80. Montefiore mentions that the young heirs to the British throne were guided around Jerusalem by archaeologists from the (British) Palestine Exploration Fund and taken to a Sephardic Passover dinner. 26 Ibid., 380–81. 27 Yeshayahu Nir, The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land 1839–1899 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1985), 121–22. 28 Jung Wien (a young group of fin-de-siècle Viennese writers and artists) was described by Carl Schorske as ‘challeng[ing] the moralistic stance of nineteenth-century literature in favour of sociological truth and psychological – especially sexual – openness’. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 212. 29 Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990), 127. Bartok’s mission recalls Roman Vishniac’s portraits of poor, Orthodox Eastern European Jews, commissioned by The Joint Distribution Committee representatives in Berlin after the First World War. Vishniac was born in St Petersburg in 1897 to wealthy secular Russian Jews. His photographs of Jewish

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life on the eve of its destruction reveal the thriving cosmopolitan life of large Jewish cities including Warsaw, Vilna, and Kraków. Alana Newhouse, ‘A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac’, The New York Times Magazine, 4 April 2010, MM36. Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport, known as S. An-sky (1863–1920), a Russian Jewish writer, born in Belarus, also headed ethnographical expeditions within the Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. See Eugene M. Avrutin, ed., Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions (Waltham, MA: ‫יִ ְׂש ָראֵ ל ּכָל ּכִ י״חַ חֲבֵ ִרים‬ Brandeis, 2009). 30 In Hebrew, the organisation was called: ‫( כל ישראל חברים כי"ח‬All Israel are comrades). Founded in 1860 and conceived as a world organisation dedicated to helping fellow Jews wherever they were suffering or discriminated against because of their religion: a world organisation of ‘fortunate’ Jews, who had achieved emancipation and assimilation in their own countries. ‘Alliance Israelite Universelle’ in the Jewish Virtual Library, The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2014. http://www. jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0001_0_00834.html, viewed 31 May 2013. 31 This lasted two years, when Leo Winz became the sole editor. 32 Gelber, ‘The Jungjüdische Bewegung,’ 108–10. Leo Winz was also the librarian at the Jewish Reading Room in Berlin from 1895 to 1902. Founded in 1894 as part of the Reading Hall Movement (Lesehallenbewegung), the Room moved to the New Synagogue on Orienburgerstrasse, in 1897. 33 ‘Das altjüdische Leben, das lange verschmäht und erniedrigt gewesen, erhebt sich, hüllt sich in die Gewänder der neuen Zeit und steigt langsamen, aber sicheren Schrittes die Stufen zum Throne empor. Noch zeugen erst vereinzelte Werke von der verjüngten Schöpferkraft, aber jeder Tag bringt uns neue Zeichen ihres Wirken auf allen Gebieten. Unsere Zeitschrift will sich in den Dienst dieses neuen Geistes stellen, dem die Zukunft des Judentums angehört’ (My translation). Davis Trietsch and Leo Winz, ‘Leitartikel’, OW 1 (January 1901): 3. 34 Both Meyer and Mendes-Flohr give the example of Franzos. See Franzos, Von Don zure Donau (Stuttgart, Berlin, 1878) cited in Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’, 82; Michael Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol. 3: Integration in Dispute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 294–95. On the confrontation between Eastern European Jews, Germany, and German Jews, see Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers; Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers. 35 S. Adler-Rudel, ‘Ostjuden in Deutschland’, 164 in Meyer, German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol. 3: Integration in Dispute, 20–21. In 1880, overall numbers of the total Jewish population in the German Reich were roughly 15,000 or 2.7 per cent. By 1890, this had risen to 22,000 or nearly 4 per cent. By 1900, it was 41,113 or 7 per cent, and by 1910 it was 78,746 or nearly 14 per cent. The Scheunenviertel (Barnquarter) was named after the barns used by Eastern European Jews, for their animals. 36 In other German cities, these numbers were even higher. In Leipzig, it was as high as 64 per cent, in Munich 34.8 per cent and in Konigsberg 25.6 per cent. Wertheimer, Appendix, Table 2b, Unwelcome Strangers, in Meyer, German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol. 3: Integration in Dispute, 21, Table 1.5. 37 Ibid., 21. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.

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40 This change was reasonably rapid. By the third issue the number of board members increased to twenty-two of whom nine were Ostjuden. The list of Ostjuden and Westjuden included many writers, socialists, doctors, journalists, editors, art critics, philosophers, rabbis, and scholars of modern Hebrew, Jewish history, and Jewish art. These included Professor Ludwig Geiger (1848–1919), German literary historian and avid supporter of the symbiosis of Judaism and Germanness and son of the biblical scholar Abraham Geiger; Dr Alfred Nossig (1864–1943), born Lwów (Lemberg) in Galicia, close to Lilien’s birthplace, a medical doctor, philosopher, sculptor, and advocate for Zionism and Jewish art; Dr S. Bernfeld (1860–1940), born in Stanislau, Galicia, a German publicist, Jewish historian, and rabbi interested in modern Hebrew; Dr Heinrich Meyer Cohen, a German Zionist from Berlin; Dr Moses Gaster (1856–1937), a Romanian-born linguist and rabbi of the Sephardic congregation in London from 1887; Samuel Lubinski (1868–1910), the German-born literary critic; Dr Max Nordau, German literary figure and Zionist; and Professor Otto Warburg (1883–1970), German physiologist, medical doctor, and Nobel laureate. 41 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 100–20, and Brenner and David, Marketing Identities, 15. 42 Wertheimer notes that Ost und West was established by the Alliance Israélite Universalle, an organisation whose ideological focus was not easy to define but was neither Zionist nor Assimilationist. Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 152. See n. 30. 43 Ibid., 152. 44 Brenner, Marketing Identites, 172. Meyer, German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 3: 7–13. 45 Ibid., 20–21. 46 Brenner, Marketing Identites, 172. 47 Meyer, German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 20–21. 48 Ibid., 43. 49 S. Adler Rudel, ‘Ostjudenin Deutschland,’ 164 in ibid., 20. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 42. 52 Ibid. 53 Rosenfeld, ‘Defining “Jewish Art” in Ost und West’, 89. 54 OW 12 (December 1901): 967–68. 55 Jewish life in Tsarist Russia deteriorated rapidly after the murder of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881. Increasingly violent attacks on Jewish populations accompanied outbreaks of revolutionary fervour that occurred before, during, and after the October Revolution. Michael Brenner, A Short History of the Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 238. 56 The price advertised in Ost und West in 1906 was still 4 Russian rubles as compared to 7 deutschemarks. OW 12 (December 1906): 856. 57 Rosenfeld, ‘Defining “Jewish Art” in Ost und West, 1901–1908’, 84. 58 Ibid., 85. 59 OW 1 (January 1901): 1. Buber’s Jüdische Renaissance also spoke of the inner yearning of the Jewish folk for their Jewish soul. 60 Baron David Günzburg (b. Ukraine Russia 1857, d. St Petersburg 1910). He was a prominent Russian orientalist, linguist, and Jewish communal leader who studied Arabic under William Ahlwardt, Professor of Oriental Languages at the

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61

62

63 64

65 66 67 68

69

70 71

227

University of Greifswald (1879–1880). See a short biography by his daughter Sophie Günzburg, ‘My Father: Baron David’, in Lucy Dawidowicz (ed.,), The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 248–56. Mendes-Flohr described his presence in the cultural Zionist movement as ‘towering’. Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’, 84–85. For his influence on the cultural Zionists, see Gelber, ‘The Jungjüdische Bewegung’; Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000). Also, see Maurice S. Friedman, Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber (New York: Paragon House, 1991). Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 121–38; Meyer, German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol. 3: Integration in Dispute, 294–95. OW 1 (January 1901): 7–10. Buber, ‘Lesser Ury’, OW 2 (February 1901): 113–28. Ury, born in Posen, came to Berlin via Paris, Munich, and Belgium. He had a disagreement with Liebermann who controlled the Secessionist movement and this affected his career. For more information on Ury, see Chana C. Schütz, ‘Lesser Ury and the Jewish Renaissance’, Jewish Studies Quarterly 10, no. 4 (2004): 360–76; Emily D. Bilski, ed., Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Dorothy Rowe, ‘Seeing Imperial Berlin: Lesser Ury, the Painter as Stranger’, in The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500, ed. Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007) 198–218. OW 2 (January 1901): 113–28. The images seem to presage the large painterly canvases of the German neo-Expressionist George Baselitz (1938–) and his largerthan-life human figures, who take up the central position in his paintings. OW 2 (January 1901): 114. See chapter 2 for Buber’s early life. Buber went to live with his father in 1892 in Lwów (Lemberg), quite close to Lilien’s hometown of Drohobycz. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche rejected the empirical reasoning of Kant, who posited a separation between man and the world. On Schopenhauer see MendesFlohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’, 78–79. On the influence of Nietzsche in Buber’s early writings, see Margaret Rose Olin, The Nation without Art: Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 105–09. Schopenhauer argues in The World as Will and Representation that each of us has knowledge of ourselves as will and that this is an illusion. Borrowing from the Hindu Vedanta, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) suggested a meditative silence or passivity as an alternative to bourgeois reason and rationalism. Mendes-Flohr, ‘Orientalism, the Ostjuden’, 80. Buber’s ideas on culture were ‘nourished’ by Nietzsche’s philosophy and in turn resembled the völkisch ideas of German nationalists. Olin, ‘Martin Buber: Jewish Art as Visual Redemption’, 109. Die Legende des Baalschem (The Legend of the Baal Shem Tov, 1908), on the founder of the Hasidic movement in early-eighteenth-century Poland; Ekstatische Konfessionen (Ecstatic Confessions, 1909) included a wide range of tales from Christianity to the Upanishads on the spiritual union with God. Martin Buber and

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Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), xvii. 72 Buber was also the guiding light of the Bar Kochba Association where he lectured on Jewish culture, Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’, 83–84. 73 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 107. 74 Kurt Wolff was a writer, journalist, editor, and publisher and was the first to produce and promote the writings of Franz Kafka. 75 Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 120. Cited in Gelber, ‘The Jungjüdische Bewegung’, 113. 76 After the First World War, Hans Kohn, along with Buber, advocated a bi-national Jewish state. He later became an American academic. YIVO Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2010, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/ article.aspx/Kohn_Hans, viewed 16 April 2013. 77 Buber, ‘The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism’, in On Judaism, 56–62. 78 Gillman, Viennese Jewish Modernism, 138. 79 Buber, ‘Lesser Ury’, OW 2 (February 1901): 113–28. 80 ‘Hier is Entartung, aber die spezifische Entartung der Juden, die eine kranke, halb schlaue, halb irre Lebensgier und eine kranke Mystik erzeugt hat. Hier sein die grässlichen Wunden der Jahrtausende und der Taumel … Der Golus-Typus ist ier am schärfsten herausgebildet, in seiner eigentümlichen Pathologie, die ganz erfüllt ist von verkümmernden Möglichkeiten, ein grauenhaftes inneres Leichenfeld’. OW 2 (February 1901): 119. Translation by Gilya Gerda Schmidt, ed., The First Buber, Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 75–76. 81 Buber, OW 2 (February 1901): 119. 82 Like other educated German Jews, Buber had internalised antisemitic rhetoric of the times. The above quote expresses his fear that the Jewish people in nineteenth-century Europe were demonstrating a mentality born of the galut, not dissimilar to the cries of Nordau for ‘deep-chested, sturdy, sharp-eyed men’ or Herzl’s disclaimer that if the Jews were to be given a state, antisemitism would disappear from all of Europe. Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 50. 83 The Star of David or Shield of David has a long and complex history. The use of the two triangles in a hexagram was popular in other ancient cultures and among Freemasons. Anthropologists regard the triangle pointing downwards as representing the feminine and the triangle pointing upward as male. Freemasons and medieval alchemists believed these symbols represented the unity of the two elements – fire and water. Lilien was one of the first modern artists to revive the Shield of David as a modern Jewish symbol, though its earliest use to represent the entire Jewish community may have been in seventeenth-century Vienna to separate the Jewish quarter from the Christian quarter. Ellen Frankel and Betsy Platkin Teutsch, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Symbols (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995), 161–62. For the transformation of the Magen David into the blue and white flag with the Shield of David, introduced by David Wolffsohn and known as the Star of Zion and thence into Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, see also Konrad Kwiet, Van Jodenhoed Tot Gele Star (Bussen: Fibula International 1973); Gershom Sholem, ‘The Star of David: History of a Symbol’, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, ed. Gershom Sholem (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 257–81.

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  84 These Orthodox rabbis were the first to consider the religious return to Zion: Alkalai’s Minhat Yehuda (The Offering of Judah, 1845) and Kalisher’s Derishat Zion (Seeking Zion, 1862). Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 47–55.   85 David Brenner points this out in Marketing Identities.   86 For a complete analysis of Prinzessin Sabbat, see chapter 7.   87 Lilien, Logo for Leo Winz, OW 12 (December 1901): 955.   88 OW 2 (February 1902): 97–98. A cover drawing by Lilien for Rosenfeld’s Lieder des Ghetto (1903) for which he was the illustrator.   89 From M. Hirshfelder, ‘E. M. Lilien’, OW 6 (July 1901): 518–28 to M. Hirschfelder, ‘Zwei Neue Lilienische Ex-Libris’, OW 11 (November 1901): 821–24 and later Jacob Thon, ‘Ein Betrag zur Geschichte der Zeichnenden Kunst’, OW 12 (December 1904): 831–36. Dr Jacob Thon (1870–1936) was a Galician cultural Zionist, writer, lawyer, and critic. Jewish Women’s Archive, Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, ‘Sarah Thon’, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/thon-sarah, viewed 17 June 2013.   90 Die Gesellschaft: Sammlung Sozialpsychologischer Monographien (Society: A Collection of Social Psychological Monographs, 1906–1912). Hermann Kirchmayer (1887–1942), a leading Jugendstil graphic designer from Innsbruck, Austria, produced the lettering. Mendes-Flohr, ‘Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism’, 86.   91 See Introduction, n. 9.   92 Dr G. Kutna, ‘Josef Israëls’, OW 5 (May 1902): 289–306. See later discussion on race politics.   93 Dr G. Kutna, ‘Isidor Kaufmann’, OW 9 (September 1903): 589–604; ‘Hermann Struck’, OW 1 (January 1902): 27–28; ‘Moritz (sic) Gottlieb, Betende Juden’, OW 1 (January 1901): 5–6; ‘Samuel Hirszenberg’, OW 10 (October 1902): 683–84; ‘Leopold Pilichowski,’ OW 1 (January 1903): 48–49; ‘Leonid Pasternak’, OW 6 (June 1902): 371–82.   94 E. M. Lilien, ‘Ein offener Brief (Jüdsiche Maecene und Jüdische Kunst)’, OW 2 (February 1902): 109–14.   95 Lilien, ‘Ein offener Brief (Jüdsiche Maecene und Jüdische Kunst)’, OW 2 (February 1902): 111–12, translated by Rosenfeld, ‘Defining “Jewish Art” in Ost Und West, 1901–1908’, 109.   96 Max Liebermann has declared her to be very talented and will defray the expenses of her education. For a year … she must, constantly working on her artistic evolution, struggling with distress and worries of all kinds. Unable to overcome many difficulties, she has to decide whether to go back to her homeland and abandon her artistic career, if in the last hour there is no help for her.   97 Rosenfeld, ‘Defining “Jewish Art” in Ost und West, 1901–1908’, 109.   98 Der Ewige Jude was a sculpture by Alfred Nossig. OW 1 (January 1901): 5–6.   99 OW 10 (October 1902): 661–62; Rosenfeld, ‘Defining “Jewish Art” in Ost und West, 1901–1908’, 95. 100 Hirszenberg studied in Munich and won a silver medal at the Paris Exposition in 1889 for his landscape paintings. On his early life see Mirjam Rajner and Richard I. Cohen, ‘Samuel Hirszenberg’s First Steps as an Artist and His Revealing Sketchbook’, in Hirszenberg Brothers in Search of the Promised Land, ed. Adam Klimczak and Teresa Smiechowska (Lodz-Warsaw: Museum of the City of Lodz; Jewish Historical Institute Emanuel Ringelblum, 2017), 340–47. 101 Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 226.

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102 Ibid., 224; Rosenfeld, ‘Defining “Jewish Art” in Ost und West, 1901–1908’, 97–98. 103 Discussed in chapter 2. 104 Berthold Fewiel, Junge Harfen (1900), 78 cited in Gelber, ‘The Jungjüdische Bewegung’, 112. Herzl offered Buber the editorship of the Zionist Journal Die Welt, in around June or July 1901, which he took up in August of that year. However, he did not last long at the helm due to their philosophical differences. Friedman, Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber, 29–31; Gelber, ‘The Jungjüdische Bewegung’, 111–12. 105 OW 1 (January 1902): 17–24 and 65–66. 106 ‘… den tiefen Bedürfnissen—der schaffenden einerseits, des Volkes anderseits— Erfüllung zu bringen’ (my translation). 107 On this, see chapter 2. 108 Buber, ‘Herzl und die Histoire’ (Herzl and History), OW, 8–9 (August 1904): 583–94. By 1905, Buber had finished his PhD dissertation and he retreated from public life to seek and write about spirituality and Hasidism. He re-entered public life in 1916 when he became the editor of Die Jude. 109 The historian Freidman called this his ‘greatness but not his Jewishness’. Friedman, Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber, 34–35. 110 Gilya Schmidt’s translation in Schmidt, The First Buber, 160. 111 Buber, ‘Herzl und die Histoire’, 592; Schmidt, 163. 112 Ibid. 113 Moses Hess (1812–1875) wrote Rome and Jerusalem in 1862. According to Buber, Hess appreciates the significance of Hasidism as a deep manifestation of Jewish peoplehood. Leo Pinsker (1821–1891) wrote AutoEmancipation (1884) was inspired by the rising tide of political, ethnic, and national consciousness. Nathan Birnbaum (1864–1937) wrote a journal titled Self-emancipation (1883) and ten years later, a pamphlet calling for ‘the national rebirth of the Jewish people in their land’. See chapters on Hess, Pinsker, and Birnbaum in Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism. 114 Schmidt, The First Buber, 159–60. 115 On the Mizrahi Jews of Palestine – Yemenites, Bukharian or Moroccan Jews – in the creation of a Jewish national art, see Dalia Manor, ‘Orientalism and Jewish National Art: The Case of Bezalel,’ in Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005). 116 Published in OW 12 (December 1904): 817–18. 117 Schmidt, The First Buber, 140. 118 On the Judenzählung, see Egmont Zechlin, Die Deutsche Politik Und Die Juden Im Ersten Weltkrieg (Gottingham: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 524. 119 Paul Mendes-Flohr, ‘The Berlin Jew as Cosmopolitan’, in Bilski, Berlin Metropolis, 26. 120 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 165–66. 121 Bar-Am, PwL 18. 122 YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2010, ‘Kishniev’, online at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Kishinev, viewed 20 March 2014. 123 According to the subtitle in Ost und West, this illustration first appeared in Rudolf Mosse’s satirical weekly magazine Ulk, meaning ‘Josh’ or perhaps ‘Joke’. Ulk was published from approximately 1872 until 1933. 124 One reason mentioned by Lilien for volunteering to fight for Austria in the First World War was to ‘free the Russian Jews (and especially Zionist circles) from the

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yoke of Tsarist rule’ (dies galt vor allem für zionistische Kreise – die russischen Juden vom Joch der zaristischen Herrschaft zu befreien). Erwin A. Schmidl, ‘Der Künstler als Offizier – Ephraim Moses Lilien im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Oz Almog, Gerhard Milchram, and Erwin A. Schmidl, E. M. Lilien, Jugendstil, Erotik, Zionismus: [Eine Ausstellung Des Jüdischen Museums Der Stadt Wien, 21. Oktober, 1998 Bis 10. Jäner, 1999 Und Des Braunschweigischen Landesmuseums, 21. März Bis 23. Mai,1999] (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 1998), 12. 125 They were living examples of a genuine Jewish desert Heimat, climate, and geography. 126 OW 5 (May 1901): 396; OW 6 (June 1901): 462–69; OW 9 (September 1901): 657–8; OW 12 (December 1901): 933–40. 127 OW 1 (January 1901): 10. My translation: ‘Sie wird uns vor einer ausseren eine innere Heimat schaffen: dadurch … dass sie uns im Neuhebräischen eine moderne Sprache schenkt, in der allein wir die wahren Worte für Lust und Weh unseren Seele finden können’. 128 Manor also mentions Sephardic pronunciation in Manor, ‘Orientalism and Jewish National Art: The Case of Bezalel’, 155. 129 Oriental Jews at this time came mainly from Yemen, Bukhara and Morocco and were more readily available to take on the job of a paid model as they were less suspicious of the new art school than the more orthodox Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem. Ibid., 152. On how many Eastern Jews were also in Palestine at this time see Manor. 130 See Gilman’s discussion of Galton’s photographs and his racist declaration of the ‘cold scanning gaze’ of the Jew in Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 39–59. Gilman states that Galton’s images captured the very essence of the Jew. His discussions were based on Foucault and Jay’s idea of the gaze. Michel Foucault and Martin Jay, ‘In the Empire of the Gaze’, in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Cousens Hoy (New York: Wiley, 1991), 175–204, cited in Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 257. Gilman also suggests that Galton’s Jew was a twentiethcentury version of Dickens’s hand-wringing Fagin, or Shakespeare’s complex Jewish Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, though there was no firm correlation between physiognomic characteristics or a disposition towards criminality and greed among English Jews. 131 Maurice Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment (London; New York; Melbourne: The Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1911), 94–97. Fishberg states: ‘It is a remarkable fact that whenever an artist, even one who is sympathetic to his people, [tries] … to depict the Jewish face … the result is invariably caricature. When … not overzealous in his attempt to bring forth all real and alleged facial features, the types he produces could be taken for any racial or national type. Of the few painters who have produced excellent Jewish faces, Rembrandt is to be mentioned … in addition to his types we have … faces of Jews painted by Hirszenberg, Gottlieb, Kaufmann, Lilien and Pasternak, showing Russian, Polish and German Jewish types as conceived by artists of high rank’ (My emphasis). 132 Fishberg, The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment, xxviii–ix. 133 Professor D. Joseph, ‘Die Kunst in ihrer Anwedung auf die Gebräuche der Juden’ OW 4 (April 1901): 253–56; Professor D. Joseph, ‘Stiftschütte, Tempel-und Synagogunbauten’, OW 8 (August 1901): 593–608; B. Ebenstein, ‘Die Zukunft des Orients,’ OW 5 (May 1901): 321–28.

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134 See the illustrations on Haggadot that appear in the Pesach (Passover) addition of OW 4 (April 1902): 255–56; 267–68. 135 Baron David Günzburg and Vladimir Stassof, L’ornament Hebreu (Berlin: Cavalry, 1905). 136 Günzburg served in the Russian Foreign Ministry as a translator, although it was closed to Jews. He also could not serve as a professor at the University of St Petersburg though he was the leading Near Eastern expert on Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Turkish, Assyrian, etc. Instead, he opened his own private school. Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, 254–5. 137 OW 3 (March 1901):169–70; OW 3 (March 1902): 169–70; OW 12 (December 1905): 557–8; OW 9 (September 1905): 565–66. 138 Alexandre Cabanel, Rebekka und Elieser (Rebecca and Eliezer, 1867), OW 12 (December 1902): 841–42 and Cabanel, Adam und Eva (Adam and Eve, 1867), OW 10–11 (October–November 1905): 691–92; Horace Vernet, Judith Mit dem Haupte des Holofernes (Judith with the Head of Holofernes, OW 12 (December 1901): 693–94; and Vernet, Judith und Holofernes, OW 12 (December 1901): 696; Eugéne Delacroix, Jüdische Hochzeit in Marokko (Jewish Wedding in Morrocco), OW 12 (December 1901): 945–46; Jean-François Portael, Jüdin aus Tangiers (Jewess from Tangiers), OW 12 (December 1901): 905–06 and Jüdin aus Tetuan (Jewess from Tetuan), OW 12 (December 1901): 933–34. 139 On the Zionist return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish perspective see Ammon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘The Zionist Return to the West and the Mizrahi Jewish Perspective’, in Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek Jonathan Penslar (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 162–81. 140 Ludwig Geiger, ‘Der Estherstoff in der neuen Litteratur’, OW 1 (January 1901): 27–34; Luise von Ploennies, ‘Judith: aus dem Cyklus, Frauen des alten Testaments’, OW 9 (September 1901): 693–98. 141 See chapter 3, 85. Email correspondence with Tom Peters, 2012.

7

The Exotic ‘Other’: Lilien’s Oriental Beauties and a Jewish Oriental Voice?

[A]ct[ing] for the [Zionist] movement, you will be doing your best to ennoble yourself and elevate yourself spiritually. When you have won recognition from the world, you say: I am a Jewess. When you are admired and loved, you know they love a Jewess. If you should one day found a family, let it be a Jewish family. —E. M. Lilien, Briefe an Seine Frau [O]n the question of women, I take the attitude of every [male] Jew: comradely … for when God created woman … only then did he bless them both and called them: Humans. —E. M. Lilien, Briefe an Seine Frau

Introduction The journal Ost und West popularised the connections between the East and the West in the German Jewish imagination. In turn, the ideas promulgated by Buber and the cultural Zionists helped fuel Lilien’s interest in the return to an ‘authenticated’ Jewish East. This book has not yet examined how popular visual culture, such as periodical and book art illustrations in the non-Jewish world, inspired Lilien’s creative imagination and helped shape his representations of women, particularly Jewish women. Lilien’s letters to his soon-to-be wife on the eve of his first trip to Ottoman Palestine indicate that he was knowledgeable about Judaism and Kabbalah, as well as aware of the plight of contemporary Jewish woman. He also understood the role of Jewish women in the Bible and thought about equality for Jewish women. But what exactly was Lilien’s view on the changing role of women at the fin de siècle? Only two letters written to Helene Magnus touch on the role of the modern Zionist woman.1 In them, he mentions many women by name, including famous Jewish mothers, heroines, priestesses, and prophetesses throughout time, such as Sarah, Bathsheba, Deborah, Hannah, and Hulda.2 He concludes the list by naming Central European Jewish women from the time of the emancipation onwards, including salonnières and writers such as Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen, [Fanny von] Arnstein, Fanny Lewald, and Dorothea von

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Schlegel. The last three women mentioned sat on the political left, ‘[f]ighting under the red flag in the present: Lina Morgenstern, Rosa Luxemburg and many others’.3 Lilien’s views hardly differed from the majority of bohemian male avant-garde European artists at the time.4 They knew that women could be more than mothers, wives, or studio models, yet seemed ambivalent about what that meant on a personal level for the private or public lives of their partners, lovers, wives, sisters, or mothers. Noticing the ambiguity in Lilien’s attitudes to women, his erotic and sensual images created for the literary and metaphysical biblical masterpiece Das Lied der Lieder (The Song of Songs) are as unexpected as they are puzzling. They appear quite different from the more conventional images of biblical heroines such as Esther or Ruth that he had already created for his Bibelplan, or from his earlier secular and lascivious anti-feminist femmes fatales for illustrated magazines in Munich and Berlin. Like many European Jewish men and their non-Jewish counterparts, Lilien grappled with the new complex social and cultural changes that were taking place between men and women at the end of the nineteenth century. This complex set of paradoxical behaviours was part of fin-de-siècle clashes over sexuality and gender roles. Jewish men could imagine a strong independent woman – as long as she was not their own wife who neglected her primary duty as companion and homemaker. Many fin-de-siècle German women were just as ambivalent as the men with regard to their sex’s political and social emancipation.5 They still believed that motherhood was essential even as they argued for sexual liberation or continued to criticise woman’s suffrage.6 It is only in the last decade or so that the modern Jewish woman has received more serious consideration in German history and cultural studies.7 There have been a handful of informative catalogues and books written on visual culture and the representations of the ‘new woman’ during the Wilhelmine period of Imperial Germany before the 1920s.8 Catalogues, books, and articles that examine the phenomenon of the new woman between the wars are much more numerous.9 Even the classic text on the Wilhelmine period, Berlin Metropolis, Jews and the New Culture 1890–1918, never examines in depth the way German Jewish women were portrayed and imagined in German visual culture.10 The images of the erotic femme fatale have received more scholarly attention, particularly by eminent scholars such as Bram Dijkstra, Ann Pellegrini, and Sander Gilman. They have considered her Jewish roots, but have not fully addressed the concept of a strong and independent fin-desiècle German Jewish ‘new woman’. This chapter examines this phenomenon and begins with a remarkable image of a Jewish woman that Lilien created for the biblical work Das Lied der Lieder as part of his popular illustrations for Die Bücher der Bibel. The audience consisted of both Jewish and non-Jewish members of the middle classes: acculturated German speakers, who were drawn to a clear German text with dramatic black and white images of the heroes and heroines of the Hebrew Bible. Lilien’s images reconstructed ‘realistic’ or what appeared to be ‘authentic’ biblical settings of Egypt, Babylon, and Palestine, in keeping with the newfound science of archaeology.11 The drawing of a strong, sensual but independent woman, as well as other images of women by Lilien, is compared to corresponding illustrations of women found in other contemporary German art

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journals. These examples include the developing genre of book art that allowed artists to illustrate texts with images, merging high art literature with the emerging medium of graphic arts.12 This genre became popular in fin-de-siècle England and Germany.13

Lilien’s oriental beauties At the end of the second volume of Die Bücher der Bibel published in 1909, Lilien includes his most seductive images of the Jewish woman. In this book, Lilien attempts three illustrations of women (Figs. 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3).14 The first image, Liebeswerben im Frühling (Courting in Spring), depicts a young shepherdess clothed in a striped robe meant to symbolise a form of ancient tribal costume as depicted in many of Lilien’s male biblical images that were based on photographs he had taken of local Arabs, Samaritans, and Yemenites while travelling in Palestine (Fig. 7.1).15 Her fanciful striped headdress recalls the traditional male prayer shawl. She stands in a field of lilies, the symbol for purity, with a lamb in her arms, signifying youth and innocence.16 The second drawing, titled Ein Garten ist meine Braut (A Garden Is My Betrothed), illustrates the moment of female sexual gratification (Fig. 7.2). The final image, Liebesfrühling (Spring Love), portrays a woman in the throes of a passionate embrace with her young lover. (Fig. 7.3)17 In Ein Garten, Lilien creates a portrayal of a Jewish woman in charge of her own libido. Aware of the male gaze, she challenges late-nineteenth-century sexual stereotyping that demanded subservience to her male partner. She embodies both the social and political possibilities of equality with men, a modern woman in charge of her sexual agency, free to be a true equal partner to her ‘New (male) Hebrew’, a woman on the verge of political, social, and sexual emancipation – sexually alluring, freethinking, and independent. The central story of the Song of Songs (Songs), the sexual awakening of a young girl and her male lover, remains an allegory for the love between God and the Jewish people. The two lovers meet in a landscape of fertility and abundance, a resplendent Eden, where they discover the pleasures of sex.18 The moment Lilien captures in his black ink drawing Ein Garten is when the young man declares, ‘the garden is my beloved, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy shoots are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits, henna and nard … I am come into the garden, my honey … I have drunk my wine with my milk.’19 In the depiction of sexual pleasure, the dark-eyed beauty looks as if she is about to reach a sexual climax. She clasps her own breasts, drawing attention to her nipples, while her dark hair streams in front of her like the dense and heavy overhanging pomegranate branch above her head displaying lush, ripe fruit.20 She is clearly Jewish, as she wears a striped ancient tribal costume.21 With minimal use of line, Lilien deftly portrays a young Jewish girl on the brink of fleshly ecstasy in a mature work that combines sensuality with a realism not often seen in his biblical illustrations. The final illustration, Liebesfrühling, depicts a young girl in the first stages of an erotic encounter. The female lover is more submissive, surrendering to the sensual embrace of her male lover, entwined like the branches of the trees and surrounded by symbols of nature’s spring growth, such as new leaf tips and lambing ewes.

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Figure 7.1  E. M. Lilien, Liebeswerben im Frühling (Courting in Spring). In Lied der Lieder (Song of Songs), Ferdinand Rahlwes, ed., Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol.VI (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1909), 309.

Reminiscent of Lilien’s depiction of the female lover in Juda (Fig. 1.2), she appears clothed, this time like an Egyptian princess, with her hair in plaits and wearing a bejewelled necklace. A similar image by Lilien of a woman with her hair in plaits, titled Prinzessin Sabbat (Princess Sabbath, 1901), appears at the very end of Juda (Fig. 7.4). Lilien’s comparable depiction of a woman in this earlier illustration indicates that his

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Figure 7.2  E. M. Lilien, Ein Garten ist meine Braut (In My Garden Is My Betrothed). In Lied der Lieder (Song of Songs), Ferdinand Rahlwes ed., Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol.VI (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1909), 312.

Figure 7.3  E. M. Lilien, Liebesfrühling (Spring Love). In Lied der Lieder (Song of Songs), Ferdinand Rahlwes, ed., Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol.VI (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1909), 318.

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Figure 7.4  E. M. Lilien, Prinzessin Sabbat (Princess Sabbath), Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p.

sensual imagery of the female figure in Ein Garten was part of a broader programme to develop the image of the Jewish female body. Lilien’s version of an imposing female image that represented the mystical Sabbath Queen is a subversive, even radical fin-de-siècle interpretation of the feminine creative role in Judaism, though not in a sexual way. The mystical ‘princess bride’, with dark hair braided in the manner of a medieval German heroine, such as Brunhilde or Rapunzel, holds the Torah, the sacred Jewish vessel of transmission and education.22 For most religious and Orthodox Jews, a woman is forbidden from holding or even touching the Torah. For men to view the naked shoulders of another woman who is not his wife was certainly prohibited. The Prinzessin Sabbat, understood as a type of Teutonic protagonist, is doubly provocative, holding this powerful marker of Jewish authority while only half-covered, her shoulders bared. Lilien’s Jewish princess is also symbolically half-covered with what looks like a synagogue Parokhet (Torah ark curtain) with richly embroidered Hebrew letters and braided tassels that lie at her feet.23 The Bride appears to be sitting on the throne of the Holy of Holies, indicated by the rather large Magen David, a common Lilien trope,

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wrapped in the Parokhet, the symbol of metaphoric division separating that which was holy from that which was not.24 Behind her is a stylised fruit tree, like the one in Liebesfrühling, but here it represents the system of ten Sefirot or emanations of God. On her head, she wears the mystical crown (Keter), the most important of the Sefirot, which stands for the infinite, primordial Godhead (Ein Sof). In the night sky, silhouettes of Cyprus trees appear and a small bird (another symbol for the soul) sits on the very top of her head.25 The depiction of the throne has an uncanny similarity to the one portrayed in a painting of a royal Bulgarian princess, for which his friend Boris Schatz had created the frame while living in Bulgaria.26 Lilien seemed happy to appropriate motifs from both secular and religious symbolism to create his royal Jewish princess. She is a powerful muse symbolising the metaphysical beauty of the divine, the spiritual manifestation of the Shekhinah or divine presence and the feminine aspect of God. Lilien’s Prinzessin Sabbat depicts the metaphysical Bride of Shabbat, or Sabbath Queen, who is the focus of the liturgical song Lekhah Dodi (Come My Beloved), sung every Friday night in the synagogue where the entire congregation physically turns around to welcome her at the end of the Sabbath service.27 Based on the rabbinic interpretation of Song of Songs in which the beloved or Bride (kallah) is a metaphor for the Jewish people, and the lover (dod) is a metaphor for God, Lilien’s image reinforces the symbolic power of women in the Sabbath liturgy and the feminine aspect of God.28 In Lilien’s image, the Princess is a gender-equal participant in Jewish history as she holds the Torah, the symbol of Jewish power, and commands attention. No longer a mere powerful biblical heroine, Lilien’s portrayal of the Princess Shabbat remains a radical, even prophetic, representation of the spiritual power of Jewish womanhood. If the Princess Bride is more concerned with spiritual matters than corporeal ones, then Lilien’s other dark-haired heroine, in Harfenspielerin (Harp Player), is a muse of a different kind (Fig. 7.5). This female image comes from Lilien’s book of illustrations for the German translation of the famous Yiddish poems by Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923), Lieder des Ghetto (Songs of the Ghetto), published three years before his visit to Palestine. Behind the heroine, kneeling angels with large wings playing violins signify that her harp playing mirrors the music of the heavens, visualised as a star-studded sky. The harp player wears a striped robe reminiscent of the one worn by the sensual lover in Ein Garten. The costume also recalls local Yemenite or Samaritan robes recorded by Lilien in photographs and drawings three years later, on his first trip to Palestine. With her dark hair coiled in a bun and dotted with pearls, the Harfenspielerin stares down her audience. Like the lover in Ein Garten, she appears closest to a modern twentieth-century woman gazing directly at the viewer from her garden throne with a full moon rising behind her. In Harfenspielen, Lilien appears to subvert the ancient moon goddess imagery associated with women’s menstrual cycles, so that the modern Jewess appears as an incarnation of contemporary divinity, a powerful woman in her own right, as sacred as the premodern moon goddess.29 Perhaps she is a present-day Jewish poet. The reference to harpists as poets was used in the title of a book of poems Junge Harfen (Young Harps) by Lilien’s friend Berthold Feiwel, a fellow cultural Zionist, in 1900. As the graphic artist for the Jewish and Zionist publishing house Jüdischer Verlag, which published Feiwel’s book, Lilien knew of the book because his own logo was on the front.30 By depicting a

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Figure 7.5 E. M. Lilien, Harfenspielerin (Harp Player). In Morris Rosenfeld, Lieder Des Ghetto, trans. Berthold Feiwel, with illustrations by Ephraim Moses Lilien (Berlin: S. Calvary, 1903), 107.

contemporary Jewish poet and Zionist as a harp-playing Jewish woman, Lilien’s portrait suggests that women are equal to men in the important work of Jewish regeneration in the Zionist movement. The work recalls his socialist figure for the Mai-Festzeitung in 1899 (Fig. 3.13), with her message of freedom, although Lilien covered up her bare breasts. Lilien’s two earlier images, Prinzessin Sabbat and Harfenspielerin, provide uncanny reminders of the power his female images could command. Placed together with his image Ein Garten (Fig. 7.2), from the metaphysical Song of Songs, all three images

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depict modern Jewish women who defy easy categorisation. Neither femmes fatales nor biblical heroines, they show a vital, original, and exotic Jewish beauty. If Harfenspielen and Prinzessin Sabbat symbolise the abstract splendour of music, poetry, and the divine, then Lilien’s image in Ein Garten is a more sensual, erotic portrayal of the contemporary Jewish woman. Lilien’s female imagery for the Songs was groundbreaking. Not only was he the first Jewish artist to portray the sexual allegory visually, but he was also the first to portray the Jewish woman as an active participant in sensual and sexual pleasure. At that moment in time, there were no other modern images of Jewish women expressing sexual pleasure.31 The images supported his Zionist and nationalist agenda, providing the acculturated European mind with an image of Judaism’s rich religious heritage, and a platform for secular modernist ideas and Jewish cultural renewal. Lilien’s choice of title for these illustrations reflects his emphasis. The work was a collaboration between a Lutheran minister and a Jew, so all the songs were written under the German heading Lied der Lieder.32 Just before Lilien’s illustrations in the book, another title, Eines von den Liedern Salomos (One of the Songs of Solomon), is positioned on a separate page.33 Lilien may have preferred to emphasise the importance of the role of the Jewish king in the creation of the Songs, as if they were a testament to Solomon’s Jewishness. In this way, Lilien rejected the non-Jewish German title Das Lied der Lieder as well as the more foreign-sounding Hebrew title Shir ha-Shirim.34 In Christianity, this love between God and the Jewish people is known as the Canticles (a reference to the Latin name for the Songs). The ‘love’ switches allegiances, instead becoming the love between God and the Church, or between Christ and the human soul.35 Lilien tried to recapture these Jewish writings and introduce a secular Jewish artistic language to counter the Christian imagery associated with Song of Songs.36 There simply was not yet a complete German Jewish translation of the Songs that featured images created by a Jewish artist telling the story from a Jewish perspective. In view of the deeply embedded tradition of the Christian reading of the Songs in Western Europe, it is no wonder that Lilien’s original, masterly, and modern illustrations were so startling and appealing.37

The graphic arts and Lilien Lilien did not work in a vacuum. Like most artists, he was aware and likely influenced by the work of other contemporary artists. German Jewish audiences, like their non-Jewish counterparts, prized popular, ‘middlebrow’ mass culture such as magazines, theatre, film, and pantomime, as well as books and classical music concerts. Such material helped provide German Jewish culture-makers with their hyphenated, hybridised, or multiple identities as Germans, Jews, and/or members of the bourgeoisie.38 Case studies prior to 1914 of German Jewish illustrators and book artists such as Lilien have received little attention compared to better-known ‘high art’ figures such as Max Liebermann or Lesser Ury.39 The problematic history of twentieth-century Germany has had a significant effect on German historiography. Like the question of the Sonderweg in German history, German art history was often

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tied to issues of nationalism and conservatism. Fin-de-siècle art historians often promoted ‘good’ German art as a product of German nationalism and denounced ‘bad’ German art as degenerate and foreign.40 The interest in German book art and the techniques of woodcut printing were linked, along with the study of Dürer and the German Renaissance, to the rise of German nationalism in efforts to promote Germany’s indigenous art forms in preference to the influence of the cosmopolitan French.41 In an effort to promote the internationalism of German art history before 1933, modern scholars have often concentrated on writing about German Expressionism and Berlin’s avant-garde literary, theatre, film, and art scene after the First World War.42 In the 1980s, attempts to integrate cultural history, the popular press, and the development of an assimilated bourgeois Jewish identity into the intellectual history of fin-de-siècle Germany began to appear.43 As late as 2011, Eric Hobsbawm’s introduction to the catalogue of the Australian exhibition entitled The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art: 1910–37 begins by limiting discussion to the Weimar period (1919– 1933), even though the exhibition included works from 1910 onwards, the first year of German Expressionism.44 What other German graphic artists fed Lilien’s appetite for images of modern, erotic, and sensual women?45 Like most other German and European Jews, Lilien consumed a vast amount of popular visual culture. A crucial period in the development of Lilien’s familiar Jugendstil was the years from the mid-to late 1890s, when Lilien was living in Munich and establishing his reputation. Two important weekly art journals started in Munich in 1896, Jugend and Simplicissimus. Jugend (1896–1940) was founded and published by the journalist Georg Hirth (1841–1916). Simplicissimus (1896–1944; 1954–1967), a satirical and humorous periodical in the vein of other popular Witzblätter (satirical journals), such as Münchener Fliegende Blätter (1845–1944), was published by Albert Langen (1869–1909).46 Lilien was also influenced by the Viennese journal Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring), which began publication in 1898 by the Viennese Secessionist group. Like Jugend, and Simplicissimus in Germany, Ver Sacrum played a significant role in the formation of Austrian culture, combining literature, the graphic arts, painting, art theory, and music into a Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’). The graphic works of a few artists from Jugend and Simplicissimus show the parallels between Lilien’s interest in the female body and a similar obsession with the naked female form in the popular art press. Like Lilien, the images of Bruno Paul, Lovis Corinth, Bernhard Pankok, and Marie Stüler-Walde also helped convey the fin-desiècle fascination with woman as ‘nature’ and wellspring of unbridled sexuality. So too did Franz von Stuck’s 1893 image of a woman as the representation of the original sin in Die Sünde (The Sin) and Klimt’s painting of Judith in 1901 (Fig. 4.6). The year 1893 stands out as a watershed for a plethora of Art Nouveau images of sensual, near-naked female bodies. At the first exhibition of the Munich Secessionists at the Glaspalast, von Struck’s painting was on show.47 Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé was published in French with images by Aubrey Beardsley, and the progressive English art journal The Studio began publication.48

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From 1893 to 1896, Art Nouveau spread like wildfire throughout continental Europe, with Munich an early home for the movement. By 1896, Lilien had established himself in Munich, gaining some commissions from both Jugend and the left-leaning satiric Munich weekly Süddeutscher Postillion, whose editor-in-chief, the socialist Eduard Fuchs, was friendly with all of Munich’s Schwabingen luminaries. Lilien was also living the life of a bohéme, fathering a son (Alexander; 1896–1974) born out of wedlock to the artist Marie Stüler-Walde (1868–1904).49 Ver Sacrum published its first magazine issue in Vienna in 1898, featuring a naked young woman by Koloman Moser (1868–1918), throwing up her arms as an exuberant allegory for life itself (Fig. 7.6).50 Munich in 1900 also vied with Berlin to be the capital of the German art world. Painters and writers made their way there. Lovis Corinth arrived in 1891, Thomas Mann in 1894, Wassily Kandinsky in 1896, Ludwig Thoma in 1897, and Vladimir Lenin in 1900. Gustav Meyrink, creator of The Golem, arrived from Prague in 1909, and Pablo Picasso came in 1910.51 Although Berlin would soon supersede Munich’s popularity – Hans Rosenhagen wrote his famous article, ‘Münchens Niedergang als

Figure 7.6 Kolomon Moser, Allegorie Ver Sacrum (An Allegory for Sacred Spring), Ver Sacrum Vol. 1, January 1898, 5. Indian ink and watercolour on paper, 41.9 × 16.5 cm.

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Kunststadt’ (Munich’s Decline as a City of Art), in 1902 – the poet Stefan George referred to Munich as the ‘City of Youth’. Bruno Paul’s (1874–1968) image of women at the time shows them sipping from the fountain (of youth) and turning into elongated, ugly misfits, with arms arranged in awkward angles as part of the satire on the modern Jugendstil movement and women’s quest for emancipation. The women who come out the other end of the fountain of youth are no longer young, appearing as odd caricatures of the Jugendstil style (Fig. 7.7).52 Although Simplicissimus may have been the master satirical periodical of the fin de siècle with works from Paul, Eduard Thöny (1866–1950), and Thomas Theodore Heine (1867–1948), Jugend was by far the most popular periodical. With over 30,000 readers in its first year of publication, Jugend’s readership rose to about 70,000 by 1900.53 Like the magazine Ost und West, these weekly periodicals were passed around in cafés, lending libraries, and beauty parlours, easily adding another 10,000 to readers.54 Eighty thousand readers per year represented around 15 per cent of the population of Munich, a genuinely substantial readership.55 More than 250 artists contributed to the first seven volumes of Jugend. All of them had some connection to Munich, and mostly were unknown at the time.56 For many, including Lilien, Max Slevogt (1868–1932), Ernst Barlach (1870– 1938), and others, Jugend provided their first chance to publish. Simplicissimus had fewer

Figure 7.7  Bruno Paul, Der Münchener Jugend Brunnen (The Munich Fountain of Youth), Simplicissimus Vol. 10, 5 June 1897, 76. Pencil and wash on paper, 38.1 × 60.4 cm. Inv-Nr. Simpl. 1250 (SGS00027187). Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://www.simplicissimus.info/uploads/tx_lombkswjournaldb/pdf/1/02/02_10. pdf. Courtesy of Deutsche ForschungsGemeinschaft, accessed 28 June 2018.

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readers. Circulation figures were about 15,000 in 1898 but rose to about 86,000 by 1908. Certain controversial issues doubled that figure.57 The only periodical that came close to Jugend’s readership in 1900 was that of the satirical weekly supplement Ulk, published in the Berliner Tageblatt, where some of Lilien’s images also appeared.58 Desperate to make a decent wage, many of these artists like Lovis Corinth, Bruno Paul, and Lilien created images for more than one journal at a time. In the first two years of publication alone, all these artists contributed images of women, as did Bernhard Pankok (1872–1943), Hans Christiansen (1866–1945), and Ludwig von Zumbusch (1861–1927). This fact confirms the near obsession they had with the naked female body, appearing in familiar tropes such as lying under the boughs of trees or being ravished by a Pan-like or mythic figure. Such tropes appear in Jugend drawings by Lovis Corinth in 1896 (Fig. 7.8), Marie Stüler-Walde’s Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (On Wings of Song) in 1897 (Fig. 7.9), Hans Christiansen’s cover in 1898 (Fig. 7.10), and an 1897 illustration by Pankok (Fig. 7.11). The journal often included images depicting women dancing freely in the contemporary styles of Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, or Loïe Fuller (Fig. 7.12). Corinth’s black and white drawing, like Lilien’s Ein Garten (Fig. 7.2), portrays a woman beneath a flowery bough. In Corinth’s illustration, a naked woman is being pored over by a Pan-like beast that pulls at her hair in a gesture of intimidation and sexual longing. The image recalls Lilien’s early works for Jugend in Mein Schönstes Fraulein, darf ich wagen, in 1898 (Fig. 3.4) or Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) in 1898 (Fig. 7.13).59 Even black and white advertisements in Jugend reflected the fashion for nude, languorous women and muscular men. In 1897, images of women’s bodies advertising chocolate and beauty care shared the same space as Beardsley’s woodcuts, juxtaposing his Art Nouveau style, so popular in Germany, with fashionable commodity equivalents (Fig. 7.14). Although similar in theme to Lilien’s image of the nude lover in Ein Garten, the difference lies in Lilien’s exceptional portrayal of a woman who enjoys pleasuring herself, as well as his emphasis on her ancient tribal clothing and dark hair. Lilien’s theme of agency and power in Ein Garten has much in common with Klimt’s Judith of 1901 (Fig. 4.6), who looks like a woman about to reach an orgasm, unlike many images that appeared in early editions of Jugend. Only Stüler-Walde’s portrait of a young woman with her lover appears to challenge the status quo while playing for the same audience reaction. This brief comparison with illustrations from Jugend demonstrates that Lilien’s Songs imagery was extremely unusual, even among the Munich Bohemian set. Perhaps they were closer in content to the erotic images found in the Viennese Secessionist magazine, Ver Sacrum (Fig. 7.6). If Lilien’s image of a young woman in the throes of an orgasm was unusual for the weekly periodical Jugend, were there other illustrators working on similar biblical themes in Germany’s burgeoning book industry who came close to these, either in tone or in subject matter? Two graphic artists, Thomas Theodor Heine (1867–1948) and Marcus Behmer (1879–1958), created illustrations for different texts, both depicting the two most famous fin-de-siècle heroines of the day, Judith and Salome. Like Lilien, both artists were influenced by the art of Aubrey Beardsley. The fact that these Jewish heroines feature in these German graphic illustrations, and that Heine had Jewish roots, is worth examining further.

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Figure 7.8  Lovis Corinth, Drawing, Jugend Vol. 2, No. 28, 11 July 1896, 456, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uniheidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1896_2/0035/image, accessed 27 June 2018.

Figure 7.9  Marie Stüler-Walde, Auf Flügelnd des Gesanges (On Wings of Song), Jugend Vol. 1, No. 21, 22 May 1897, 337, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1897_1/0331/image, accessed 27 June 2018.

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Figure 7.10  Hans Christiansen, Cover illustration, Jugend Vol. 2, No. 48, 26 November 1898, 795, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1898_2/0379/image, accessed 27 June 2018.

Figure 7.11  Bernhard Pankok, Jugend Vol. 1, No. 21, 22 May 1897, 39, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uniheidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1897_1/0042/image, accessed 27 June 2018.

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Figure 7.12  Ludwig von Zumbusch, Cover, Jugend Vol. 2, No. 40, 2 October 1897, 669, – CCBY-SA 3.0. Colour lithograph. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1897_2/0217/image, accessed 27 June 2018.

Figure 7.13  E. M. Lilien, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), 1898. In Lothar Brieger, E. M. Lilien: Eine Künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922), 41.

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Figure 7.14  Page of advertisements, Jugend Vol. 1, No. 22, 29 May 1897, 366, – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uniheidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1897_1/0361/image, accessed 27 June 2018.

Marcus Behmer and Thomas Theodor Heine: Drawing the Oriental Images of the biblical Salome became one of the richest sources for female symbolism in England and turn-of-the-century Germany, Austria, and Central Europe.60 The German reception of Beardsley’s illustrations for Wilde’s Salomé reached a crescendo in 1903, when Wilde’s play was translated into German by the young Jewish playwright Hedwig Lachmann.61 Successfully performed in 1905 by Max Reinhardt at the Schall und Rauch Theatre and set to music by Richard Strauss, these images of the sensual and sexually permissive, even dangerously modern, woman were tied to the Christian interpretation of the biblical tale of Eve as the penultimate Jewish temptress and femme fatale. Eve was both virgin and dominatrix, pagan goddess of lust and immortal goddess of hysteria. Yet, often the images Germans saw were Marcus Behmer’s black and white drawings for Lachmann’s translation, not Beardsley’s illustrations. Behmer has been much maligned as a copyist of Beardsley’s style, but he was a successful draughtsman who created early comic and design books for the German book industry. Lilien, like Behmer, Heine, Kleukens, and other graphic illustrators of the period, was greatly influenced by the contemporary renaissance in bookbinding, printing, and decoration in Germany at the fin de siècle.62 Behmer’s Salome (Figs. 7.19 and 7.20), like Friedrich Wilhelm Kleukens’ book Esther (Fig. 5.5) and Lilien’s Die

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Bücher der Bibel series, was originally commissioned by the Insel Verlag Publisher in Leipzig, a publishing house dedicated to the creation of artistic books containing creative typography and illustrations.63 Behmer’s ten black and white images for Salome follow Lachmann’s text. They depict the heroine Salome as a stronger, less erotic character than Beardsley’s Salome, although it is easy to see why the comparisons between his and Beardsley’s illustrations occur. Behmer’s title page (Fig. 7.15) bears the same sensuous linear Art Nouveau-style leaves and flowers seen in Beardsley’s book cover designs. Similar motifs occur in the graphic designs of many Jugendstil artists, such as the Henry Van de Velde (Fig. 7.16), or Lilien’s cover and title page for Juda (Figs. 7.17 and 7.18). Behmer’s images also recall Beardsley’s flat blocks of black and white colour and Japanese woodblock prints. Behmer’s Salome reveals a strong, determined woman bent on atoning for herself and her people (Fig. 7.19). The sharp, rigid lines delineating the figure of Salome are mirrored in the long line of her crown’s plume, the angular lines of her arms, and the strange position of her pet bird’s tail. The bird is the only animal that appears in the entire story, remaining tethered, like his mistress, to the dark and woeful tragedy. In Der Wunsch, a disorientated Salome stares at her reflection in the moon where she has become the mythical Medusa or monster (Fig. 7.20). Unlike Beardsley’s Salome who stares at the head of John the Baptist with an aggressive scowl (Fig. 4.3), Behmer’s Salome appears as if dumbfounded by her deed. She stares at her own dark metamorphosis rather than at the head of John the Baptist, which becomes the focus in

Figure 7.15 Marcus Behmer, Title page, Salome, 1908. In Hedwig Lachmann, Salome (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1908). Courtesy of Suhrkamp/Insel Verlag.

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Figure 7.16 Henry Van de Velde, Cover, Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch fur Alle und Klein (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and for None), 1908. Double-page ornamental title, printed in purple and gold, after designs by Henry van der Velde, text printed in black and gold, type designed in 1900 by G. Lemmen. Courtesy of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Figure 7.17  E. M. Lilien, Cover, Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p.

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Figure 7.17  (Continued)

Figure 7.18  E. M. Lilien, Artist’s name with surrounded by flourishes, Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p.

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Beardsley’s image. Behmer’s Salome abruptly changes the tale of beheading into a less erotic, aggressive, and less subversive motif of female betrayal. Thomas Theodor Heine, like Behmer, also created images for periodicals, posters, and books.64 Heine’s style was versatile, and his images are now better known than Behmer’s. He created satirical images for Simplicissimus that included the poster of a licentious woman artist running away with the devil himself (Fig. 7.21). They were delightfully tongue-in-cheek drawings that poked fun at Germany’s reactionary forces, the self-righteous bourgeoisie, and the dull-witted, lower middle class. Heine, born in Leipzig in 1861 of Jewish origin, was raised as a Christian.65 As a leading caricaturist for Simplicissimus, he was controversial for creating political cartoons that showed insensitivity to the minority position of German Jews.66 Heine’s femme fatale, with her paint palette in hand, writes the name of the magazine using the devil’s tail as her brush. Heine’s image suggests that the Arts, as personified by the woman artist, are in league with the devil, a reference to the satirical way that Simplicissimus viewed the debauchery of contemporary society.67 The image was so well received

Figure 7.19 Marcus Behmer, Salome. In Hedwig Lachmann Landauer, Salome, 1908. Courtesy of Suhrkamp/Insel Verlag.

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Figure 7.20  Marcus Behmer, Der Wunsch (Desire). In Hedwig Lachmann Landauer, Salome, 1908. Courtesy of Suhrkamp/Insel Verlag.

that the devil became a common motif in Heine’s later work.68 The cover also shows the influences of Beardsley’s raucous humour, the flat colour of Japanese woodcut prints, and the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. All of these influences were part of the Jugendstil style. Heine also created simple images such as the depiction of the American dancer Loïe Fuller for Die Insel magazine in 1900, which emphasised the dancer’s linear movements.69 Heine created illustrations for Friedrich Hebbel’s recreation of the biblical story of Judith, in this same simple linear style in 1908 (Figs. 7.22 and 7.24). That same year, Lilien published his first volume of illustrations for the Die Bücher der Bibel. Although the images for Judith confirm that Heine was an accomplished

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Figure 7.21  T. T. (Thomas Theodor) Heine, Poster for Simplicissimus, 1896, colour lithograph, 79 × 59 cm.

artist in this field, Lilien and Beardsley’s styles were far superior (Figs. 5.15 and 4.3). By this time, dark, erotic, and menacing representations of woman in literature and visual culture included Otto Weininger’s disparaging antisemitic and anti-feminist book Geschlect und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903); Eduard Fuchs’s history of eroticism and women Die Frau in der Karikatur (1906) and Geschichte der Erotischen Kunst (1907); Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), where sensual eroticism was replaced with an aggressively crude pornography; and Kokoschka’s play Murderer, Hope of Women (1908), which presented a bloodthirsty vision of a dangerous woman.70 Heine’s illustrations for Hebbel’s Judith have been compared to Beardsley’s Salome, not only because of the subject matter, but also because they have both been reinterpreted as modern, degenerate women who murder for the sake of personal or individual indignation rather than as submissive instruments of God’s purpose.71 This is perfectly realised in the subtle, spare use of line in one of Heine’s most famous illustrations for the book (Fig. 7.22). In this drawing, the emphasis is on Judith’s deed. Her left hand clasps

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Figure 7.22 T. T. (Thomas Theodor) Heine, Judith (Munich: Hans von Weber, 1908). In Timothy W. Hiles, Thomas Theodor Heine: Fin-de-Siècle Munich and the Origins of Simplicissimus (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 210.

the right hand responsible for cutting off Holofernes’ head, and both limbs are elongated, appearing as an extension of clothing that ends at the very site where his severed head lies abandoned on the palace floor. Heine portrays Judith as a temptress, a representation seen in an earlier work that he created for the cover of Marcel Prévost’s (1862–1941) book Halbe Unschuld: Demi-vierge (Half Innocent: Half Virgin, 1895) (Fig. 7.23). Prevost’s book was about the exaggerated social ramifications of a modern education on young Parisian girls.72 Heine portrays a modern couple, where the woman is being seduced by a young man in a tailored coat and who is smelling the last lily before it is broken in half. The lily symbolises women’s purity, recalling the Virgin Mary’s purity and the symbol of the lily in many medieval and Renaissance paintings as a sign of the Annunciation. Heine infers that modern woman is tempted by the devil himself, signified by the dragon that lurks beneath every young unplucked lily, as her lover breaks the lily’s stalk. The modern woman hardly cares as she gazes knowingly towards the viewing audience. Heine uses the Christian imagery and interpretation of the ‘fall’ to explain her seduction. The modern woman is the biblical Eve moments before her ‘fall’. Heine’s image recalls Lilien’s use of the same trope – the lily – in his illustration of the young maiden or shepherdess in Liebeswerben im Frühling (Fig. 7.1). Both Heine’s and Lilien’s use of multilayered symbols indicate that their hybrid identity as Germans and Jews was a constant, often ambivalent, struggle. Lilien may have been acutely aware of such multifaceted imagery because he knew from the outset that his biblical

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Figure 7.23  T. T. (Thomas Theodor) Heine, Halbe Unschuld: Demi-vierge (Half Innocent: Half-Virgin), 1895. In Timothy Hiles, Thomas Theodor Heine: Fin-de-Siècle Munich and the Origins of Simplicissimus (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 206.

Figure 7.24  T. T. (Thomas Theodor) Heine, Judith, (Munich: Hans von Weber, 1908). In Timothy Hiles, Thomas Theodor Heine: Fin-de-Siècle Munich and the Origins of Simplicissimus (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 209.

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illustrations were to be marketed to both Christian and Jewish audiences. By contrast, Heine simply did not care enough about Jewish themes.73 Behmer’s images of Salome and Heine’s view of Judith as a seductive, licentious, fallen woman confirm that their representations combined their protagonists’ complex roles as femmes fatales as well as heroines of their people. Heine’s psychological portraits of Judith combine simplicity and detail in images of a modern dangerous woman in an ancient biblical melodrama. Both provide an intriguing depiction of these Jewish women as simultaneously heroines and complicated women. Heine’s portrayal of Judith (Fig. 7.24) provides a stylistic link to Lilien’s portrayal of Solomon (Fig. 5.15). Lilien uses similar oriental motifs, such as the tiled floor and geometric outlines of the divan, but here the similarities end. Although they share the visual language of orientalism, Heine’s imagery indicates a superficial attempt to engage with Judith’s world, and Holofernes is an ogre in a Grimm’s fairy tale. Lilien was more intent on a detailed and serious engagement with the material culture of the biblical world of the East, its architecture, dress, and customs. Even Behmer’s drawings of Salome show little interest in her clothing or apparel. For Heine and Behmer, the world of these Jewish heroines was less important than the unfolding of their female protagonist’s psychological trauma. Even if both Heine and Behmer created simplified drawings for the sake of their psychological portraiture, they are more caricature than representations of Jewish heroines. Lilien’s images reflected a more detailed and authentic vision of the Orient.

Conclusions By the time Lilien created his imagery for Die Bücher der Bibel, he had absorbed many different stylistic practices and influences – from orientalist paintings and biblical drawings to the chic and stylish book art of Aubrey Beardsley. These influences included the burgeoning book art of fellow German-speaking printers, typographers, book designers, and illustrators. Lilien was well aware of the visual culture of Jugendstil and Art Nouveau, and the eroticised and sensuous images of young women by more renowned artists such as Klimt, Beardsley, Mucha, and Fidus. His sensual, erotic imagery from Das Lied der Lieder, as well as his two other powerful drawings of strong independent Jewish women – in Prinzessin Shabbat and Harfenspielerin – relied on his absorption of innumerable stylistic influences from the graphic arts. Lilien’s biblical images attempted to create a thoroughly modern new Jewish woman. This was unusual, even radical for its time. Only a few other graphic artists of the same period, such as Heine and Behmer, came close to his evocative representations. Nonetheless, Heine and Behmer were not nearly as interested in the resonance that orientalism had as a symbol of personal and political identity. For Heine and Behmer, orientalism was an artistic style used to help emphasise the erotic nature of the modern woman and accentuate the linear playfulness of their own Jugendstil technique. Orientalism became a superficial trope that was not dependent on a religious or contextual understanding of who that oriental woman might be or what her Eastern

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outlook might confirm or deny. Lilien’s use of orientalism reverberates on a deeper level and highlights a more sophisticated and religiously informed knowledge of Judaism, of contemporary archaeology and its antisemitic overtones, and of the standing or place of Jewish women in Jewish Orthodoxy. Considering the efflorescence of dark, erotic, and menacing representations of women in literature and visual culture that occurred during the fin de siècle, Lilien’s sensuous image in Ein Garten of a dangerously modern woman radiating agency and power is compelling. It offers the viewer a glimpse of an alternate and intriguing vision of a modern Jewish woman in early Central European Zionist discourse. Subconsciously or consciously (one is not sure which), Lilien captures the predicament of the new Jewish woman on the verge of emancipation, still being portrayed as the serpentine seductress. Lilien’s most Jewish femme fatale embraces her sexuality and transforms the misogynist image of herself as a sexually dangerous woman into an agent of her own personal liberation. Ann Pellegrini has argued that the more the male Jew was viewed as an effeminate version of the degenerate modern, the more the Jewish woman disappeared from view.74 Lilien’s provocative illustrations for Das Lied der Lieder (as well as his earlier metaphysical images of music and the divine) indicate that she is not missing from the fin-de-siècle Jewish imagination. She is just harder to locate as a fully formed, perfectly realised vision. Lilien’s various, and often contradictory, views of women were in keeping with the tensions and multiple currents at play during the fin de siècle. Sometimes Lilien’s images of women were anti-feminist – when he created images of women in the current vogue of femmes fatales, sometimes they were more chaste heroine – in keeping with his evolving Zionist agenda. Occasionally, they were images of powerful, exotic, oriental beauties. Lilien’s use of the more radical contemporary conceptions of gender and sexuality emerging among the cultural avant-garde, as well as his use of the sensual oriental paradigm, gives his biblical illustrations an exotic fin-de-siècle fusion of decadence, rebelliousness, and Jewish cultural renewal. Lilien’s remarkable accomplishment for the period was the creation of three powerful images of Jewish women: his sensual and provocative illustration Ein Garten, and his illustrations of independent Jewish women in Prinzessin Shabbat and Harfenspielerin, both of whom seem comfortable with their place in the world. It was as if Lilien’s women were an exotic, powerful metaphor for his own Jewish national vision. Jewish heroines, like Jewish heroes, were another way to resist fin-de-siècle antisemitic stereotyping. Lilien’s use of Jewish orientalism promised an ‘authenticity’ never before imagined and provided a potent way to introduce new meaning to an increasingly acculturated German Jewish audience who yearned for cultural recognition in a society that venerated Bildung above all. These often-respectable German burghers also enjoyed looking at beautiful images of women with that intensely contemporary and gendered male ‘gaze’. Lilien defied the rules of modesty within traditional Orthodoxy, but his work was sympathetic to Judaism and its spiritual components, even though it was based on a secular Zionist ideology in which the reclamation of Jewish culture was not just important, but essential. Because of this Zionist sentiment, his personal interest in

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Jewish literary culture pushed the limits of Jewish visual representations and gave him the opportunity to merge three very different paradigms: the oriental, the biblical, and the femme fatale. Something potent and powerful appeared when Lilien accomplished this, giving his work an uncanny contemporary and prescient feeling. The thoroughly ‘new Jewish woman’ in these works emerges as a strong, independent figure, both emancipated and sensual, with her dark-coloured eyes and long black locks. She embraces her sexuality, rewriting the misogynist image of herself as a treacherous woman into an agent of her own personal liberation. Lilien’s depiction of the new Jewish woman in Das Lied der Lieder, as both an ‘authentic’ oriental and modern Jewess who confounds categorisation, remains a captivating exception to the conservative representation of Jewish women at that time. The genre of Jüdischer, nationalist, and Jugendstil book art by Lilien was a popular cultural moment in the history of German Jewish cultural Zionism. Lilien’s development of this culturally rich phenomenon deserves to be re-examined and understood, so that his work can be reinstated and integrated into the study of the history of European graphic art and artists of the fin de siècle.

Notes 1 2

They appear as epigraphs to this chapter. E. M. Lilien, letter to Helene, Berlin, 13 July 1905 in Lilien, Briefe, 41–42. Translation from Ruthi Ofek, E. M. Lilien: The First Zionist Artist, Letters, Etchings, Drawings, Photographs (Haifa: Rahash Printers, 1997), 107; Lilien, letter to Helene, Berlin, 14 August 1905, 43–44, translation, ibid., 112–13. For the complete paragraph about Jewish women from the Matriach Sarah to Rosa Luxemburg, see Appendix D. 3 Ibid. 4 As discussed in the first two sections of chapter 3, 71–84 and chapter 4, 104–126. 5 See chapter 4. 6 Many German women’s stance on motherhood and women’s suffrage did not fit neatly into categories of emancipated or un-emancipated women. The Munich writer, avant-garde artist, and mother Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow (1871–1918) was a firm believer in the ‘natural’ differences between men and women, asserting in 1899 that ‘It is only a short step from loose fitting dresses to women breathing through gills.’ Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow, ‘Viragines oder Hetären (Viragoes or Hetaerae [courtesans])’, Zürcher Diskussionen, 1899, in Jürgen Kolbe, Heller Zaube – Thomas Mann in München, 1894–1933 (Berlin: Siedler, 1987), cited in Gabriele Fahr-Becker, Art Nouveau (Bonn: Tandem Verlag, 2007). 7 Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quatert, Gendering German History: Rewriting Historiography (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); Julie Lieber, ‘Infidelity and Intimacy in Nineteenth-Century Vienna: Gender and Orthodoxy as Reflected in the Responsa of Rabbi Eliezer Horowitz’, Nashim, no. 21 (Spring 2011): 24–45; Alison Rose, Jewish Women in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). The omission may be because gender analysis has focused on the writing of German cultural history from Weimar to Nazi Germany. See Geoff Eley, Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 17.

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As discussed in chapter 3, Jewish women scholars introduced or ‘discovered’ the role of women within the modern Jewish experience, arguing since the 1970s that gender, as Joan Wallach Scott noted, is a critical category for analysis in European and modern Jewish history. Marion Kaplan’s pioneering research on the new German Jewish woman integrated the activities of women into the larger historical narrative of European Jewish history. Her approach remains central to this book. However, Kaplan’s research documents the social and political status of the modern Jewish woman, and writes from the perspective of a social rather than cultural historian. Kaplan’s latest book, co-edited with Deborah Dash Moore, Gender and Jewish History (2011), seems intent on changing that, although the position of fin-de-siècle Jewish women, or the ‘New Woman’ prior to the Weimar period, is not especially addressed. Claudia Prestel’s essay, ‘The “New Jewish Woman” in Weimar Germany’, does focus on the subject of the ‘New Woman’, but Prestel also concentrates on the Weimar period from the perspective of a social historian. Claudia Prestel, ‘The “New Jewish Woman” in Weimar Germany’, in Jüdisches Leben in Der Weimar Republik (London; Tübingen: Leo Baeck Institute/Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 135–58. 9 See Sabine Rewald, Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s (New York; New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Yale University Press, 2006). 10 Emily D. Bilski, ed., Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). A recent article on Elsa LaskerSchüler is an exception. See Astrid Schmetterling, ‘“I Am Jussuf of Egypt”: Orientalism in Else Lasker-Schüler’s Drawings’, Ars Judaica, The Bar Ilan Journal of Jewish Art 8 (2012): 81–98. 11 As noted in chapter 4, n. 7, the word ‘authentic’ or the idea of ‘authenticity’ is used in quotation marks because the word is value-laden. On the way literary theory, cultural, and aesthetic theories understand the problematics of authenticity, see that note. 12 Book artists used similar border designs and small vignettes attached to individual letters. Book art was another source of income for struggling artists and a way to produce artwork for the pleasure of the popular reading public. On book art in Germany, see Jürgen Eyssen, Buchkunst in Deutschland: Vom Jugendstil Zum Malerbuch (Hanover: Schlütersche Verlagsanstalt und Druckerei, 1980); Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, Graphic Style: From Victorian to Post-Modern (New York: Harry M. Abrams Inc., Publishers, 1988); Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945 (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). 13 In England, it was due to the visionary art of the poet and artist William Blake (1757–1827) who wrote, illustrated, coloured, printed, and bound his own work. In Germany, most book artists were influenced by the contemporary Renaissance in bookbinding, printing, and decoration, harking back to woodblock prints revolutionised by northern German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). 14 Rahlwes, Bibel, VI: 303–21. 15 See E. M. Lilien, Moses Zerbricht die Tafeln (Moses Breaking the Tablets), c. 1908, Brieger, EML, 217 (2.4). In this image, Aaron wears a striped costume that recurs in many of Lilien’s biblical illustrations. In images of Daniel, he wears a common Arab cloak or abbaya, worn at the time. Torah scribes appear in Yemenite or Samaritan robes. For the comparison of Lilien’s photographs of Arabs, Yemenites, and Samaritans wearing their traditional robes to his biblical drawings, see Bar-Am, PwL 54. 16 Rahlwes, Bibel, VI: 309. 17 Ibid., 312.

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18 Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch, The Song of Songs: A New Translation (San Francisco: University of California Press, 1998), 1. 19 Chapter 4, verses 12–16, Das Lied der Lieder, in Rahlwes, Bibel, VI: 312. ‘Ein Garten ist meine Braut. Ein verschlossener Garten ist mein Schwester, meine Braut, eine verschlossene Quelle, ein versiegelter Born. Ihr sprossen im Lusthain Granatan mit Köstlicher Frucht, Zyprus und Narde … Ich komme in seinen Garten mein Honig, ich trinke meinen Wein und meine Milch’. 20 In Judaism, the pomegranate is a popular motif. As in Ancient Greece, it can symbolise fertility, fire, and passion. Israel is often compared to the good fruit, the pomegranate, full of good deeds, and emblematic of Israel’s agricultural fertility. According to Midrash, it is associated with the mystical number 613. Ellen Frankel and Betsy Platkin Teutsch, The Encyclopaedia of Jewish Symbols (Northvale, NJ;London: Jason Aronson, 1995), 128–29. 21 See n. 14. 22 Brunhilde is the heroine in the Nibelungenlied, a German medieval epic poem of the 1200s. Richard Wagner’s opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung (1853–74) is the most famous modern adaption. Rapunzel is the heroine of the German Romantic stories by the Brothers’ Grimm (1812–20). Her hair braided with pearls foreshadows the ‘virtuous Jewish woman’ in Lilien’s sketch for the first Jewish tapestry, An Allegorical Wedding, created five years later. On Lilien’s tapestry, see chapter 6. 23 Cecil Roth states that as early as the fourteenth century, most Western and Central European Jews lavished great attention on the Parokhet and used heavily embroidered fabric, sometimes decorated with Hebrew lettering in gold or silver, with holes for the curtain rod and tassels as decoration. Cecil Roth and Bezalel Narkiss, Jewish Art: An Illustrated History, Revised Edition (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1971), 124. 24 Amitai Mendelsohn recently suggested that Lilien helped create his Sabbath Queen from the Christian iconography of the halo used to represent the Madonna. Amitai Mendelsohn, Behold the Man: Jesus in Israeli Art (Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Israel Museum, 2017), 70. 25 Brieger, EML, 147, 277. 26 For the image of the throne, see Yigal Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art (Jerusalem: Lund Humphries; Israel Museum, 2013), 11. 27 Ellen Frankel and Betsy Platkin Teutsch, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Symbols (Northvale, NJ; London: Jason Aronson, 1995), 155. 28 Lawrence A. Hoffman, ed., My People’s Prayer Book, Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries, Vol. 8: Kabbalat Shabbat: (Welcoming Shabbat in the Synagogue) (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2005), 115–38. 29 Frankel and Teutsch, Encyclopedia of Jewish Symbols, 112. 30 The logo appears on the front cover of the book. Berthold Feiwel, Junge Harfen: Eine Sammlung Jungjüdischer Gedichte (Young Harps: A Collection of Young Jewish Poems) (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1900). The title Junge Harfen comes from the opening poem by the Viennese writer Max Barber. The young modern Jewish poet was like a young harp, a ‘clarion call for [Jewish] cultural rejuvenation’. Mark H. Gelber, Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000), 48–49. 31 As noted earlier, Raban created a series of erotic images of women in his Song of Songs, but that was later in 1923.

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32 The title for this biblical book appears as Lied der Lieder on page 295. 33 On page 303. 34 Lilien may have been a Freemason, preferring to use the name that helped associate the Songs with King Solomon, who is associated with the building of the Temple in Freemasonry. Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, 15. See also the discussion on Solomon in Albert G. Mackey, in Mackey’s Revised Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry (Chicago: The Masonic History Company, [1900] 1956), 697–99. 35 Discussed in chapter 5. For a patently non-ecumenical depiction by Lilien, see his image of Haman on the cross in the ‘Book of Esther’ in Rahlwes, Bibel, VII: 248. 36 I am referring to the works of Northern Renaissance German artists like Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Hans Holbein, the Younger (1497–1593), who were important influences on his work. See, for instance, Holbein’s’ sixteenth-century woodcut series Icones historiarvm Veteris Testamenti, Metropolitan Museum Art, New York. 37 On the translation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) into German, see chapter 5. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s modern translation of Mendelssohn’s Bible was not published until the years 1925 through 1937. 38 On fin-de-siècle German Jewish mass popular culture, see ‘Introduction’ in David Brenner, German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust: Kafka’s Kitsch (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–11. 39 For instance, Marion Deshmukh sought to re-examine the artwork of Liebermann and Ury in terms of their ‘foreign’ or ‘degenerate/Jewish’ links. Marion F. Deshmukh, ‘“Politics Is an Art”: The Cultural Politics of Max Liebermann in Wilhelmine Germany’, in Imagining Modern German Culture, 1889–1910, ed. Francoise ForsterHahn (Washington, DC; Hanover, NH: National Gallery of Art; University Press of New England, 1996), 165–84. On Lesser Ury, see Chana C. Schütz, ‘Lesser Ury and the Jewish Renaissance’, Jewish Studies Quarterly 10, no. 4 (2004): 146–63. 40 See chapter 1 for a more complete discussion of these events including Hans Belting’s cultural Sonderweg in Hans Belting, The Germans and Their Art: A Troublesome Relationship, trans. Scott Kleager (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Barbara McClosky, ‘Wither the Study of German Art?’ German Studies Review 35, no. 3 (2012): 481–5. 41 Catherine Soussloff, ed., Jewish Identity in Modern Art History (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1999), 19–40. 42 See n. 7 and Jacqueline Strecker, The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art: 1910–37 (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2011). 43 Henry Wasserman, ‘Jews in Jugendstil (a Social Analysis of Jokes and Cartoons in the Simplicissimus, 1896–1914)’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 31 (1986): 71–104; Justin Howes and Pauline Paucker, ‘German Jews and the Graphic Arts’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 34 (1989): 443–73. 44 Strecker, The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art: 1910–1937, 15–18. Hobsbawm’s article was not written for this exhibition but for a review of the book by Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) and was originally published for the London Review of Books, 24 January 2008 as ‘Diary: Memories of Weimar’. 45 The more celebrated influences of the European painters Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha, and Fidus (Hugo Höppener) and the English graphic artist Aubrey Beardsley were considered in chapter 5.

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46 Langen was exiled in 1898 when the Kaiser objected to a cover where he was ridiculed. See Timothy W. Hiles, Thomas Theodor Heine: Fin-De-Siècle Munich and the Origins of Simplicissimus (New York: Peter Long, 1996), 65. 47 The first Secessionist movement in Germany took place in 1892. On Jugendstil and Munich, see Rainer Kathryn Bloom Heisinger, Art Nouveau in Munich: Masters of Jugendstil (Philadelphia: Prestel-Verlag in association with Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1988); Michael Buhrs et al., eds., The Munich Secession, 1892–1914 (Munich: Minerva Hermann Farnung, 2008). 48 The Studio became so widely read in Germany that the director of the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Arts and Crafts) in Leipzig proclaimed that an ‘artistic Anglomania’ had begun. Richard Graul, ed., Die Krisis im Kunstgewerbe (Liepzig, 1901), 40, cited in Heisinger, Art Nouveau in Munich: Masters of Jugendstil, 17. On Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Beardsley’s images, see pages 107–8 and 249–50. 49 Email correspondence with Tom Peters, May 2012. 50 Moser was the founder of the Wiener Werkstätte and one of the three main graphic designers for the magazine. 51 Metzger, Munich: Its Golden Age of Art and Culture, 1890–1920, 59–60. 52 Paul was capable of creating both positive and negative images of women. David Ehrenpreis, ‘Cyclists and Amazons: Representing the New Woman in Wilhelmine Germany’, Woman’s Art Journal 20, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1999): 25. 53 Anne Taylor Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladderadatsch & Simplicissimus, 1890–1914 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 3. 54 Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany, 4. 55 About 500,000 people. See Munich Statistical Office (Statistisches Amt der Landeshauptstadt München). For this reason, Jugend is used as the major primary source material in this chapter for artists with whom Lilien may have studied or analysed on a weekly basis. 56 University of Heidelberg, ‘Jugend – München illustrierte Wochenschrift für Kunst und Leben – Digitised’, http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/Englisch/helios/fachinfo/ www/kunst/digilit/artjournals/jugend.html, viewed 13 August 2013. The list of artists included Munich’s August Endell, inventor of the whiplash style, the ultimate Jugendstil and Art Nouveau motif; Hermann Obrist, artist of beautiful plant motifs; and Fidus’s image of naked young girls with flowing hair caught in the wind that echo Lilien’s early work for Jugend. See Figure 6.10. 57 Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany, 3. 58 In 1900, Ulk’s circulation was the same as Jugend, although Berlin’s population was close to two million. Jugend outstripped even Ulk’s popularity. Karl Scheffler, Berlin: Ein Stadtschiksal (1910: reprint Berlin: Fannel & Walz, 1989), 219, cited in Bilski, Berlin Metropolis, 7. 59 Lovis Corinth, one of the three well-known Impressionist painters of this period, later married Charlotte Berend (1880–1967), a fellow artist and pupil, and daughter of a Jewish merchant. 60 As mentioned in earlier chapters, the emergence of so-called Salomania, with which many European and North American performers and audiences became obsessed, was prevalent at the fin de siècle. Ulrike Brunotte, ‘Unveiling Salome 1900’, in Veiled Orient Unveiled Occident? (Un) Visibility in Politics, Law, Art and Culture since the

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19th Century, ed. B. Dennerlein, E. Frietsch, and T. Steffen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012), 98. 61 On the German reception to Wilde’s Salome, see Eugene W. Davis, ‘Oscar Wilde, Salome and the German Press 1901–1905’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 44, no. 2 (2001): 149–80. On Hedwig Lachmann, see the Jewish Women’s Archive online at http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/lachmann-hedwig, viewed 26 August 2013. 62 The Werkstätter movement had workshops located in Munich, Dresden, and Berlin. 63 Harry Graf Kessler (1868–1937) worked in one such small workshop until he founded The Cranach Press in 1913. Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945, 30. 64 T. T. Heine is not to be confused with the poet Christian Johann Heinrich Heine, or H. H. Heine (1797–1856). Heine, the poet, was born into a Jewish Düsseldorf family and converted to Christianity in 1825. 65 Wasserman, ‘Jews in Jugendstil’, 85. 66 On the position of Simplicissimus and the Jews, see Wassserman, ‘Jews in Jugendstil’, 75–86. 67 Hiles, Thomas Theodor Heine, 65. The use of the devil motif also signified the original meaning of the Grimmelhausen novel on which the magazine Simplicissimus was based. In the novel, the devil is shown reading a book, or magazine, like Heine’s illustration and was an established reference for satirical poetry. 68 Hiles, Thomas Theodor Heine. 69 Julius Meier-Greafe, ‘Loie Fuller’, Die Insel 1, no. 3 (1900): 102; Friedrich Hebbel, Judith (Munich: Hans von Weber Verlag, 1893). 70 See chapter 4, 107–110 and 125. 71 On the psychological implications of Judith’s actions, see Edna Purdie, The Story of Judith in German and English Literature (Paris: H. Champion, 1927), 28. Cited in his discussion of Heine’s Judith in his book on Heine. Hiles, Thomas Theodor Heine, 205. 72 Prevost was a French writer who wrote stories that claimed to show the ‘corrupting effect of Parisian education and society on young women’. Marcel Prevost, Encylcopaedia Britannica online at http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/ topic/1285970/Marcel-Prevost, viewed 2 September 2013. 73 Wasserman, ‘Jews in Jugendstil’, 86. 74 Ann Pellegrini, ‘Whiteface Performances, Race, Gender and Jewish Bodies’, in Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, ed. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 109.

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They were both Oriental and European, conquered and resistor, friend and foe. Jews could occupy multiple spaces in the framework of alterity, and they could do so simultaneously: they could be the eternal accursed, and they could be the learned ones. They could be the predictable moneylender, and they could be the trace of familiarity in a landscape that was, at times, overwhelmingly foreign. Their position was not unequivocal; rather, it was ambiguous and ambivalent. —Julie Kalman, ‘Going Home to the Holy Land’

Introduction Ephraim Moses Lilien was an artist of many talents who worked across many media (drawing, etching, photography, and painting) and sites (Drohobycz, Lwów (Lemberg), Kraków, Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Braunschweig). His work clearly expresses the major themes and contradictions of the Western or European engagement with both gender and the East or Orient at the fin de siècle. As this book demonstrates, like the Jews of Jerusalem (described above),1 Jews in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe were more than ever both ‘Oriental and European, conquered and resistor’. They could ‘occupy multiple spaces in the framework of alterity, and they could do so simultaneously’. Furthermore, their position was not unequivocal; rather, it was ‘ambiguous and ambivalent’.2 Thus, Lilien could be a secular Austrian, German, Ostjude, cosmopolitan artist, nationalist, misogynist, and lover of women at different moments or at the same moment in time. Like many other fin-desiècle male and female German Jewish European intellectuals and artists, he managed to straddle these differing worlds and hybrid identities. Furthermore, as discussed in chapter one, like so many of his generation of German-speaking Jews, Lilien operated within and beyond Europe’s national borders. As Lilien’s images and the real-life stories of Helene Lilien and Nahida Remy Lazarus reveal, Central European Jews were often caught between what appeared (at least to Germans) to be the alien Asiatic, foreign world of Jewish identification and

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the desire to assimilate and acculturate, between Jewish distinction and cosmopolitan modernism. Thus, many German-speaking Jews like Lilien served as examples of Grunfeld’s Grenzjuden, marginalised Jews on the borders of German and/or Jewish identity. They crossed socio-cultural boundaries, national borders, and the East–West divide by combining these differing identities in any way they thought possible. Such fluid boundary crossing and border hopping, the paradox of late-nineteenth-century Jewish modernity, remain fundamental to understanding Lilien’s artistic genius. This final section attempts to re-situate Lilien’s work within the wider European world, keeping in mind his precarious position, while taking into account his significance and legacy across a range of issues important to this book: identity, gender, Zionism, and orientalism.

Lilien’s images of women Lilien’s early representations of femmes fatales purposefully imitated the proscribed, normative nineteenth-century European female stereotypes, even when he tried to produce striking images of women with Jewish distinction. Though Lilien’s images of Jewish femmes fatales, initiated with Juda, challenged more overtly antisemitic, racialised representations of Jewish women (as well as Jewish men) by other male avant-garde artists, they retained a certain cosmopolitan or avant-garde liberalism regarding the female body that often intensified women’s sexual objectification. While attempting to transform the more dangerous image of female Jewish difference into a new representation of the modern Jewish Zionist woman, Lilien’s liberalism remains ambivalent to the anti-feminist – even misogynist – attitude to women propagated in those same sexist stereotypes. Still, by transforming Jewish difference into a redemptive vision for Jewish acceptance, Lilien found a new role for biblical Jewish heroes and heroines in the guise of a Jewish national art. As Lilien’s images of women morphed from the femme fatale into a more national Jewish imagery that depicted these women as strong, courageous heroines, they also began to show the Jewish woman as a sensual yet active partner to the strong, virile Jewish man. In the process, Lilien merged two very different paradigms – the oriental and the biblical – into a powerful new Jewish genre. Occasionally, in Lilien’s new synthesis of style and method, a new and modern Jewish woman fleetingly emerged who was on the verge of political and social emancipation: sexually alluring, liberated, and independent. This representation conflicted with the more conservative ideal vision of the Jewish woman, fostered within Central European religious Jewish communities at the fin de siècle, who was sexually passive, domestically centred, maternally disposed, and innately religious. Lilien’s new Jewish woman mirrors the radical conceptions of gender and sexuality emerging among the acculturated Jewish and non-Jewish cultural avant-garde. Lilien’s vision was radical and prescient. Like the contemporary visual representations of French-Jewish actress Sarah Bernhardt, or the depiction of Austrian Jewish feminist and social pioneer Bertha

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Pappenheim (who became infamous as Freud’s Anna O), or the transgendered artwork of Else Lasker-Schüler, discussed earlier in this book, Lilien’s female representations of a dangerously modern woman are a fin-de-siècle fusion of decadence and rebelliousness, Jewish nationalism and cultural renewal. In such roles as Prinzessin Sabbat from Juda, or Harfenspielerin in Lieder des Ghetto, or Shulamite in Ein Garten (who is on the verge of an orgasm), these Jewish women clearly radiate agency and power. Lilien may have proffered visions that mimicked the exotic and sensuous Western male oriental fantasy, yet his Jewish female images also offered visions of a thoroughly modern woman who gazes at the viewer with authority, appearing as mother, goddess, wife, artist, daughter, femme fatale, or youthful innocent, sometimes all rolled into one. Lilien, a lover of women and an ambivalent sketcher of anti-woman femmes fatales, merged the rebellious Jugendstil and biblical book art of illustration into a groundbreaking nationalist aesthetic of strong, muscular biblical heroes and courageous mothers and heroines who defy easy categorisation. As stated in chapter seven, Lilien’s various, and often contradictory, views of women were in keeping with the tensions and multiple currents at play during the fin de siècle. Sometimes Lilien’s images of women were misogynist or anti-feminist, for example, when he created images of women in the current vogue of non-Jewish femmes fatales in his early work for Jugend (see Figs. 3.4 and 3.5), his book plates (see Figs. 3.6 and 3.7), and his early work Juda (see Fig. 1.2). Sometimes they were more chaste heroines, like his domestic images of Helene or his mother-in-law (see Figs. 3.14 and 3.16.), or, in keeping with his evolving Zionist agenda, his biblical images of women (see Esther Fig. 5.17, Rahab Fig. 5.23, Miriam Fig. 5.27, and Ruth Fig. 5.28). Occasionally, they were images of powerful, exotic, oriental beauties (see Figs. 7.2, 7.4, and 7.5). Lilien’s female images were part of his repertoire of Jugendstil drawing, to which he added the Star of David and the menorah, as well as other attributes. Seen in the context of his Biblical illustrations, Zionist magazines, and publicity, these female images take on an iconic status. Lilien’s use of the more radical conceptions of gender and sexuality emerging among the cultural avant-garde, as well as his use of the sensual oriental paradigm, gives his biblical illustrations a fin-de-siècle fusion of decadence, rebelliousness, and Jewish cultural renewal. Ultimately, Lilien’s female oeuvre remains as fresh and as complex now as it was then.

Lilien and hybridity at the fin de siècle Lilien’s images of the muscular ‘New Jew’ have been rightly celebrated for their contribution to the creation of a Jewish national art, and his images of women constitute a major, if neglected, part of his oeuvre. His female representations, as well as his male imagery, help demonstrate the wider significance of Lilien’s art in fin-desiècle Europe. Lilien was neither an isolated genius nor merely a figurehead for the Jewish national movement; rather, he engaged with the broader cultural scene that embraced cosmopolitan links to other important Zionist thinkers, Jewish intellectuals, and a myriad of other progressive artists, poets, and writers in the German-speaking world. Besides his friendship with Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Martin Buber, Stefan

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Zweig, and Chaim Weizmann, Lilien knew and worked with the early socialist art critic and collector Eduard Fuchs, the literary critic Berthold Feiwel, the editors of Ost und West (Davis Treitsche and Leo Winz), the artists Lesser Ury and Max Liebermann, and the Russian orientalist David Günzberg. He was also associated with the Berlin group of progressive writers, intellectuals, and artists from Die Kommenden that included Else Lasker-Schüler, Rudolph Steiner, and Magnus Hirschfield. In addition, Lilien was influenced by the neo-Romantic ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friederich Nietzsche and the Polish nationalism of Kornel Ujetski and Jan Matejko. He collaborated with non-Jewish writers, including the German Baron Börries von Münchhausen, the Lutheran pastor Ferdinand Rahlwes, and the Russian socialist Maxim Gorki, on important publishing projects. Furthermore, he admired and was influenced by the work of countless avant-garde painters and illustrators at the turn of the twentieth century, including the flamboyant Viennese painter Gustav Klimt, the Bohemian poster designer Alphonse Mucha, the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, the French book illustrators Gustave Doré and James Tissot, and the secessionist artists of Munich and Berlin. In turn, Lilien influenced other Jewish artists in Central Europe such as Joseph Budko (b. Poland 1888–1940), who came to Berlin in 1909 to study with Hermann Struck, as well as Shmuel Ben-David, Ze’ev Raban, and Ya’akov Stark. All were as cosmopolitan and as multi-identified as himself. The latter three moved to Palestine between around 1905 and 1912 and studied and/or taught at Bezalel. Budko arrived later but also created similar biblically themed book illustrations, becoming Head of Bezalel in 1935.

Lilien, Jewish orientalism, and Die Bücher der Bibel Lilien’s biblical illustrations, which wove together the images of the Jewish woman in a palimpsest of femme fatale, biblical heroine, and oriental beauty, reveal the complex tensions at play in fin-de-siècle Europe, where Jews were positioned simultaneously within and outside Europe’s borders. Thus, Lilien’s representations of Jewish orientalised women were imbued with a specific vision. They were not simply white, Western, male fantasies. Rather, they represented a fundamental and critical attempt to explore the complexities of German and Jewish identity. To Lilien, the Orient was not simply a fanciful place, but rather an internal space to explore his multiple identities. In fact, at the fin de siècle, Lilien was part of an increasingly large ingenious and active group of Jewish writers, poets, and artists whose response to the problems of alterity was to view German orientalism as an inspiration that would help explain their multiple identities. Lilien searched in his oriental and biblical imagery for an ‘authentic’ Jewish identity that would help overcome how many non-Jewish Germans perceived or classified him (and his fellow Jews): as being ‘not quite white’ and certainly ‘not quite German’. Thus, Lilien’s sense of ‘otherness’ not only produced tensions between his apparent ‘Germanness’ and ‘Jewishness’ but it demanded a psychological gestalt or answer to the perennial question that Buber’s spiritual ideas posed to the cultural Zionists on the Jewish ‘essence’. His images of orientalised Jewish

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women form part of that search for identity, roots, and meaning. Grounded in their European origins, Lilien’s images were, nevertheless, also part of the quest for a Jewish and ‘authentic’ oriental voice. Though Lilien’s racially Jewish images in his biblical illustrations confirmed the Rassenkraft or racial contradiction at the heart of cultural Zionism, they were also meant to reclaim the Hebrew Bible for both German secular modernists and Zionists alike. Lilien’s images were certainly a visual representation of Zionist cultural politics, Jewish identity, and cultural education. They were created partly to win over more support for the fledging Zionist movement as well as to put to rest ongoing myths about the Jewish question and German Jewish identity. Zionists and artists in Palestine were happy to appropriate Lilien’s artwork, but his work also served as a visual example of the beneficial potential of Jewish acculturation into German society, a paradigm of cultural and religious tolerance and the positive potential of Jewish artistic sensibility in the face of growing antisemitism and persecution. As an act of visual redemption, Lilien’s images were an opportunity to re-present Jewish biblical heroes and heroines for a Christian as well as a Jewish audience. In the end, Lilien strove (like Else LaskerSchüler) to open up ecumenical spaces between what it meant to be European and oriental, Christian or Jew, female or male, self or ‘other’.

The significance of Lilien’s art As discussed in the Introduction, this book fills a gap in our understanding of preWeimar ‘new women’ and representations of the ‘new Jewish woman’. This is the first study to consider the wide spectrum of Lilien’s drawings and illustrations, from his early work in Munich to his biblical illustrations, as well as his work for Ost und West, with particular attention to his use of German orientalism and gender as an important source of evidence for understanding both Jewish alterity and Jewish national identity at the fin de siècle. In addition, Lilien’s biblical illustrations for the Bücher der Bibel appear to have been largely neglected by many scholars, even though these works were often very popular among German Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike. Certainly, scholars have used the artwork Lilien fashioned from this genre to illustrate specific points concerning Lilien and/or the cultural Zionist movement. Nonetheless, Lilien’s biblical illustrations need to be understood and appreciated as the first biblical images created by a modern Jewish artist as well as a serious attempt to integrate Jewish artistic culture with European modernism.

Lilien’s enduring legacy Like Lilien and the cultural Zionists, Judah Ha-Levi, the Spanish Jewish philosopher, physician, and poet of Al-Andalus (1075–1141), spoke eloquently of the tensions between the East and West in the Jewish imagination in his famous poem:

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My heart is in the East And I am at the edge of the West How can I possibly taste what I eat? How could it please me? I’ll gladly leave behind me all the pleasure of Spain if only I might see the dust and ruins of your Shrine.3

Like a modern-day Ha-Levi, who wavered before eventually leaving for Zion in 1140, Lilien continued to vacillate on his commitment to living in Zion after returning from his fourth and final trip to Palestine at the outbreak of the Great War. As his interest in Zionism waned, he continued to remain loyal to the concept of Zion, creating etchings of his still popular landscapes and portraits (made during his trips to Palestine) as a way to make a living. His art, rather than his heart, may have belonged there, but his life back home in Germany beckoned. Unlike Hermann Struck, a fellow German Jewish artist who left for Palestine in 1922 to follow his Zionist principles and ideals, Lilien remained in Germany after the war. He was no longer the young rebellious artist. With a family to support and deteriorating health after his voluntary war service (his heart was beginning to fail him), Lilien, like other veterans of the First World War, retreated to the Heimat and the safety of bourgeois family life in Braunschweig, content to continue his artistic career in a more realist landscape style than Jugendstil, a style he had ambitiously challenged as a young man. And yet, the content of that style remained present to the end. His first heart attack came while lecturing on the land of Israel. In fact, by the time the Great War had ended, Art Nouveau and Jugendstil had become so passé among the avant-garde that a style which purported to honour nature in all its glory seemed old-fashioned and out of touch with the horror and magnitude of the killing, maiming, and gassing of so many men during the war years. (Interestingly, recently there are signs that Art Nouveau’s innocent interest in nature had a more sinister underbelly.)4 German Expressionism, which began as early as 1905 with the formation of Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden and Die Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich in 1911, along with Cubism, Fauvism, and the Dadaists, all seemed more in keeping with a world that had witnessed such depravity and sickness brought on by the impossible reason and logic of bourgeois nationalists, colonialists, and capitalists. Taking into account that Lilien’s images fell out of fashion, that he died relatively young, and that the spoils of war scattered what was left of his reputation, correspondence, and much of his art collection, it is quite remarkable that nearly 119 years after Juda was published, his male and female images of modern Jewish alterity still seem remarkably prophetic, absorbing the viewer’s gaze and fuelling one’s imagination. As noted in the Introduction, Lilien’s images are even now on display in many modern Passover Haggadot throughout the world, on contemporary book covers, on the side of a three-storey building in Kazimierz, Kraków, as well as in the early-twenty-first-century corporeal historiography of Zionism. In addition, Lilien’s

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art is on permanent display in the Israel Museum, thus forming a pertinent part of the story of the early iconographic history of Israeli art, while general books on the international art movement, Art Nouveau, are beginning to include his work in the retelling of this significant period.5 Like the revival of interest in Stefan Zweig’s work (for example, in Wes Anderson’s popular adaption of one of his tales in the 2014 movie The Grand Budapest Hotel, together with the new book on his life by George Prochnik), a re-evaluation of Lilien’s work, starting with this book, is in order.6 Just as Zweig’s contribution to Western literature is being better appreciated, it is time that Lilien, the first of Zweig’s Eastern European friends, emerged from the shadows. By integrating Lilien’s imagery into the broader study of Central European fin-de-siècle art history, his remarkable search for personal and political alterity in that visceral moment of cultural Zionism stands a better chance of being understood and appreciated. This book demonstrates that Lilien was not a minor figure in the European art scene, but a major figure whose work needs re-reading in light of his cosmopolitan and national artistic genius.

Notes 1

Julie Kalman, ‘Going Home to the Holy Land: The Jews of Jerusalem in NineteenthCentury French Catholic Pilgrimage’, Journal of Modern History 84, no. 2, The Jew in the Modern European Imaginary (June 2012): 367. 2 Ibid. 3 Peter Cole, Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain (950–1492) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 164. 4 For the discussion regarding the rethinking of some of the objects and singular motifs of the Art Nouveau movement, particularly with regard to Belgian Colonial endeavours in the Congo, see Debora L. Silverman, ‘Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part 1’, West 86th-West 18, no. 2 (Fall– Winter 2011): 138–217; ‘Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part 2’, West 86th-West 19, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2012): 174–343; ‘Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part 3’, ‘West 86th-West 20, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2013): 2–151. 5 Gabriele Fahr-Becker, Art Nouveau, 1st English-language edition (Bonn: Tandem Verlag, 2007), 254. 6 George Prochnik, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (New York: Other Press, 2014).

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Appendix A Print run for Juda by Börries von Münchhausen with illustrations by Ephraim Mose Lilien 1. Published by Goslar: F. A. Lattmann (1900). A cloth binding edition at the price of 8 Reichsmarks and a deluxe edition on real China paper in leather for 25 Reichsmarks. This first of these editions ranges from 1,000 to 3,000 copies with most probably 65 copies made of the deluxe edition. (For this information, see the 1920 edition where the editor writes: ‘Mit der ersten Auflage (1.-3. Tausend) dieses Werke, die 1900 bei F. A. Lattmann in Goslar in gleicher Ausstattung erschien, wurden 65 Stück auf China-Papier und in Ledereinband hergestellt, die vom Dichter und vom Zeichner mit ihren Namen versehen wurden’ (In the 1900 edition by Lattman in Goslar, there were 1,000–3,000 copies made. In the same print run, there were sixty-five works made on China paper and bound in leather that contained the signatures of the poet and artist). 2. Berlin, Goslar, Leipzig: F. A. Lattmann [1901] – 1000 copies: no price. NOTE: The above two published books appear in Gesamtverzeichnis des deutschsprachigen Schrifttums (GV) 1700–1910 for the year 1900. From different library catalogues: 3. Lattmann [c. 1900] – 2,000 copies. 4. Berlin: Egon Fleischel [1902] – 2,000 copies. 5. Lattmann [c. 1905] – 3,000 copies. 6. Berlin: Fleischel [c.1910] – 3,000 copies. 7. Berlin: Fleischel [c. 1916] – 4,000–6,000 copies. 8. Berlin: Fleischel [c. 1920] – 7,000– 9,000 copies. From: Gesamtverzeichnis des deutschsprachigen Schrifttums (GV) 1911–1965: 9. Berlin, Stuttgart: Dt. Verlags-Anstalt [1920] – Half cloth binding. Price: 27.50 Reichmarks; Higher Price: 43 Reichmarks (at this time the Reichsmark was higher due to hyper inflation) – 7,000–9,000 copies.

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10. Change of edition: Illustrator: Joseph Budko (1888–1940) – 8,000–10,000 copies. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt [1922] – Paperback 5.50 Reichmarks, cloth binding 6.50 Reichmarks. 11. In 1977, a new edition with illustrations by Lilien was published by ‘Opera’ in Taunusstein. No price or print run. All the above information was located by Karl-Frieder Netsch at the Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig.

Appendix B List of works exhibited at the Fifth Zionist Congress art exhibition 1. Bendemann, Trauende Juden (Lithographie) 2. Bendemann, Jeremias auf den Trümmern Jerusalem (Lithographie) 3. Bendemann, Jeremias, (Lithographie) 4. Jehudo Epstein (Wien), Hiob und seine Freunde (Ölgemälde) 5. Jehudo Epstein (Wien), Ölgemälde zu den Makkbäern 6. Moritz Gottlieb, Betende Juden (Photographie) 7. Jozef Israëls (Haag), David und Saul (Kohlendruck) 8. Jozef Israëls (Haag), Der Sohn einen Altes Volkes (Radierung) 9./10. Jozef Israëls (Haag), Zwei Jüdsiche Typen (Kohlenzeichnung) 11. Jozef Israëls (Haag), Kinde am Strande (Radierung) 12. Jozef Israëls (Haag), Geschwister (Radierung) 13. Kischinewski, Kopf einers Rabbiners (Federzeichnung) 14. Kischinewski, Studienköpf (Federzeichnung) 15./16. Kischinewski, Zwei Reproductionen nach Studienköpfen 17. Alfred Lakos (Budapest) Trauende Juden (Ölgemälde) 18. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Ex Libris R. Brainin (Federzeichnung) 19. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Ex Libris E. Simonsen (Federzeichnung) 20. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Congresskarte (Federzeichnung) 21. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Chanuka-leiste (Federzeichnung) 22. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Leuchterleiste (Federzeichnung) 23. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Titelvignette (Palaestina) (Federzeichnung) 24. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Heimatlos (Federzeichnung) 25. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Titelblatt (Ost und West) (Federzeichnung) 26. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Golus (Federzeichnung) 27. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Jesaia (Federzeichnung) 28. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Widmungsblatt aus dem Juda (Federzeichnung) 29. E. M. Lilien (Berlin) Sabbath (Reproduction) (Federzeichnung) 30./31. Oscar Mamorek (Wien) Entwürfe eines Congresshauses 32./34.Oscar Mamorek (Wien) Pläne hierzu 35. Oscar Mamorek (Wien) Ansicht einer Syngagoue 36. /37. Oscar Mamorek (Wien) Pläne hierzu 38. Alfred Nossig (Berlin) Maske der Ewige Juden 39. Alfred Nossig (Berlin) Maske der Königs Salomo 40. Hermann Struck (Berlin) Polnischer Jude (Radierung)

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41. Hermann Struck (Berlin) Kopf eines Rabbiners (Radierung) 42. Hermann Struck (Berlin) Studienkopf (Radierung) 43. Hermann Struck (Berlin) Selbsportät (Radierung) 44. Lesser Ury (Berlin) Mittelgruppe aus ‘Jerusalem’ (Kohlenzeichnung) 45. Lesser Ury (Berlin) Studie zu ‘Jerusalem’ (Tempura) 46./47. Lesser Ury (Berlin) Zwei Studien zum ‘Jeremias’ 48. Lesser Ury (Berlin) Studienkopf (Kohlenzeichnung) (Protokol II, supp. D)

Appendix C Source information on the Philippson Bible 1827  Die Propheten Hosea, Joel, Jonah, Obadjah und Nahum. In metrischdeutscher Übers. von P[höbus] Philippsohn. Halle: Ruff in Komm. 1827 (X, 90 S.; 8°). 1839  Die Israelitische Bibel ‫מקרא תורה נביאים וכתובים‬. Enthaltend: Den heiligen Urtext, die deutsche Uebertragung, die allgemeine, ausführliche Erläuterung mit mehr als 500 englischen Holzschnitten. Hrsg. v. Ludwig Philippson. Leipzig 1839.

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hwpazv.

1841  Die Israelitische Bibel ‫מקרא תורה נביאים וכתובים‬. Enthaltend: Den heiligen Urtext, die deutsche Uebertragung, die allgemeine, ausführliche Erläuterung mit mehr als 500 Holzschnitten. Hrsg. v. Ludwig Philippson. Leipzig: Baumgärtners Buchhandlung 1841–54 (1. Ausg.) u. 1858/9 (2. Ausg.).

zugehörige Teillieferungen (alle Leipzig: Baumgärtner):

1841 Teil 2/1: Die ersten Propheten ‫נביאים ראשונים‬. Übertragen und erläutert von D. Philippson. Teil 2/2: Die späteren Propheten ‫נביאים אחרונים‬. übertragen und erläutert von D. Ludwig Philippson. 1844

Teil 1: Der Pentateuch. Die fünf Bücher Moscheh ‫חמשה חומשי תורה‬.

Enthaltend: Den heiligen Urtext, die deutsche Uebertragung, die allgemeine, ausführliche Erläuterung nebst Einleitung mit vielen englischen Holzschnitten Herausgegeben von Ludwig Philippson – vorhanden (PDF) – StaBi: 4Bv 9166–1. http://reader.digitale- sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/ bsb10481772_01046.html 1848

Teil 2/1+2: Die (ersten und die späteren) Propheten. [mit Teillieferungen].

1849 Teil 3: Die Hagiographen. Die heiligen Schriften ‫כתובים‬. Übersetzt und erläutert von Ludwig Philippson.

280

Appendix C

1854 Teil 3: Die Hagiographen. Die heiligen Schriften ‫כתובים‬. Übersetzt und erläutert von Ludwig Philippson. [mit Teillieferungen] – StaBi: 50 MB 4533–3. 1857  Die Psalmen ‫תהלים‬. Enthaltend: Den hebräischen Urtext, die deutsche Uebertragung, die allgemeine, ausführliche Erläuterung mit 50 englischen Holzschnitten nebst Einleitung zu den Psalmen. Hrsg. v. Ludwig Philippson. 1858

Teil 1: Die fünf Bücher Moscheh. Mit e. Stahlst. (2. Ausg.).

http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/freimann/urn/urn:nbn:de:heb is:30:1–137168 1858

Teil 2: Die Propheten. (2. Ausg.).

1858/1859 Teil 3: Die heiligen Schriften. (2. Ausg.) – StaBi: 4Bv 9166–3. 1847  Die fünf Bücher Moses für Schule und Haus. Neue Übersetzung mit Inhaltserläuterungen zu jedem Kapitel, Zeit- und Orts- und naturhistorischen Bemerkungen und einer Zeittafel. Hrsg. v. Ludwig Philippson Leipzig: Baumgärtner, 1847. [199 S.] – Jena (Magazin, Lesesaal, Kurzausleihe). 1859  Das Buch der Haphtoroth ‫סדר ההפטרות‬. Text, Uebersetzung und ausführliche Erläuterungen. Hrsg. v. Ludwig Philippson. Leipzig: Baumgärtners Buchhandlung 1859. – vorhanden (PDF) – StaBi: Bl 4358 (von 1889, einsprachig Hebräisch). http://reader.digitale- sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/ bsb10224112_00294.html 1862  Mikra kodesh: kolel kd kitve kodesh meduyak hetiv al pi ha-masorah/ve-huva la-defus me-ito … Ludwig Philippson, Saul I. Kaempf, Wolf Landau. Leipzig: Druck und Stereotypie der Ries’schen Buchdruckerei (Carl B. Lord) in Commission bei Louis Herschel in Berlin, 1862 (Transliterationsvariante: Miqra qodes: kollel kd kitve qodes), 484, 551 S. – StaBi: Stabi 1164 (Unter den Linden). 1862  Ḥamishah ḥumshe Torah: meduyak hetev/al pi ha-Masorah u-meturgam Ashkenazit al pi ha-targum shel Yehudah Filipzon … Leipzig: C. Lorck 1862 (Hebräisch-Deutsch); enth. Haftorot, 258, 96 S. – StaBi: Bl 4290 (Ab dieser Ausgabe variierte Übersetzung!). 1862  Die Heilige Schrift in deutscher Übersetzung. Mit allgemeiner ausführlicher Erklärung, nebst Einleitungen von Ludwig Philippson. 3., verb. Ausg., ohne

Appendix C

281

den Text und die Holzschnitte des grossen Bibelwerkes, 2 Vol. Th. 1. Die fünf Bücher Moscheh. Th. 3. Die späteren Propheten. 1862. Lfg. 2. Leipzig: Baumgärtner 1862–1863. 1864  Die fünf Buecher Moses. Der Urtext. Die deutsche Uebers., mit Zugrundelegung des Philippson’schen Bibelwerks. Revid. von [Ludw.] Philippson, [Wolf] Landau und [Saul Is.] Kaempf. Berlin 1864. – StaBi: Bl 4291 (gesichtet). 1866  Miḳra Ḳodesh = Die heilige Schrift. Der Urtext. Die deutsche Uebersetzung mit Zugrundelegung des Philippson’schen Bibelwerkes. Revidiert von Dr Philippson, Dr Landau und Dr Kaempf. Berlin: Louis Gerschel 1866. [2 Vol. in einem Bd.]. 1867  Die heilige Schrift ‫מקרא קדש‬. Der Urtext. Die deutsche Übersetzung, mit Zugrundelegung des Philippson’schen Bibelwerkes. Revidiert von Dr Philippson, Ludwig Jehuda aus Bonn, Dr. Kaempf, Schaul Jizchak aus Prag, Dr Landau, Wolf Benjamin Zeev aus Dresden. Herausgegeben auf Kosten der Israelitischen Bibelanstalt. Berlin 1867–1889. zugehörige Teillieferungen: 1867

Teil 2: Die späteren Propheten und die Hagiographen ‫נביאים אחרונים והכתובים‬. Berlin: In Commission von Louis Gerschel Verlag 1867.

1889 Teil 1: Die fünf Bücher Moses und die früheren Propheten ‫חמשה חומשי תורה והנביאים הראשונים‬. Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung 1889. – StaBi: Bv 9168–1 (gesichtet). 1874  Die Heilige Schrift der Israeliten in deutscher Übertragung. Mit einhundert vier und fünfzig Bildern von Gustav Doré. Stuttgart: Eduard Hallberger 1874. [wahrscheinlich 2 Bde. Bd. 1 mit 496 Sp., Bd. 2 mit 802 Sp.] – vorhanden (Herder). 1889  Die heilige Schrift. In deutscher Uebersetzung, mit Zugrundelegung des Philippson’schen Bibelwerkes, revidiert von Dr Philippson, Dr Landau u. Dr Kaempf. Herausgegeben auf Kosten der israelitischen Bibelanstalt. Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung 1889. [einsprachige Ausgabe] StaBi: 8Bv9169 (gesichtet).

282

Appendix C

1913  Die heilige Schrift. In deutscher Uebersetzung, mit Zugrundelegung des Philippson’schen Bibelwerkes, revidiert von Dr Philippson, Dr Landau u. Dr Kaempf. Frankfurt a.M.: Kauffman Verlag 1913. NLI.

Sekundärliteratur: (Secondary literature) Herrmann, Klaus: ‘Translating Cultures and Texts in Reform Judaism: The Philippson Bible.’ In Jewish Studies Quarterly 14, no. 2 (2007), 164–97 (34). Liebig, Martin Hartmut: Die Philippson-Bibel und ihr Kommentar. Ein jüdischer Beitrag  zur Bibelwissenschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts. Berlin 2008. [Magisterarbeit] FU Judaistik – nicht einsehbar.

Appendix D Complete paragraph on Jewish women from Lilien’s letter to Helene, Berlin, 14 August 1905 On the question of women, I take the attitude of every Jew: comradely. In the Hebrew language the man is called ‘ish’ the woman, ‘isha’ (the female of ‘man’). In the Bible we read: God created man. Then he saw ‘that it is not good for man to be alone’ and therefore he created the ‘man-ess’. But only then did he bless them both and called them: Humans! The Bible gives the names of women on every page. Besides the mothers of our heroes like Sarah, the grandmother of the great Moses, Bathsheba the mother of Solomon, it describes women heroines like Deborah, priestesses and prophetesses like Hannah and Hulda, and many others. Later Jewish history shows the Jewish woman as bearer of the national idea, the guardian of what the ideal of the people has created: Hannah who dies for her people under the hand of the executioner, Donna Garcia who fosters Jewish culture, and Bruriah the thinker, Rebecca Tiktiner the writer, Sarah Sullam the poet and Esther Englehard, Michelangelo’s pupil. The most famous memoirs were written in the Middle Ages by Glickel of Hamelin. Jewesses also appeared as leading figures at the time of the emancipation, and I only want to mention Henrietta Herz, Rahel von Varnhagen, Arnstein, Fanny Lewald, and Dorothea Schlegel. Fighting under the red flag in the present: Lina Morgenstern, Rosa Luxemburg, and many others.

A Note on Sources As with other research projects on fin-de-siècle German Jewish history, the subsequent disruption and destruction of the Jewish world by the Holocaust (Shoah), by emigration and by the ensuing economic turmoil scattered or destroyed many primary sources related to E. M. Lilien’s life and artistic career. So too, Lilien’s somewhat itinerant life as an artist and the lack of a comprehensive record of diaries and other correspondence relating to his collaborative publications create challenges for the historian piecing together his movements and responses to the world around him. Despite these challenges, sufficient tidbits (plus the occasional gem) have survived to enable me to produce this first English-language book on Lilien’s images of women. Most of Lilien’s primary sources, including contemporary reviews, commentaries, correspondence, and exhibition catalogues, are in German, and some of the commentaries and retrospective exhibitions undertaken on him in Israel have been in Hebrew, thus making my book a truly international or transnational study. Although there is a vast body of literature on Lilien, almost none of the contemporary literature has been translated into English, so I translated many of the German documents myself. The few books and articles in Hebrew were translated with the collaboration of an Israeli-born colleague. Research for this project would not have been possible without the 1988 pioneering work of Professor Haim Finkelstein and Professor Mark Gelber who established the first modern exhibition, English-language catalogue, and conference on Lilien’s work, followed by the photographic catalogue by Micha and Orna Bar Arm.1 These two catalogues, drawing together the largely fragmented information available on Lilien’s life, as well as the information gleaned from the surviving relatives of Lilien and his wife Helene (whom I tracked down in Israel, Denmark, and Australia) further pointed me in the direction of primary sources on Lilien in Israel, New York, and Germany. All this information helped me assemble the jigsaw puzzle of Lilien’s art and life. In the north of Israel, I located Lilien’s Nachlass (or estate documents) within the collection of the German-speaking Jewish Heritage Museum at Tefen. This collection consists, for the most part, of newspaper clippings compiled by E. M. Lilien and his son, Otto, in two large leather-bound volumes. The reviews and commentaries, which are mostly in German, with a few in Hungarian, Polish, Russian, and English (largely from Jewish newspapers), chart his major exhibitions and published books. The collection provides evidence of Lilien’s far-reaching influence across Europe’s Jewish community during the early years of the twentieth century, but it does not contain any of his private correspondence or diaries.

A Note on Sources

285

Lilien’s private letters are part of the Magnus/Lilien archive of correspondence and are on permanent loan at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with the permission of Lilien’s grandchildren Tom and Susan Peters.2 The entire unpublished correspondence from Helene to her parents and her parents to Helene and from Helene to Lilien and Lilien to Helene (c. 1827– 1900) is available on microfiche. Only Lilien’s letters to his wife Helene were published. Titled E. M. Lilien: Briefe an seine Frau, 1905–1925 (1985), the letters appeared in the original German and were published by his son, Otto.3 According to Tom Peters, who lives in Switzerland, these letters were heavily edited by Otto, and not all of Lilien’s letters were included.4 Furthermore, although a letter from Helene is mentioned in the foreword, the reproduced letters are solely those from Lilien to his wife.5 Unfortunately, despite locating the unpublished letters from Helene to Lilien towards the end of my research, I found them too difficult to decipher to be of use in this book.6 They remain an important primary source for any future project on Lilien’s images. According to Tom Peters, a great deal of Lilien’s correspondence seems to have been lost when Helene’s household shipment of goods from Braunschweig was confiscated by the Nazis and sold off at Bremerhaven at the outset of the war in 1939. Peters states that ‘everything was destroyed: my uncle (Otto Lilien) searched out all the addresses of purchasers after the war and they had all been bombed’. The second loss of artwork and correspondence occurred when ‘a shipment of crates of some material my uncle had managed to take with him to Palestine … fell into Haifa harbor while being unloaded’.7 The lack of further key primary sources – such as diaries, other correspondence, or an autobiography – means that it is difficult to give a definitive assessment of Lilien’s oeuvre, of his attitude to women and to Zionism, or indeed of his early years in Drohobycz or his lack of art training. Taking into account just how much of Lilien’s artwork may have been lost, it is remarkable that there is still a considerable collection of his drawings and etchings – a rare, significant, and indispensable primary source – located in the Prints and Drawing Collection at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Over nine boxes of his drawings and etchings are kept there, and these include intimate portraits of his wife and children that also found their way into this book. Another crucial source of primary information was gleaned by email interviews with Lilien’s remaining relatives in Switzerland and Copenhagen, Tom and Susan Peters, the children of Hannah Lilien (Ephraim and Helene’s daughter), and with one of his relatives in Israel, Chava Givoni, the youngest daughter of Otto Lilien. Tom, Susan, and Chava all gave me insights into E. M. Lilien’s character. Chava kindly met with me at her kibbutz, and we had a wonderful afternoon discussing her grandfather and his work. Tom gave me a carefully researched and crucial family genealogy paper and directed me to his grandmother’s unpublished letters held at The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem.8 Without the genealogy paper and their insights, I would never have known of Lilien’s early love affair in Munich, his near-complete family genealogy in Drohobycz, or how Otto attempted to preserve his father’s photographic work during his first few years in Israel.

286

A Note on Sources

Most of the vital primary sources for Lilien’s published books, including his three major Jewish publications, Juda, Lieder des Ghetto, and the three-volume Die Bücher der Bibel, are located together at the Leo Baeck Institute, now part of the Centre for Jewish History, in New York. The Institute also contains two important editions of Lilien’s collected prints and drawings. The oldest dates from 1903 and is titled E. M. Lilien, sein werk, mit einer Einleitung von Stefan Zweig (E. M. Lilien, His work with an Introduction by Stefan Zweig). Zweig’s introduction provides the most valuable insight into Lilien’s early years, while Lothar Brieger’s E. M. Lilien, Eine künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhunderwerde (E. M. Lilien, An Artistic Development at the Turn of the Century, 1922) is an updated collection of essays on Lilien’s work.9 The Leo Baeck Institute also includes a wealth of German-language secondary source books, pamphlets, journals, and yearbooks on fin-de-siècle German Jewish art and the cultural Zionist art movement that were essential to my research. It has been a delightful surprise to uncover an Australian connection to Lilien. In Sydney, I located two first cousins related to Lilien through marriage. Barbara Ford’s (née Witton) and Nic Witton’s fathers were siblings of Lore Witkowski, who married Lilien’s son, Otto. As Barbara’s parents were both from Braunschweig, her connections there have enabled me to carry out extra primary research on Lilien and locate his registration card, the whereabouts of the Magnus family home, and the catalogue from Lilien’s 1909 exhibition there. Nic Witton lent me his own 1923 edition of Lilien’s threevolume set of Die Bücher der Bibel. Now that so many German Jewish primary source journals are available online, one of the most useful and essential contemporary sources for newspaper and journal articles by or on Lilien and the cultural Zionist movement is available at the website, Compact Memory: Internetarchiv Jüdische Periodika.10 The main journals accessed were Ost und West, Die Welt, Der Jude, and Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums. I was also able to access online my other main primary sources, the two illustrated art journals, Jugend and Simplicissimus, something that was not possible when I began this project.11

Notes Haim Finkelstein, E. M. Lilien in the Middle East, Etchings (1908–1925) (Beersheba: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Avraham Barom Art Gallery, 1988). Bar Am, PwL. 2 Email correspondence from Tom Peters to Lynne Swarts, 30 May 2012. 3 Lilien, Briefe. 4 Email correspondence from Tom Peters to Lynne Swarts, 30 May 2012. 5 Lilien, Briefe, 7. 6 Tom Peters informs me that his mother, Hannah Lilien, typed up a great part of the correspondence form the old German Script in the years from 1983 until her death in 2009, although I have not seen them. 7 Email correspondence from Tom Peters to Lynne Swarts, 30 May 2012. 8 Michael Hasenclever, the owner of Gallerie Hasenclever in Munich, who has published catalogues on Lilien’s work, also mentioned them to me in a telephone call in late 2010 and I thank him for this information. 1

A Note on Sources

287

9 Lilien, EMLsW; Brieger, EML (Berlin; Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922). 10 Compact Memory: Internetarchiv Jüdische Periodika, dem Wissenschaftsportal für Jüdische Studien, available at: http://www.compactmemory.de/, viewed 1 July 2014. 11 For instance, the University of Heidelberg now has a major collection of historical art journals available online in 2013 that includes Jugend and a host of many other art and satirical periodicals and monographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Heidelberg University Library, Digitization and Subject Cataloguing of Illustrated Art and Satire Periodicals of the 19th and Early 20th Century, updated 19 March 2014. http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/Englisch/helios/fachinfo/www/kunst/ digilit/artjournals/, viewed 20 March 2014.

Bibliography Primary Sources a) Print Collections–Israel E. M. Lilien Collection, Prints and Drawings Department, Israel Museum, Jerusalem. E. M. Lilien’s Nachlass, German-Speaking Jewish Heritage Museum, Tefen, Israel. Else Lasker-Schüler Collection, The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. Hermann Struck Collection, Prints and Drawings Department, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv. Photographic Collection, Early Twentieth Century, German-Speaking Jewish Heritage Museum, Tefen, Israel.

b) Correspondence E. M. Lilien. Correspondence. Isler, Magnus, Lilien Family Letters Collection, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Helene Magnus Lilien Correspondence. Isler, Magnus, Lilien Family Letters Collection, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

c) Newspapers and magazines Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums Chicago Daily Tribune The Burlington Magazine Der Jude Die Welt Jugend The Burlington Magazine Kunst für Alle The New York Times Ost und West (OW) Simplicissimus The Times, London

d) Books and Articles ‘Advertisement’. Ost und West 12 (December 1901): 967–68. Agate, James. Rachel. New York: Viking Press, 1928. ‘Bilder von Congress’. Die Welt 2 (10 January 1902): 12. Brieger, Lothar. E. M. Lilien, Eine künstlerische Entwicklung um die Jahrhunderwende. Berlin and Vienna: Benjamin Herz, 1922. Buber, Martin. ‘Das Buch Juda’. Die Welt 10, no. 50 (14 December 1900): 12.

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Buber, Martin. ‘Das Ende der Deutsche-Jüdischen Symbiose’. Jüdische Weltrundschau 1, no. 10 (March 1939). In Martin Buber: Politische Schriften. Edited by Abraham Melzer, 735–37. Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 2010. Buber, Martin. Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism (1909). Edited by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Buber, Martin. ‘Elijahu’. Ost und West 12 (December 1904): 817–18. Buber, Martin. ‘Judische Renaissance’. Ost und West 1 (January 1901): 7–10. English translation: ‘Address on Jewish Art’. In The First Buber, Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber. Edited by Gilya Gerda Schmidt, 46–63. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Buber, Martin. ‘Lesser Ury’. Ost und West 2 (February 1901): 113–28. Buber, Martin. On Judaism. Edited by N. N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1967. Chipiez, Charles, and Georges Perrot. Histoire de L’art Dans L’antiquité. Vol. IV, Judee. Paris: LibraireHachette et Co., 1887. Dahn, Felix. ‘Zeitschriften und Bücher Rundschau’. Die Welt 8 (1901): 9. Ebenstein, B. ‘Die Zukunft des Orients’. Ost und West 5 (May 1901): 321–28. Feiwel, Berthold. Junge Harfen: Eine Sammlung Jungjüdischer Gedichte (Young Harps: A Collection of Young Jewish Poems). Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1900. Fishberg, Maurice. The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment. London; New York; Melbourne: The Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1911. Frischmann, David. ‘Leopold Pilichowski’. Ost und West 1 (January 1903): 48–49. ‘The German Emperor in Turkey. New German Church at Jerusalem’. The Illustrated London News, 29 October 1898, 622–24. Gottlieb, Moritz (sic). ‘Betende Juden’. Ost und West 1 (January 1902): 5–6. Günzburg, David Baron, and Vladimir Stassof. L’ornament Hebreu. Berlin: Cavalry, 1905. Hebbel, Friedrich. Judith. Munich: Hans von Weber Verlag, 1893. Herzl, Theodor. ‘Herzl und die Histoire (Herzl and History)’. Ost und West 8–9 (August 1904): 583–94. Herzl, Theodor. The Jewish State (translated 1896). London: Penguin Books, 2010. Herzl, Theodor. ‘Zwei Neue Lilienische Ex-Libris’. Ost und West 11 (November 1901): 821–24. Hirshfelder, M. ‘E. M. Lililen’, Ost und West 6 (July 1901): 518–28. Hirszenberg, Samuel. ‘Ein Stückchen Politik’, Ost und West 10 (October 1902): 677–87. Jaffe, Robert. ‘Neu Judische Kunst’. Die Welt 14 (3 April 1901): 24. James, Henry. The Tragic Muse. London and New York: Macmillan, 1891. Joseph, D. ‘Die Kunst in ihrer Anwedung auf die Gebräuche der Juden’. Ost und West 4 (April 1901): 253–56. Joseph, D. ‘Stiftschütte, Tempel-und Synagogunbauten’. Ost und West 8 (August 1901): 593–608. Kaufmann, David. Die Haggadah von Sarajevo: Eine Spanisch-Jüdische Bilderhandschrift des Mittelalters. Vienna: A. Hölder, 1898. Kutna, Dr. G. ‘Hermann Struck’. Ost und West 1 (January 1902): 27–28. Kutna, Dr. G. ‘Isidor Kaufmann’. Ost und West 9 (September 1903): 589–604. Kutna, Dr. G. ‘Josef Israëls’. Ost und West 5 (May 1902): 289–306. Levussove, M. S. The Art of an Ancient People: The Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1906.

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Lilien, Ephraim Moses. E. M. Lilien, Sein Werk, mit Einer Einleitung von Stefan Zweig. Goslar: J. Jager und Sohn, 1903. Lilien, Ephraim Moses. ‘Ein Offener Brief (Jüdsiche Maecene und Jüdische Kunst)’. Ost und West 2 (February 1902): 109–14. Lilien, Ephraim Moses, Helene Lilien, and Otto M. Lilien. Briefe an seine Frau, 1905–1925. Königstein: Jüdischer Verlag Athenäum, 1985. Mackey, Albert G. Mackey’s Revised Encylcopaedia of Freemasonry. Chicago: The Masonic History Company, 1900. Seventh printing 1956. Montgailhard, Guy de. Lecomte Du Noüy, Reliure D’amateur Maroquin. Paris: A. Lahure, 1906. Münchhausen, Börries von. Juda, Gesänge von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen mit Buchschmuck von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d. Nordau, Max Simon. Degeneration. London: Heinemann, 1895. Pawetti. ‘Leonid Pasternak’. Ost und West 6 (June 1902): 371–82. Ploennies, Luise von. ‘Judith: aus dem Cyklus “Frauen des alten Testaments”’. Ost und West 9 (September 1901): 693. Purdie, Edna. The Story of Judith in German and English Literature. Paris: H. Champion, 1927. Rahlwes, Ferdinand. Die Bücher Der Bibel. 3 vols. Braunschweig: Westermann, 1908–1912. Rahlwes, Ferdinand. Die Bücher Der Bibel. Berlin; Wien: Benjamin Harz Verlag, 1923. Remy, Nahida. The Jewish Women (Das Jüdische Weib). Translated by Louise Mannheimer. Cincinnati: C. J. Kriebel, 1895. Rosenfeld, Morris, and Ephraim Moses Lilien. Lieder des Ghetto. Berlin: S. Calvary, 1903. Schatz, Boris. Boris Schatz His Life & Work: Monography. Jerusalem: B’nai Bezalel, 1925. Simmel, Georg. Die Fremde (1908). New York: The Free Press, 1964. Thon, Ja-akov. ‘Ein Betrag zur Geschichte der Zeichnenden Kunst’. Ost und West 12 (December 1904): 831–36. Tissot, James Jacques. The Old Testament: Three Hundred and Ninety-Six Compositions Illustrating the Old Testament. Paris; London; New York: M. De Brunoff, Art Publisher, 1904. Trietsch, Davis, and Leo Winz. ‘Leitartikel’. Ost und West 1 (January 1901): 3.

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Index Note: locators with ‘n’ refer to notes. Abdul-Hamid II 19 Academy of Fine Arts, Kraków 39, 61 nn.28–9 acculturation 7, 8, 11 n.8, 21, 40, 41, 44, 47, 57, 75, 79, 84, 90, 93, 103, 116, 118, 138, 141, 143, 152, 163, 191, 195, 234, 241, 259, 268, 271 Adorno, Theodor W. 1 Al-Am, Sadik 23 anti-feminism/anti-feminists 7–8, 74–5, 91, 92, 104, 109, 125, 127, 234, 255, 259, 268, 269 and antisemitism 75 anti-feminist movement German League for the Prevention of Women’s Emancipation 74 antisemitism 2, 7, 8, 10 n.5, 10 n.7, 18, 20, 26, 27 n.9, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 48, 50–2, 54, 58, 59 n.11, 75, 78, 104, 109, 116, 118, 127, 128 n.12, 130–1 n.38, 138, 150–2, 162, 174, 176, 177, 183 n.69, 185 n.104, 191, 210, 221, 228 n.82, 255, 259, 268, 271 Appadurai, Arjun 25 Aravamudan, Srinivas Enlightenment Orientalism 23 archaeology 18, 21, 31 n.41, 59 n.13, 143, 157, 192, 193, 224 n.25, 234, 259 Arendt, Hannah 30 n.32 Arnold, Matthew 132 n.60 art historiography 9, 18, 19–21, 22, 32 n.50, 45, 49, 59 n.13, 116, 138, 141, 164, 184 n.95, 221, 241–2, 273 ‘artless Jew,’ the 8 Art Nouveau 2, 11 n.11, 26 n.3, 69, 74, 75, 104, 201, 242–3, 245, 250, 258, 264 n.56, 272, 273, 273 n.4 assimilation 2, 8, 11 n.8, 19, 20, 21, 24, 35, 36, 44, 49, 51–2, 54, 69, 93, 98 n.55,

141, 143, 175, 191, 195, 210, 216, 225 n.30, 226 n.42, 242, 268 Auschwitz 69 Avineri, Shlomo 11 n.12, 66 n.86, 229 n.84 Balfour Declaration 2 barbarism 1, 19, 152, 192, 214, 221 Bauschinger, Sigrid 98 n.64, 133 nn.69–70, 134 nn.77–80, 135 n.98, 135 n.104 Baxandall, Michael 14 n.37 Beardsley, Aubrey 15, 64–5 n.71, 74, 79–81, 92–3, 97 n.50, 98 n.60, 104, 107 Early Works of Aubrey Beardsley 79 image of Salome/femmes fatales 105, 107–8, 116, 126, 127, 128 n.11, 129 n.26, 130 n.32, 146, 171, 242, 249–50, 253, 254, 255, 258, 263 n.45, 264 n.48, 270 influence 245, 249–50 Beaulieu, Jill 32 n.59, 33 n.62, 183 n.70 Behmer, Marcus 245, 249–50, 253–4, 258 Belting, Hans 20, 29 n.23, 263 n.40 and the Sonderweg Theory 20 Ben-David, Shmuel 3, 270 Bendemann, Eduard 45, 204 Berger, John 12 n.24 Berkowitz, Michael 13 n. 29, 34 n. 74 Berlin Secessionist movement 45, 63 n.57, 113, 116, 132 n.59 Berman, Nina 23, 33 n.61 Bernhardt, Sarah 59 n.11, 69, 84, 94 n.3, 96 n.35, 104–7, 109, 125, 127, 128 n.12, 129–30 nn.27–28, 129 n.21, 129 n.22, 268 Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts 2, 3, 55, 157, 161 Bhabha, Homi 23, 33 nn.59–60, 34 n.78, 36, 59 n.14 Location of Culture, The 23

Index Bialystock pogrom 198 Bildung 19, 21, 28 n.19, 35, 139, 201, 259 Bing, Samuel Siegfried 11 n.11 Birnbaum, Nathan 45, 198, 209, 230 n.113 Bismarck 71 Bodenheimer, Max 28 n.16 book art 40–1, 146, 175, 177, 233, 235, 241, 242, 258, 260, 261 nn.12–13, 269 bookplates 18, 27 n.5, 55, 76–81, 97 n.49, 98 n.66, 103, 134 n.83, 203, 211 Boyarin, Daniel 54, 59 n.15, 128 n.12 Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Jewish Man 36–7 Braunschweig 84, 85, 88, 89, 99 n.69, 99 n.72, 140, 180 n.24, 180 n.26, 267, 272, 285, 286 Brenner, David 21, 25, 229 n.85, 263 n.38 Brieger, Lothar 175, 187 n.145, 286 British Palestine Exploration Fund 27 n.8, 224 n.25 Brunnhofer, Hermann 137, 178 n.1 Buber, Martin 21 ‘Address on Jewish Art’ 15, 47–8, 116 cultural Zionism 28 n.21, 44, 52, 76, 90, 93, 103–4, 177, 183 n.75, 189–95, 198, 233, 269–70 early life 15, 21, 24–5, 227 n.67 Ecstatic Confessions 63 n.51 Elijahu (Elijah) 209–10 Fifth Zionist Congress 45, 48, 55, 152, 198, 207 and German Jewish imagination 134 n.85, 198–221 influence on 64 n.65 Jewish art/Jewish Art Exhibition 45–9 ‘Jewish Renaissance’ 2, 31 n.42, 33 n.70, 35, 48, 57–8, 152, 187 n.136 and mysticism 63 n.51 and neo-Romanticism 200 spirituality/Hasidism 230 n.108, 230 n.113, 270 Burckhardt, Jacob 8, 9 Burke, Peter 8 Burns, Robert 13 nn.32–3 Butler, Judith 25, 125

321

Charcot, Jean Martin 50 Chateaubriand 27 n.6, 156, 192 Chicago Daily Tribune 18, 149 Christiansen, Hans 245, 247 classicism 21 Congresskarte (Congress Card) 15, 46, 201 Cohen, Richard I. 181 n. 37, 38, 42, 185 n. 104 Corinth, Lovis 242, 243, 245, 264 n.59 Jugend 2 245, 246 Salome II 113, 115 cosmopolitan internationalism 20 cosmopolitanism 8, 19, 66–7 n.100 Dahn, Felix 44 Das Literatur Echo (journal) 44 degeneracy/degeneration 10 n.5, 20, 29 n.30, 36, 47, 49–51, 53, 59, 59 n.12, 65 n.79, 74–5, 91–2, 108, 131 n.38, 191, 201, 215, 221, 242, 255, 259, 263 n.39 Delilah 104, 105, 113, 114, 116, 126 Delitzsch, Friedrich 152 and antisemitism 151, 152, 174, 183 n.69, 183 n.72, 185 n.99 Democratic Fraction, the 48, 49, 207 ‘Der Fremde’ (The Stranger) (Simmel) 26 Der Hammer: Blätter für deutschen Sinn 75 Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) 19, 91 Die Kommenden 77, 222, 270 Die Welt 19, 44, 90, 230 n.104, 286 Dijkstra, Bram 12 n. 23, 234 discourse theory 23 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm 191 Doré, Gustave 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147–52, 153, 156, 157, 163, 175, 176, 177, 181 n.42, 182 n.52, 184 n.76, 207, 270 Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise 148 Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law 149 Pharisee and the Publican, The 151 Wandering Jew, The 207 Dreifus, Bernhard 131 n.41 Dreyfus, Alfred 51 Dreyfus Affair 51–2, 75, 107, 130 n.38

322

Index

Drohobycz 2, 37, 39–40, 60 n.19, 79–80, 88, 98 n.56, 165, 204, 227 n.67, 267, 285 Dura-Europos 22, 31 n.41, 32 n.50, 185 n.107 Dürer, Albrecht 20, 97 n.49, 242, 261 n.13, 263 n.36 Efron, John 29 n.21 Eliot, George (aka Mary Evans) 104, 105, 129 n.15 emancipation 1, 2, 8, 11 n.8, 25, 35, 36, 37, 47, 51–2, 58 n.2, 71, 89, 91, 92, 93, 106, 127, 139, 191, 195, 225 n.30, 233, 234, 235, 244, 259, 260, 268, 283 Engels, Freidrich 75 Enlightenment 19, 21, 25, 40, 90, 137, 152, 190–1 Epstein, Yehuda 45 Fackenheim, Emil 10 n.7 Falkenberg, Betty 116, 133 n.76 fascism 20, 36 Feiwel, Berthold 49, 91–2, 208, 239–40, 270 femme fatale 1, 7, 12 n.23, 70, 75–84, 93, 103–8, 112, 114, 116, 125, 126, 127, 128 n.4, 138, 167, 171, 234, 249, 253, 259–60, 268–70 and Jewish femmes fatales 104, 106, 126, 260, 268–70 Feuchtwanger, Lion 130 n.30 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 22 Fidus (aka Reinhold Karl Johann Höppener) 74, 96 n.31, 258, 263 n.45, 264 n.56 First World War 2, 7, 125, 138, 194, 196, 199–200, 210, 222, 224 n.29, 228 n.76, 231 n.124, 242, 272 Fishberg, Maurice 216, 217–18, 231 n.131 Forster-Hahn, Françoise 20 Foucault, Michael 36, 58 n.7, 231 n.130 Discipline and Punish 37 Freedberg, David 14 n.36 French Impressionism 20 Freud, Sigmund 36, 108, 109, 130 n.35, 143, 176, 214, 269 Friedländer, Salomo

Operated Goy, The 62 n.39 Friedrich, Caspar David Chasseur, The 66 n.91 Fuchs, Eduard 40, 61 n.32, 243, 255, 270 Galton, Francis 215–16, 231 n.130 gaze, the 7, 12–13 n.24, 76, 104, 125, 138, 162, 169, 176, 177, 231 n.130, 235, 256, 259, 269, 272 Geiger, Abraham 24, 28 n.21, 139, 143, 177, 178 n.1, 226 n.40 Geiger, Ludwig 226 n.40 Gelber, Mark H. 45, 92, 117, 190, 223 n.9, 284 German history vs. art history 20–2 German-Jewish Culture before the Holocaust: Kafka’s Kitsch (Brenner) 21, 25 German unification, 1871 2, 11 n.9, 20, 30 n.36, 35, 58 n.2, 134 n.85 ghetto 11 n.8, 47, 49, 52, 92, 201, 223 n.12 Gilman, Sander Jew’s Body, The 36–7, 41, 59 n.11, 231 n.130, 234 Salome 107, 128 n.12, 129 n.26, 130 n.37 globalisation 25 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 21, 22, 73, 74, 116, 132 n.60 Goldziher, Ignaz 24, 28 n.21, 139, 143, 177, 178 n.1 Gorki, Maxim 7, 12 n.21, 66 n.98, 76, 211, 212, 270 Gottlieb, Maurycy 37, 45 Graetz, Heinrich 24, 28 n.21, 90, 101 n.86, 139, 177, 178 n.1 Grand, Sarah 71, 95 n.13 Grenzjuden 25, 28 n.19, 268 Griepenkerl, Christian 39 Grillparzer, Franz Die Jüdin von Toledo (The Jewess of Toledo) 107, 130 n.30 Grimm’s Brothers and Rapunzel 258, 262 n.22 Grunfeld, Frederic 25, 28 n.19, 268 Günzburg, David Baron 198, 218, 226 n.60, 232 n.136

Index Ha’am, Ahad (Asher Ginzberg) 190, 198, 214 Haeckel, Ernst 74 halakha (Jewish Law) 9 Ha-Levi, Judah 271–2 Hebbel, Friedrich 254, 255 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 190–1, 224 n.18 Heine, Heinrich 187 n.133, 265 n.64 Heine, Thomas Theodor 244, 245, 249–58, 265 n.64, 265 n.67, 265 n.71 Heizer, Donna 117, 133 n.68 Herder, Johann Gottfried 22, 162, 190 Hermann, Christian 61 n.34, 181 n.40 Herzl, Theodor 2, 7, 19, 20, 28 nn.15–16, 41–3, 46, 49, 51, 52, 57, 62 n.41, 64 n.60, 65 n.73, 75, 90, 91, 93, 104, 128 nn.8–9, 137, 167, 191, 207–12, 228 n.82, 230 n.104, 269–70 Heschel, Susannah 28 n.21, 151 Hess, Jonathan 21, 30 n.35, 223 n.14 Hess, Moses 209, 230 n.113 Heyd, Milly 97 n.50 Hirschfeld, Magnus 49, 118 Hirszenberg, Samuel 204, 206, 207, 216, 229 n.100, 231 n.131 history of Jewish biblical illustration 18–19, 21, 141–7 Holy Land 18, 19, 24, 28 n.14, 104, 128 n.9, 137, 141, 145, 146, 147, 153, 176, 182 n.48, 217 homosexuality 36, 49, 74, 80, 96 n.35 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 58 n.1, 72 Hunt, William Holman 146, 154, 182 n.50, 201 Hyman, Paula 13 n.29, 26, 92, 102 n.112 ideal (classical) body, the 36–7, 51, 57 illness, sexuality and 36, 50, 65 n.79 Illustrated London News, The 18 integration 11 n.8, 44, 93, 177, 209 International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) 31 n.37 Irwin, Robert 23 Israels, Josef 45, 49, 143, 204 Jaffe, Robert (Max Aram) 44 Jahn, Friedrich 53

323

James, Henry 103, 105–6, 107 Jew in the Text, The 21, 31 n.39 Jewish biblical heroes Abraham 5, 126, 156 Adam 41, 49, 65 n.73, 148, 155, 162, 199, 221 David 55, 126, 156, 172, 192, 201, 238 Moses 41, 42, 43, 130 n.34, 140, 144, 148–9, 154, 156–7, 172, 218–19, 283 Jewish biblical heroines Esther 107, 126, 140, 146, 147, 163–8 Eve 76, 126, 148, 155, 162, 199, 218, 221, 249, 256 Miriam 163, 172, 175, 269 Rachel 107, 162, 221 Rahab 163, 168–71, 174, 175, 269 Ruth 126, 140, 163, 172–3, 175, 185 n.106, 186 n.129, 234, 269 Jewish consciousness 7 Jewish Gymnastics 52, 59 n.12 Jewish nationalism 7, 10 n.5, 18, 19, 20, 44, 55, 75, 80, 84, 90, 91, 137, 139, 152, 175, 190, 191, 192, 201, 202, 208, 209, 216–17, 269 Jewish women and Zionism 26, 70, 84–5, 90–3, 168, 177, 202, 259, 260, 268–70 Jewish women’s Zionist groups 92 Jüdischer Almanach 48–9, 208 Jüdischer Verlag 48, 208, 239 Judith 105, 107, 108, 111–14, 126, 131 n.56, 163, 184 n.77, 186 n.126, 218, 220, 221, 242, 245, 254–5, 255–8, 265 n.71 Jugend 11 n.11, 40, 71, 75, 78, 92, 100 n.78, 103, 104, 242–8, 264 n.55, 264 n.58, 269, 286, 287 n.11 Jugendstil 2, 11 n.11, 15, 26 n.3, 41, 46, 49, 55, 69, 75, 83, 92, 118, 137, 146, 175, 177, 190, 193, 203, 229 n.90, 242, 244, 250, 254, 258, 260, 264 n.47, 264 n.56, 269, 272 Kalman, Julie 24–5, 267 Kalmar, Ivan David 24, 150 Kaplan, Marion A. 11 n.8, 92 Karp, Jonathan 14 n.41

324

Index

Kaufmann, David 22, 31 n.39, 31 n.41, 32 n.49 Kaufmann, Isidor 204, 216, 231 n.131 Kiev pogrom 198 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 110 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 14 n.41 Kishinev pogrom 198, 211, 212, 214 Kleukens, Friedrich Williams 146, 147, 249 Klimt, Gustav 15, 74, 81, 82, 83, 84, 104–5, 111–14, 116, 126, 127, 131 n.56, 242, 245, 258, 263 n.45, 270 Kohn, Hans 200, 223 n.11, 228 n.76 Kokoschka, Oscar 108, 109, 110, 125, 255 Kontje, Todd 23, 183 n.69 Korolenko, Vladimir 211 Lachmann, Hedwig 249, 250, 253, 254, 265 n.61 Lasker-Schüler, Elsa 29 n.30 Lasker-Schüler, Elsa artworks 116–17, 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 134 n.85, 269, 270, 271 early life 103, 116 poetry 103, 104, 116–26, 222 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 21 The Jews 40 Nathan the Wise 40 Levant, the 18, 28 n.14, 149, 150, 154, 156, 162, 165, 182 n.57, 194 Lewis, Rheina 23 Liebermann, Max 20, 29 n.30, 45, 49, 104, 105, 113–16, 126–7, 132 n.60, 132 n.65, 132 n.67, 143, 198, 204, 206, 227 n.64, 229 n.96, 241, 263 n.39, 270 and the Secession movement 116 Lilien, Ephraim Moses Briefe an Seine Frau 233 Congresskarte (Congress Card) 15, 46, 201 Der Zöllner von Klausen (The Tax Collector of Klausen) 40 Die Bücher der Bibel (The Books of the Bible) 15, 18, 57, 137, 138, 143, 159, 164, 165, 169, 172, 173, 185 n.106, 217, 234, 235, 236, 237, 254, 258, 270–1

early life 1, 37–9 and hybridity 269–70 Juda (Judah) 1, 15, 37–43 legacy 3–7, 271–3 Lieder des Ghetto (Songs of the Ghetto) 15, 17, 37 oeuvre 18 reception to Juda 44 significance 267–73 social network and collaborations 3–7, 269–70 and collaboration with Borries von Münchhausen 7, 40, 140, 176, 270 and collaboration with Ferdinand Rahlwes 1, 138, 140, 175–7, 270 and collaboration with Maxim Gorki 7, 12 n.21, 66 n.98, 76, 211, 270 war photographer for the Austrian Military Press Corps 88 Lilien bookplates Ex Libris, des Künstlers 76–7 Ex Libris Anselm Hartog 76, 77 Künstlerpostkarte‚ “Die Kommenden” (An Art Postcard for “Die Kommenden”) 77 Lilien, Mein schönstes Fräulein, darf Ich’s wagen … (My fair young lady, May I dare …) 76 Lilien images Abraham’s descendants will be like the stars (Genesis 15) 5 An der Nähmaschine (At the Sewing Machine) 64–5 n.71 Das Stille Lied (The Silent Song) 17, 41, 103–4 Den Märtyrern von Kishinew (Dedicatedto the Martyrs of Kishinev) 213 Die Erschaffung des Menschen (The Creation of Mankind) 49, 50 Die Vertreibung aus dem Paradies (The Expulsion from Paradise) 57 Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) 245, 248 Ein Garten ist meine Braut (In My Garden Is My Betrothed) 235, 237 Ex Libris E. M. Lilien (Hebrew) 55, 56

Index Galut (Diaspora) 46 From Ghetto to Zion 46 Golus (Exile) 45 Harfenspielerin (Harp Player) 239, 240, 258, 259, 269 Jesaia (Isaiah) 45 Liebesfrühling (Spring Love) 235, 237, 239 Liebeswerben im Frühling (Courting in Spring) 235, 236, 256 Lieder der Arbeit (The Song of Work) 37, 39 Logo of Bezalel 3 Mai-Festzeitung (May Day newspaper) 83, 240 Market Place at Drohobycz 37, 38 Moses 42, 43 Moses Zerbricht die Tafeln (Moses Breaking the Tablets) 42, 261 n.15 Passah (Passover) 45 Plakat für das Berliner Tageblatt (Poster for the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt) 69, 70, 74 Prinzessin Sabbat (Princess Sabbath) 168, 236, 238–41, 269 Selbsportrait (Self-Portrait) 15, 16, 46, 55 Sketch for Ex-Libris for Dov (Boris) Schatz 56 Sprüche Salmos, das Sohnes Davids des Königs von Israel (The Proverbs of Solomon, The Son of David, The King of Israel) 158 Study for a Carpet 167 Theodor Herzl on the Balcony of the Three Kings Hotel 41, 42 Väter und Söhne (Fathers and Sons) 210, 213 Vater und Sohn (Father and Son) 210, 211 Vom Ghetto nach Zion (From Ghetto to Zion) or Congresscarte (Congress Card) 46, 218 Lilien postcards 47, 52, 64 n.60, 75–7, 162 Jude aus Jemen (Jew from Yemen) 218 Kopf einer Jüdin (Head of a Jewess [from Jerusalem]) 219

325

Künstlerpostkarte‚ “Die Kommenden” 76, 77 Lilien, Hania (sister) 37 Lilien, Hannah (daughter) 7, 89, 285 Lilien, Helene (wife) xxxi, 7, 70, 84–6, 88–9, 93, 99 n.69, 99 nn.71–2, 140, 165, 166, 167, 179 n.23, 190, 233, 260 n.2, 267, 269, 283, 284, 285 Lilien, Jacob (father) 37, 38 Lilien, Keila (née Langermann) (mother) 37 Lilien, Markus (brother) 37, 60 n.23 Lilien, Minna (sister) 37 Lilien, Otto (son) xxx, 7, 85, 87, 178 n.5, 284, 285, 286 Lublinksi, Samuel 118 Magen David (Shield/Star of David) 3, 55, 201, 228 n.83, 238–9 Marchand, Suzanne 23–4 Marr, Wilhelm 10 n.7, 191 Matejko, Jan 38–9, 60 n.25, 270 McCloskey, Barbara 29 n.23 Melman, Billie 23, 32 n.56 Mendelssohn, Moses 30 n.32, 40, 47, 90, 141, 191, 263 n.37 Mendes-Flohr, Paul 24, 28 n.19, 33 n.64, 33 n.70, 225 n.34, 227 n.61 menorah (seven-branched candlestick) 3, 269 Meyrink, Gustave 28 n.21, 223 n.12 mimicry 36–7 mishkan (tabernacle) 3, 55 Mobius, Paul J. 74 Moreau, Gustave 104–5 Moser, Kolomon 243, 264 n.50 Mosse, George 20, 36, 37, 59 n.11, 101 n.103, 222 n.4 Mucha, Alphonse 74, 81, 82, 84, 96 n.31, 104, 105–6, 126, 127, 146, 258, 263 n.45, 270 Munich Secessionist movement 203, 242 Neo-Romanticism 200 Neue Freie Presse 41, 44 neurasthenia 50, 65 n.79

326

Index

‘New Jewish Woman’ 1, 7, 75–102, 104, 107, 127, 167, 258, 259, 260, 261 n.8, 268, 271 ‘New (male) Jew,’ the 1–2, 7–8, 10 n.5, 26, 36–44, 84, 103 ‘New Woman,’ the anti-feminist debates 71–5 campaigns 74 femme fatale 75–84, 107, 108 origins 69–72 personality/attributes 71–5, 92, 95 nn.13–14, 234 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 64 n.65, 179 n.16, 190, 199–200, 227 nn.68–70, 251, 270 Nochlin, Linda 9, 32 n.56 Nordau, Max 7 anti-feminism 91 anti-modernist ideas 20, 71 and Buber 35, 47, 49, 57, 64 n.65 and degeneracy 50, 53, 59 n.12 First Zionist Congress/Zionism 66 nn.85–6, 90, 91 and hybridity 71, 269 and Muskeljudentum 2, 35, 47, 48, 49–55, 57 and ‘new woman’ 71, 91–2, 93 North American Review 71 Nossig, Alfred 45, 206, 207, 226 n.40, 229 n.99 Nye, Robert 58 n.7 Obrist, Hermann 264 n.56 occidentalism 18, 24, 27 n.9, 138, 200, 223 n.12 Ockman, Carol 69 Olin, Margaret 44, 64 n.58, 97 n.50, 187 n.136 Orientalism Christian orientalists 139, 143, 147–56, 157, 162, 174–5, 187 n.140, 221 Jewish orientalists 8, 22–5, 141, 156–75, 189–232, 259, 270–1 Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Said) 22–3 Orientalism and the Jews (Kalmar and Penslar) 24 Ost und West and Buber 25, 31 n.42, 47, 152, 189, 190, 198–210

and Lasker-Schüler 118–19, 120 and Lilien 66 n.98, 116, 118–19, 189–232 Lilien, Cover illustration, Ost und West 47, 202, 203 and Lublinksi 118 and Remy 90, 93 and Zionist identity 190–8 Panizza, Oscar 62 n.39, 108, 111 Pankok, Bernhard 242, 245 Pappenheim, Bertha 268–9 Paul, Bruno 242, 244 Das Brotkörbchen (The Little Bread Basket) 71, 72 Das Weib vor, hinter und auf dem Rade (Women before behind and upon the wheel) 71–2 Der Münchener Jugend Brunnen (The Munich Fountain of Youth) 244 Pellegrini, Ann 128 n.12, 234, 259 Penslar, Derek 24 Philippson Bible and Rabbi Ludwig Philippson 141 Picasso, Pablo 243 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 75, 255 Pinsker, Leon 209, 230 n.113 Pollock, Griselda 9 Potts, Alex 59 n.13 Pracht Bible 142, 156, 180 nn.33–4 and Julius Füst 141 Presner, Todd 59 n.12 psychoanalysis 36, 130 n.35 Pulzer, Peter 75 Raban, Ze’ev 3, 178 n.8, 262 n.31, 270 racial hygiene 47–8, 57, 75, 79–80 Rahlwes, Ferdinand 7, 12 n.21, 138, 140, 175–7, 179 nn.22–3, 180 n.25, 187 n.140, 270 Rassenkraft 41, 69, 190, 217, 221, 223 n.9, 271 Reformation 20, 35, 180 n.25 Remy, Max 90 Remy, Nahida Das Jüdische Weib (The Jewish Woman) 73, 88, 89–90, 93, 100 nn.81–2, 195, 267 early life 84, 89–90

Index Renan, Ernest 150–2 Reuveni, Gideon 59 n.15 Riley, Denise 13 n.27 Roberts, David 146, 149, 182 n.57 Roberts, Mary 23, 94 n.9, 95 n.14, 125 Romanticism 92, 152, 162, 190, 200 Romantic Nationalism 22, 178 Rose, Alison 26, 101 n.91 Rosenfeld, Morris 49, 64–5 n.71, 239 Ruess, Edouard translation of the ‘Old Testament’ 180 nn.25–6 Rupprecht, Phillip 54 Sabar, Shalom 8 Said, Edward 8, 22–4, 33 n.61, 138, 152 Salome/Shulamit Beardsley’s 92, 107–8, 116, 128 n.11, 171, 242, 250, 255, 264 n.48, 265 n.61 Behmer’s 245, 249–50, 253, 254, 258 Corinth’s 113, 115 Gilman’s 59 n.11, 107, 129 nn.26–7 Moreau’s 104–5 Sarajevo Haggadah 22, 31 n.48 Sawicki, Jana 37, 59 n.16 Schatz, Boris 2–3, 45, 55–7, 66 n.99, 76, 207, 214, 239 Schiele, Egon 39 Schiff, Jacob H. and the Jewish Museum, New York 156, 184 n.95 Schiller, Friedrich 21, 58 n.1, 73, 74, 116 Schliemann, Heinrich 18–19 Scholem, Gershom 30 n.32, 118 Schopenhauer, Arthur 190, 199–200, 227 nn.68–9, 270 Schorske, Carl E. 224 n.28 Scott, Joan Wallach 13 n.27, 261 n.8 Sebald, W. G. 26 Secession movement, Berlin 45, 116 Munich 203, 242 Second World War 12 n.20, 19, 30 n.32, 31 n.37, 34 n.83, 89, 101 n.86, 133 n.70 secularism 8, 19 Sefirot 239 Shoah 21, 30 n.32, 34 n.83, 284 Shohat, Ella 137 Simmel, Georg 26

327

Simplicissimus 71, 72, 242, 244–5, 253, 255, 256, 257, 263 n.43, 265 n.67, 286 social Darwinism 74, 96 n.28 Sombart, Werner 20 Jews and Modern Capitalism, The (Sombart) 20 Luxus und Kapitalismus (Luxury and Capitalism) 110 Modern Capitalism (Sombart) 20 Sonderweg (special path) theory 20, 241–2, 263 n.40 Song of Songs 111, 140, 178 n.8, 185 n.105, 234, 235–41 Sorkin, David 21 Spinoza, Baruch 47 Stanislawski, Michael 59 n.12 Stark, Ya’akov 3 Stern, Fritz 20 Struck, Hermann 45, 49, 204, 270, 272 Stüler-Walde, Marie 100 n.78, 242, 243, 245, 246 Süddeutscher Postillion 40, 243 Swift, Jonathan 132 n.60 Thode, Henry 20, 29 n.30 Tissot, J. James 138, 139, 143–6, 153–6, 157, 163, 175, 176, 177, 184 n.92, 270 Adam and Eve Driven from Paradise 155 Life of Christ 153 Plague of Locusts (Exodus 10:13) 155 Tolstoy, Leo 211 transnationalism 25–6 Trietsch, Davis 194, 208 Über den Moralischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (On the Moral Imbecility of Women) 74–5 Ujeski, Kornel 39 Ury, Lesser 45, 49, 132 n.67, 143, 198–9, 201, 203, 227 n.64, 241, 270 Van de Velde, Henry 250, 251 Vernet, Horace 144–5, 149, 153, 154, 156, 182 n.57, 184 n.77, 220, 221 Ver Sacrum 83, 242, 243, 245 völkisch 40, 44 von Münchhausen, Borries 7, 12 n.21, 40, 140, 176, 270

328

Index

von Rosen, Kathinka 74–5 von Stuck, Franz 242 von Wildenradt, Johann 40 Wagner, Richard 21–2 and antisemitism 21–2, 47, 49 and Nordau 49 and Ring and Brunhilde, The 262 n.22 and Wagner cult 49 Walden, Herwath 29 n.29, 109, 118 Wasserman, Jacob 133 n.68, 139, 200, 223 n.12 Weininger, Otto 109–10, 255 Weizmann, Chaim 7, 208, 270 Werner, Alfred 44, 63 n.48 Westermann Verlag 140, 176, 178 n.5, 179 n.21, 180 n.27 Whitfield, Stephen 8 Wilde, Oscar 80, 96 n.35, 107, 108, 128 n.11, 242, 249 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 18–19, 66 n.91, 96 n.35, 125, 183 n.72, 192 Williams, Raymond 9, 13 n.32 Winckelmann, Johann 36, 59 n.13, 66 n.94 Winz, Leo 194, 196, 203, 207, 225 nn.31–2, 270 Wissenschaft des Judentums and Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz and Ignaz Goldziher 28 n.21, 177, 178 n.1 Wistrich, Robert 59 n.12 Wolff, Kurt 133 n.68, 139, 200, 223 n.12, 228 n.74 Wolfskehl, Karl 200, 223 n.12 Wolfsohn, David 28 n.16, 167 women’s feminist movements

League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine – BDF) 73 Union of Progressive Women’s Associations (Verband fortschrittlicher Frauenvereine – VFF) 73 Zalmona, Yigal 55–6, 66 n.100, 168, 186 n.117, 186 n.119, 189 Zangwill, Israel 7 Zbornik (Gorki) 12 n.21, 211 Zetkin, Clara 73, 95 n.23 Zimmerman, Moshe 59 n.12 Zionism cultural 1, 11 n.10, 24, 28 n.21, 35–67, 90, 91–3, 103–4, 117, 118, 132, 141, 143, 174, 176, 177, 183 n.75, 189, 190–8, 200, 207–8, 214, 217, 221, 227 n.61, 233, 239, 260, 270–1, 273, 286 and Jewish identity 1, 8, 64, 177, 190, 206, 259, 268–9 and orientalism 189, 190, 200, 198–210, 259, 268 political 2, 11 n.12, 41, 91, 104, 168, 208, 210 and women 26, 70, 84–5, 90–3, 168, 177, 202, 259, 260, 268–70 Zionist Congresses 13 n.29, 15, 41, 45, 47, 48, 51–3, 55, 64 n.60, 65 n.85, 91, 152, 198, 201, 207, 208 Zola, Emile 49, 71 Zweig, Lotte 12 n.14 Zweig, Stefan 2, 7, 11–12 nn.14–15, 35, 37, 40, 41, 44, 49, 60 n.21, 61 n.31, 76, 79–80, 98 n.55, 270, 273, 286

329

330

331

332

333

334

Plate 1  Grave of Helene and Ephraim Moses Lilien, Braunschweig, (Brunswick). Reproduced from a photograph. Courtesy of Owen Watkinson, 2018.

Plate 2  E. M. Lilien, The Magnus-Lilien home at 3 Wolfenbütteler Straße 3, Braunschweig (Brunswick), 1913, etching, P74.09.2500. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

Plate 3  E. M. Lilien, Logo of Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, c. 1906, ink and gouache on cardboard, B03496. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Peter Lanyi.

Plate 4 Israeli stamps from 1977, commemorating Lilien’s art from the Fifth Zionist Congress of 1905. http://www.boeliem.com/content/1977/209.html, accessed 5 September 2009. Courtesy of Boelim Stamps, Israel.

Plate 5  Broken Fingaz Graffiti Collective, Homage to E. M. Lilien, Kazimierz, Kraków, 2014. Photograph by author.

Plate 6  E. M. Lilien, Vom Ghetto nach Zion (From Ghetto to Zion) or Congresscarte (Congress Card), 1901, India ink over graphite and white gouache, B51.11.2917. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner.

Plate 7  Members of the Democratic Fraction (?), at the Fifth Zionist Congress, 1901, Basel. No. 002643746. Courtesy of the National Library, Jerusalem.

Plate 8  Phillip Rupprecht, Money is the God of the Jews. In Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom). (Nuremberg: Verlag Der Stürmer, 1938/9), 42. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016 by the Katz Family.

Plate 9  E. M. Lilien, Ex Libris E. M. Lilien [Hebrew], 1909, etching, P74.09.2452. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

Plate 10  E. M. Lilien, Sketch for Ex-Libris Dov (Boris) Schatz, n.d., India ink over graphite and white gouache, P83.04.5534. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Plate 11  E. M. Lilien, Plakat für das Berliner Tageblatt (Poster for the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt), 1899.

Plate 12  Bruno Paul, Das Weib vor, hinter und auf dem Rade (Women before behind and upon the wheel), Jugend Vol. 1, No. 21, 23 May 1896, 335. Inv.-Nr. 45740 Z (SGS00027185), Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://digi. ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1896_1/0326/image, Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany accessed 28 June 2018.

Plate 13  Bruno Paul, Das Brotkörbchen (The Little Bread Basket). Cover for Simplicissimus Vol. 2, No. 35, 27 November 1897, 273. Inv.-Nr. Simpl. 1279 (SGS00025047). Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://www.simplicissimus.info/ index.php?id=12. Courtesy of Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft, accessed 28 June 2018.

Plate 14  Alphonse Mucha, poster design for Job cigarette papers, 1896.

Plate 15 E. M. Lilien, Helene with Night Crème, or Morning Reading, c. 1909, etching (red), P74.092455. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Laura Lachman.

Plate 16  Alphonse Mucha, La Samaritaine, 1897, colour lithograph.

Plate 17  Oscar Kokoschka, Pietà (Poster for Mörderer, Hoffnung der Frauen [Murderer, Hope of Women]), 1909, lithograph.

Plate 18  Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1901, oil on canvas, 84 × 42 cm. Österreichische Galerie, Belvedere, Vienna.

Plate 19  Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil, silver and gold on canvas, 138 × 138 cm. Neue Galerie, New York.

Plate 20  Max Liebermann, Simson und Delila (Samson and Delilah), 1901–02, oil on canvas, 151.2 × 212 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

Plate 21  Max Liebermann, Der Zwölfjährige Jesus im Tempel (The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple), 1879, oil on canvas, 149.6 × 130.8 cm. Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

Plate 22 Simeon Solomon, The Mother of Moses, 1860, oil on canvas, 59.7 × 48.3 cm. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington. Bequest of Robert Louis Isaacson, 1999. Object No. 19999–1. http://emuseum.delart.org:8080/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/items$0040:8619.

Plate 23  Maurycy Gottlieb, Christ Preaching at Capernaum, oil on canvas, 110  ×  80 cm. National Museum of Warsaw, Warsaw. Collection no. MP 431.

Plate 24  William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1854–55, oil on canvas, 141 × 85.7 cm, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham. Public domain.

Plate 25 E. M. Lilien, Sprüche Salmos, das Sohnes Davids, des Königs von Israel (The Proverbs of Solomon, The Son of David, The King of Israel), Die Bücher der Bibel, Vol. VII (Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag, 1912), 12–13.

Plate 26  E. M. Lilien, Study for a Carpet, dedicated to Mr and Mrs David Wolffson, 1906, oil chalk and graphite on canvas, 185 × 305.5 cm, B88.027. Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner.

Plate 27  Jewish ornamentation from Syria? Parchment found in the Cairo Genizah, David Baron Günzburg, L’Ornament Hébreu (The Hebrew Ornament) (Berlin: Cavalry, 1905), 20. Courtesy of J.C.S.,Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main/ Digitale Sammlung Judaica/ http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/freimann/content/pageview/265871, accessed 4 May 2018.

Plate 28  Kolomon Moser, Allegorie Ver Sacrum (An Allegory for Sacred Spring), Ver Sacrum Vol. 1, January 1898, 5. Indian ink and watercolour on paper, 41.9 × 16.5 cm.

Plate 29  Bruno Paul, Der Münchener Jugend Brunnen (The Munich Fountain of Youth), Simplicissimus Vol. 10, 5 June 1897, 76. Pencil and wash on paper, 38.1 × 60.4 cm. Inv-Nr. Simpl. 1250 (SGS00027187). Courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Also available at: http://www.simplicissimus.info/uploads/tx_lombkswjournaldb/pdf/1/02/02_10. pdf. Courtesy of Deutsche ForschungsGemeinschaft, accessed 28 June 2018.

Plate 30  Hans Christiansen, Cover illustration, Jugend Vol. 2, No. 48, 26 November 1898, 795 – CC-BY-SA 3.0. Courtesy of Heidelberg University Library, Heidelberg, Germany, http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/jugend1898_2/0379/image, accessed 27 June 2018.

Plate 31 Henry Van de Velde, Cover, Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch fur Alle und Klein (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and for None), 1908. Double-page ornamental title, printed in purple and gold, after designs by Henry van der Velde, text printed in black and gold, type designed in 1900 by G. Lemmen. Courtesy of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Plate 32  E. M. Lilien, Cover, Juda, c. 1900. In Börries von Münchhausen, Juda, Gesänge Von Börries, Freiherrn V. Münchhausen Mit Buchschmuck Von E. M. Lilien. Berlin: Egon Fleischel and Co., n.d., n.p.