The Essence of Jewish Art 0011439451

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School of Theology at Claremont

IININON LN

a Librax

0011439451

ERNEST NAMENYI THE ESSENCE F

The Library of the School of Theology at Claremont

1325 North College Avenue

Claremont, CA 91711-3199 1/800-626-7820

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THE

ESSENCE

OF JEWISH

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THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH ART by ERNEST

NAMENYI

Translated from the French by Edouard Roditi

NEW YORK

THOMAS

YOSELOFF

LONDON

L’Esprit de VArt Fuif © 1957 World Jewish Congress 4 English translation © 1960 by World Jewish Congress, British Section Published by Thomas Yoseloff, London & New York

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CONTENTS Preface The Divine Will and the World of Becoming

page ix I

Form and Content

16

III

The Symbolism of the Ancient Synagogue

25

IV

Abraham, Father of the Chosen People

33

The Candlestick of the Redemption

42

The Path of Redemption

74

Notes

81

Index

85

II

VI

i.

ILLUSTRATIONS The Illustrations follow page 44 Plate I

Plate II

The Sacrifice of Abraham. Intaglio (Third to Fourth century), imprint enlarged four and a half times. Cabinet des Médailles de la Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris (Photograph: RogiAndré). The Messianic Temple, the Menora and Abraham’s Sacrifice. Painting from the tympanum of the niche of the Dura Europos synagogue.

Plates III,

IV&V

Figures 1 and 2

(Photograph: Yale University) The Vision of Ezekiel. Painting from the Dura Europos synagogue. (Photograph: Yale University). The Vision of Ezekiel. After a direct tracing, taken from the original

painting

of the Dura

Europos

synagogue in 1936. From: Comte du Mesnil du Buisson: Les Peintures de la Synagogue de Doura Europos, Plate VI Plate VII

Plates XLII-XLIII. Mosaic of the Beth (Sixth century). The Sacrifice of Isaac.

Alpha

synagogue

Agua: Mishne Tora. 1296. Kaufmann Lib-

rary, Budapest Academy of Sciences. Plate VIII

The inventory of the Messianic Temple. Bible illuminated by Solomon ben Raphael

of Perpignan in 1299. Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris. MS. Hébreu no. 7. (Photograph: B.N.).

vii

Plate IX

Figurative Massora (Tree of Life and Shield of David or Magen David). Bible illuminated by Solomon ben Raphael

of Perpignan in 1299. Bibliothéque breu no. 7. Plate X

Nationale,

Paris, MS.

Hé-

(Photograph: B.N.). The Menora: Abraham’s Sacrifice and the Judgment of Solomon. Bible illuminated by Joseph ben Benjamin Zeb of Pontarlier in A.D. 1300 Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, MS. Hébreu no. 36.

(Photograph: B.N.). Plate XI

Plate XII

Plate XIII

Solomon. Fourteenth century South German Mach-

zor. David Kaufmann Library of the Budapest Academy of Sciences, no. A. 384. Mizrach. Etching by Markus Donath of Nyitra (about 1830). Budapest Jewish Museum. Parochet of the Obuda Synagogue, of 1747. Budapest Jewish Museum.

Plate XIV

Moses receiving the Torah. Machzor of 1450. Palatine Library, Parma, De Rossi no. 2895. (From: Munkacsi: Miniattrmiiveszet Italia

Konyvtaraiban, plate XXIV).

viii

PREFACE

“The history of art is the history of the spirit as it reveals itself in forms,’’ writes Henri Focillon. “It occupies a central position, at the very heart of the history of civilizations, and concerns itself with collating and interpreting monuments as if they were texts, since, in themselves, they have the same value as written texts and sometimes even a greater value. There exist whole expanses of civilization concerning which monuments are our only source of information, and great movements of exchange have occurred which we would never, without the help of monuments, be able to measure or analyse. The further we go back into the distant past of mankind, the more we become aware of these truths; it thus becomes all the more clear that man’s history is not one of stability, and that

he has not been set where he is once and for all time ...’’? Actually, all those who, during the nineteenth century,

concerned themselves with the study of Judaism, deliberately ignored the existence of Jewish art. It had been

admitted irrevocably that the creative genius of the Jews limits itself to poetry and perhaps also to music, but eschews the plastic arts. As the Bible had been written without any illustrations, Israel remained a nation that has no images, so that its traditions were commonly opposed to be those of Greek and Roman civilization, revived at the time of the Renaissance. The discovery of the existence of Jewish art occurred scarcely sixty years ago. David Kaufmann and Julius von

Schlosser were the first to reveal the treasures of mediaeval Jewish art that are preserved in European libraries and JA ix B

PREFACE

museums.? David Ginzburg and W. V. Stassoff subsequently published in 1907, some reproductions of tenth century illuminated manuscripts which had been discovered in the Cairo Geniza.° In 1921, the French Biblical and Archaeological School

in Jerusalem

unearthed

the

mosaics

unfort-

unately badly damaged, of the Naaran Synagogue and in 1930, E. L. Sukenik made known of those of the sixth-

century synagogue of Beth Alpha, which were intact and had been discovered by scientists of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Finally, on November 22, 1932, Professor Clark Hoskins and Count Mesnil du Boisson in the

course of excavations undertaken by Yale University in co-operation with the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, uncovered the paintings

which

had once

adorned, towards the end of the second century, the walls of the Synagogue of Dura Europos in Mesopotamia. These various “‘texts in the form of monuments’, dating from different periods that take us back more than a thousand years, should have sufficed to dispose of all existing prejudices which deny the existence of Jewish art. But one can still read, in Marcel Brion’s introduction to The Bible in Art, for instance, such statements as the following: ““The Book is jealous and tends to exclude. Israel, Islam and the Reformed Churches accept that all that it

tells us in narrative should never be confronted with a sculptured or painted version of the same episodes.”’ Later, the author speaks of ‘‘a bad conscience that one can detect in some figurative works of post-classical Judaism, for instance in the synagogue of Dura Europos.”’ Bernard Berenson, an expert in the art of the Italian Renaissance, which had inherited the traditions of ancient Greek art, wrote on the other hand that neither the Jews who

x

PREFACE

occupied the hinterland of the Palestinian coast, nor their

ancestors, had ever been gifted with any kind of skill in the plastic or even the mechanical arts. He then added in conclusion that the wealthier Jews of Alexandria may have

had their own copies of the Greek version of the Old Testament illustrated; but, as no specifically Jewish style of art existed in those days, they were forced to employ for this purpose Greek artists or Jewish artists who were

completely hellenised.* Not only did Jewish art exist however, but the importance of the vast cultural exchange that Focillon mentions

was all the more great in a people which lived, for two thousand years, dispersed among the nations and in close contact with countless other civilizations. The present modest study does not claim to undertake an exhaustive investigation of this whole matter. It limits itself to elucidating those key ideas that have dominated the many expressions of Jewish art in the course of eighteen centuries: the notion of One God transcending history

and determining its evolution according to His will, the notion of a Chosen People, that of the Torah and, last of all, that of a Messianic Faith. A mere enumeration of such themes clearly shows that they constitute throughout the diversity of forms and the shifts of spiritual currents, the very essence of Judaism. No

study of Jewish civilization can any longer afford to neglect an interpretation of the “texts in the form of monu-

ments” that Jewish art has bequeathed to us.

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4

CHAPTER

AND

I

THE DIVINE WILL THE WORLD OF BECOMING

After the wanderings of the generations in the desert, the Jews reached the Promised Land, an area where two powerful cultures met and came into conflict, the culture of Mesopotamia and that of Egypt. Nations entered this area either from the mountains or from the desert, but were all rapidly assimilated by its dominating civilizations, with the notable exception of the Jews, who remained peculiarly intransigent and rigorous in their opposition to the ideas and reasoning of their new neighbours. The latter, sedentary nations with an agricultural economy, believed in the immanent nature of

divinity and sought its manifestations in natural phenomena; but the Jews, a people of the desert, sought God neither on the earth nor in the waters, nor again in the heavens, all natural phenomena remaining, in their eyes,

but pale reflections of the greatness of God. Can man even

pronounce His Name? “I am He who is.” This God becomes one with absolute transcendence, a manifestation of Being that remains unique, an expression of all that is holy. All values, in the last resort, are but attributes of God alone. Concrete phenomena, even nature and man, lose all their value and meaning in His presence: “‘But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Is. 64. 6). Even righteousness, which most distinguishes man as his supreme ornament, is of no value when he faces the Absolute that is God.

I

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

We scarcely ever find any longer, except among the Jews,

this kind of passionate depreciation of all the phenomena of nature and all the conquests of the human mind, whether arts, virtues, or social institutions, in their confrontation with a basic and unique awareness of the divine principle. Only a God who transcends everything and cannot be defined or qualified is sole ruler of the world of

phenomena. He is conditioned by no other manifestation of any kind; alone, this God, defying all qualifications, remains the one source of all existence. Such a conception of deity is so perfectly abstract that, in achieving it, the Jews even refrained from using the traditional figure of speech of mythical poetry. The mythical element in the Bible is not particularly rich, if one compares it to the myths of Egypt or Mesopotamia. Yet Jewish thought created a new kind of ‘myth’, that of the _

Divine Will.

The great THOU that faces the Jews as a sublime expression of nature enjoyed, one might say, a kind of

constitutional relationship with the Chosen People: “For His people are the Lord’s portion.” Again: “But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham my friend. Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, and called thee from the chief men thereof, and said unto thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness” (Is. 41. 8-9). The Divine Will was revealed to this people, as it had been promised to Abraham when he did not refuse his

only son: “And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice”

(Gen.

22. 18). This

choice

is again

confirmed

on

Mount Sinai: “Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar

2

DIVINE

WILL

AND

THE

WORLD

OF

BECOMING

treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine. And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation” (Ex. 19. 5-6). The unique quality of the Chosen People corresponds to the unique quality of the One God, and the Jewish people thus becomes a symbol of the unity of all mankind as well as of the Messianic hope of the Jewish faith, whereby the hope of the redemption of Israel becomes a symbol of the redemption of all righteous men. But the idea of there being one people implies a corollary: that this people must obey the dictates of the Divine

Voice and of the Divine Will. The history of Israel therefore becomes one of the struggle between human weakness

and human strength, between man’s will and his capacity to achieve his objectives as he bears this very heavy burden of a supra-human Will. The Jew is albeit never the blind

slave of Divinity, as in the religions of Mesopotamia, nor again a merely mechanical cog in the machinery of a state ruled by a sovereign endowed with divine attributes, as in Egypt. In these other civilizations, man was at the same time supported and crushed by the power of the state as

by the rhythm of nature. Among the Jews, neither nature nor the power of a king endowed with divine attributes presided over the evolution of history, which was ruled, on the contrary, only by the Will of God. Hence this awareness of a reality that transcends all that is real, in the Kingdom of God, Who

is one and transcends all things. This Kingdom is ruled by laws that have been revealed to the Chosen People and man thus discovers in the Law the expression of the Divine

Will, so that his own free will can achieve or destroy the Kingdom of God. Such is the meaning of the history of the Jews, the lesson that it teaches us. 3

THE

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JEWISH

ART

But how and when can the Divine Will, as it is revealed in the Law, be accomplished? In future ages of perfection, when all mankind shall at last have discovered the true meaning of the Law and accomplished it in their actions. “If you listen to my voice,” the Kingdom of God will be established and the redemption of the Chosen People accomplished, with the redemption of mankind at the same time. Such is the Will of a God who transcends all things. Such a Deity cannot be represented in images and can never become manifest in any forms, only through His own divine will. As the plastic arts achieve their expression in

forms borrowed ready-made from nature, deities that are merely immanent lend themselves readily to representation in these forms and are revealed in such representations of natural forms as may constitute their very presence. But . the God of the Jews transcends all such forms and is ' absolute Being: “I am He who is.” Such a deity cannot be represented in any images! ““Take ye therefore good

heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire: Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, the likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground,

the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth” (Deut. 4. 15-18). The deities of the pagans are indeed such images and are immanent in these images and through them. Service to such gods is service to their images, which are idols, whereas service to God is service to true Being, Being in itself, transcending all images. The campaign conducted

4

DIVINE

WILL

AND

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WORLD

OF

BECOMING

by all the prophets against such idols was that of Being

against mere appearances, against nothingness or Nonbeing, for images do not represent anything at all. Where is their original? What has been their prototype? No such thing exists.

The God who is One is not content to say: ‘““Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Expanding His thought in greater detail—and this is the only thought of the Ten Commandments that inspires the first four of them—He says: ‘“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Ex. 20. 4-5). Because every image must have an original, an immanent prototype, no image of God can be made. Transcending all things, God cannot be the prototype of anything at all and reveals Himself only through intuition, through the spirit, through love, through reason, without ever being the model of any image.

It is easy to understand that this conception of God might lead to a negation of the plastic arts. But the creative powers of man cannot remain content with expressions of his religious fervour in the form of poetry, music or ritual, and must therefore seek a concrete

expression in all the other arts too. If truth, the unique nature of God, Being in itself, the basic and constant principle of the religion of Israel, cannot permit any

representation of God, man’s aesthetic faculty remains nonetheless something that has requirements which go beyond normal sensual perception and which provide the artist with the intuitions of his creative work. Our eye, as Bergson has pointed out,°> perceives the features of the i)

THE

ESSENCE

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JEWISH

ART

living being, but in juxtaposition and without any common organization. The intention of life, the simple movement that goes through the lines and unites them and gives them a meaning, this escapes the eye; and it is this intention that the artist seeks to grasp by placing himself within what he

depicts, by an effort of sympathy and intuition which reduces the barrier set by space between himself and his model. “Intuition,” writes Bergson, “‘can thus help us to grasp what is lacking in the data of intelligence, allowing us to obtain a glimpse of the means that can allow us to complete them.” If we undertake an analysis of artistic creation in terms of reason, as the philosopher Hermann Cohen has done, we somehow fail to grasp its very essence. Art is ruled by intuition and is thus able to grasp reality, which is eternal Becoming, whereas science is ruled by reason and remains puzzled by reality.6 There has never been any nation whose creative powers and religious fervour have been limited to poetry, music and dramatic ritual. Man’s art-

istic intuition must always also tend towards expression in the plastic arts and even attain it: the monuments of art of the past forty thousand years offer us ample proof of this. The art of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt was closely bound to religion. Its forms are not exactly those of mere appearances, yet they represent the immanence of the divine principle and, by representing it, finally usurp the

place of divinity. Such works of art become gods and are idols. In order to preserve the essence of Judaism, only two attitudes were possible. The first of these was an in-

transigent

iconoclastic

creed,

involving

a campaign

against all images, using persuasion; irony and threats. This was the attitude of the prophets. But was not such

DIVINE

WILL

AND

THE

WORLD

OF

BECOMING

a struggle doomed to remain unsuccessful? Was it not bound to succumb to the untiring will of man to create, a

will that is born of the intuitions which inspire him to create works of art? Ever since the men who still dwelt in caves, there has not been a single people that has not followed the dictates of the instinct or intuition from which artistic creation arises. True, throughout the period of the Old Testament, an unceasing campaign was carried on against idols. But what could be hoped for from such a struggle, as long as man had not yet found ways and means of creating works of art that were not idols? In time, man’s intuition did manage to make us understand that, in the data offered us by our intelligence, something remains concealed; and this is what offers us the resources of expression of an art which “no longer expresses itself in terms of analogies with nature’, and is no longer an expression of the immanent quality of divinities, but which suggests the transcendent quality of God. How was man to attain this ideal? How could he be made to hear the voice of God, to understand His Will? A

static or hieratic representation of divinity could not achieve this aim. How could man express Becoming, the manifestations of the Will of God, in motion, both in time

and in space? The monuments of Jewish art, as early as the third century c.z., achieved this aim by means of a method that was then transmitted to ancient Christian art and to Byzantine art. The need to suggest, by means of art, the transcendent nature of God thus expressed itself in another attitude towards art, that of continuous narrative as opposed to the inconoclastic negation of the plastic arts. And this constitutes the great contribution of the Jewish genius to the art of the western world.

7

THE

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ART

What are the characteristics of continuous narrative? In order to make an action understandable in its unfolding, one cannot remain content with representing only an isolated scene of it; this scene would focus our attention too much on the characters represented, whereas the Jewish religion requires that we eschew the sacred immobility and the hieratic poses of the kind of art which produces idols. It is therefore in a continued action, a true sign of divine

reality, that we must seek the subject to be represented, in events that make us sense the presence of God by their semantic concatenation, a presence that cannot be subjected to mere forms but must achieve its fruition in His will. In a single picture, we thus see the same character appear several times, in the various phases of the evolution of a story; and this is the visible expression of a process, undergoing a kind of expansion in our conscience in order . to “introduce us into a realm that is peculiar to divine transcendence, that of creation infinitedly continued.’”’ The first application of continuous narrative that we know of in Jewish art, is magnificently illustrated in the fresco-paintings of the synagogue of Dura Europos, which date back to approximately 245 c.z. Our ideas of Jewish art were profoundly affected by the discovery, in 1932, of this synagogue. Dura Europos, a city of Syria situated on the banks of the Euphrates, was a fortress that belonged in turn to the Seleucid kings of Persia and to the Parthians, and which then became a part of the Roman limes. In

260 C.E., it was finally destroyed by the Persians. In the course of this last siege, the city’s Roman commander expropriated all buildings situated close to the fortified walls, in order to facilitate their defence. Among these buildings happened to be the synagogue. When the

city’s walls were destroyed, their ruins buried this house

DIVINE

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of worship, the walls of which had been adorned with precious paintings. The city was then completely destroyed, but, beneath its ruins, many of these paintings managed to remain preserved, in excellent condition, throughout seventeen centuries, until archaeologists brought them to light again.

We shall discuss here only a few of these paintings. The pediment of the Ark was thus decorated and the four walls were also covered with representations of in-

cidents drawn from the Scriptures, painted on three superimposed levels. It is moreover important to note that the creation of these works of figurative art occurred

shortly before

the heyday

of Babylonian

Rabbinical

scholarship, the most famous academic centres of which, in Sura and Nehardea, were situated not so very far from Dura Europos. These paintings are therefore an expression

of Jewish thought as it manifested itself immediately before the halachic reformation. The murals depict the main episodes of the life of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Samuel, David, Solomon, Elijah and Esther. In discussing them, it will be seen how they are to be interpreted as symbols (Chapter III). The most striking feature of the Dura Europos synagogue’s

murals is that the representation of persons and the beauty of the human form remain of obviously secondary importance to the artist, who seems not to have been at all concerned with three-dimensional representation and to have felt but little interest for the tricks of perspective that he had learnt from Greek artists. The general setting of the action, its architecture and landscape, are his main preoccupation, and to them he devotes his full attention.

The element of motion in the spectacle that he thus provides is developed to such an extreme

5)

that it distracts our

THE

ESSENCE

OF JEWISH

ART

attention from each human figure in turn. We are made to contemplate huge groupings of figures and stretches of

space and of time in which they move and meet. Let us summarize, for instance, the description that Count du Mesnil du Buisson has given of the composition

representing the scene, from the Vision of Ezekiel, of the dry bones being brought back to life. The subject is drawn from Ez. 37. 1-14. Each one of the scenes depicted, sometimes on a very reduced scale, illustrates a different paragraph of the narrative, which we can

follow by referring back to the text (see plates III, IV and V and figures 1 and 2). The figure of a man, whom the hand of God has seized by the hair in order to drop him among the scattered bones, is the prophet Ezekiel. In the second scene, the prophet, now with his feet on the ground, extends his right hand, while, with his raised left hand, he gestures ‘towards the hand of God above him, as if he were speaking rather than indicating it. This image corresponds

to the following verses (37. 2-7): ““And caused me

to

pass by them round about ... Again he said unto me: Prophesy upon these dry bones ... Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live ... So I prophesied as I was

commanded.” The third figure of the prophet shows him with his right hand stretched out towards a hill that opens up, while his left hand is again raised towards the

hand of God that is above the cleft in the hill. From out of this cleft hill, detached limbs seem to pour forth. The text illustrated here runs as follows: ‘‘And as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone’ (Ez. 37. 7). In the fourth scene, again beneath the hand of God, the

10

DIVINE

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Prophet is represented with both arms outstretched. At the foot of the hill on the right, three bodies that have been formed again are lying side by side on the ground. Above them, amidst the rocks, one recognizes the ruins of a house. The text describes the bones moving towards one another and adds: ‘‘And when I beheld, lo! the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them” (36. 8). The ruins of the house seem to us to symbolize here the House of Israel (see fig. 1). Then we see the prophet for the fifth time, facing us and raising his right hand in a gesture that suggests speech. Three small figures, like the Psyche of ancient mythology with their butterfly wings, seem to be moving towards him, with outstretched arms. A fourth figure of the same species is moving towards three youthful figures that are stretched out on the ground to the right, as in the preceding scene. This last Psyche, seen in profile, is about to grasp in her hands the head of one of the recumbent figures. Let us return to the text: ““Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live” (37. 9). The four winds are represented by the four figures of Psyche which have just breathed life into the corpses (fig. 2). We then reach the sixth and last scene of this frieze, where the prophet indicates to us, with his outstretched right hand, ten upright figures: “So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great

army” artist

(37. 10). One

should

has still depicted,

note, however, that the

to the side, a few scattered

II

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

limbs. Perhaps he thereby intended to suggest that not all bodies will be brought back to life, and that some

remain condemned to “‘eternal death”’. M. Rostovtzeff, a great interpreter of the civilizations

of the Near East in the first centuries of the Christian era, has written:®

“The artists of India were the first in whose works one finds examples of this method of continuous narrative, employed by them to illustrate episodes of the life of the Buddha and of his successive incarnations. Later, ancient Christian art and Byzantine art resorted to it too, but not in order to interpret the will of a God Who transcends all things, only to describe incidents of the life of Jesus and the theme of the redemption, seen in the light of Christian dogma, much as the Hindus had already described various

aspects of the meditations of the Buddha.” This great discovery of Jewish art was thus borrowed by Christian art too, but with a different semantic intention. Christian art, during the last centuries of antiquity, in adopting a Jewish prototype, adapted it also to the iconographical teachings of the Church. One of the places where one can observe this Jewish influence most clearly is the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, built in the fourth century by Pope Liberius. In the central nave, a series of square mosaics, all of the same size, is divided in two superimposed series, devoted to scenes borrowed from Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and Joshua, illustrating the lives of Abraham, Jacob, Moses and Joshua. Without claiming to analyse these scenes exhaustively, we shall limit ourselves here to discussing the scene where Abraham receives the angels. On three panels, the patriarch appears three times in order to accomplish the mission discussed in the first eleven verses of chapter

12

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eighteen of Genesis. Another example is to be found in the panel illustrating the great battle of Gibeon, where the appearance of a hand symbolizes the intervention of God, whereas in the following panel we see Joshua stopping the

sun and the moon in their courses (Joshua 10. 12). This conception of continuous narrative, which inspired the composition of the murals of Dura Europos, can also be found in the admirable miniatures, with their purple backgrounds, of the Vienna Genesis (Vienna, Austrian National Library, Theol. gr. 31), a manuscript of the sixth century which probably comes originally from Syria or Alexandria. Its miniatures are distributed in series, like the paintings of Dura Europos, and likewise concentrate less on the heroic attitudes of the figures or

their individual features than on the succession of events so dictated by a divine will. The iconography of Judaism thus influenced the art

of the Early Christians in a number of its finest manifestations, such as the Tours Pentateuch and the Ashburnham Pentateuch (Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, nouvelles acquisitions latines no. 2334), which was probably illustrated in the seventh century in the immediate vicinity of Alexandria, and the many Byzantine manuscripts of the same period as well as the Homilies of Saint Gregory of Nazianza (Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, Grec no. 510), the Psalter of the same collection (Grec no. 139), or even the Bible of Queen Christina in the Vatican Library (Codex Vaticanus Reginae, Greco I). What a few scholars of genius, such as David Kaufmann and Joseph Strzygowski, had been able only to guess some fifty years ago, is now proven beyond dispute by the paintings of Dura Europos, namely that the richest source of Christian art is to be found in Jewish art. But the semantics

JA

13

Cc

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of Christian art were destined very soon to undergo another change. The hieratic quality that the artists of Dura Europos were so anxious to eschew reappears in

Byzantine art, though the interpretation of the Scriptures had continued, at first, to follow the directives which Jewish art had respected. Whatever may have occurred later in the evolution of Christian art, the divine Will appeared, in continuous narrative, in concrete forms, clear

and expressed in terms of space. Each form was thus stressed in its full reality, while events followed one another in detached succession. Neither the actors or figures, nor the strict imitation of nature mattered much, nor was beauty, the perfection of the human body as the Greeks oonceived and appreciated it, of great importance. This art was indeed moving away from the ideals of Hellenism and already seeking, even finding, paths which allowed a more truthful awareness of a vast shifting reality to reveal itself in art, beyond an exact depicting of the features of men or gods. That is why any representation of God as an image has been banned from Jewish art throughout its history, the divine presence being suggested, at times, only by His hand. But a schism was destined to arise between this art and that of the Christians, in which God soon became visible, whereas representation, in general, tended again to adopt the form of hieratic figures allowing the personal image of the individual to reign supreme. From that moment on, Jewish art became separated and distinct from Christian art as well as from pagan art. If Jesus in-

deed adopts a human form, a contradiction inevitably arises between Christianity and the transcendental mono-

theism in which the Jews refuse to accept any such ambiguity. For the spirit of Judaism cannot accept the idea of lending to God the appearance of a mere figure, 14.

DIVINE

WILL

AND

THE

WORLD

OF

BECOMING

and Jewish artists, as early as the era of hellenistic and talmudic Judaism, did not concern themselves with representing merely the person of God. On the contrary, they wished to express the divine Will, in fact all that

broods there in a state of becoming, and all that is still in the process of tending towards becoming.

15

CHAPTER II FORM

AND

CONTENT

Jewish culture, ever since the Diaspora began, has always been founded on two principles. These must of course be studied by anyone who sets out to consider all of Jewish

art throughout the centuries of its history. The first of these principles is determined by the specific surroundings in which, as a minority, the Jews are forced to live among the nations. The second is to be found, on the contrary, in their specifically Jewish heritage, in all that persists in their traditions and refuses to change, giving the Jews the strength to resist assimilation to

the civilizations that surround them. Always and everywhere, the forms and styles of the civilizations which surrounded the Jews have left their mark on the work of Jewish artists. In the era of the Kings,

the forms of the art of Israel were those of the NearEastern peoples in general. The carved ivories from the palace of King Ahab (876-853 B.c.£.) in Samaria reveal an

influence of Phoenician art as well as elements borrowed from Egyptian, Syrian-Hittite and Assyrian art. As for the brilliant hellenistic era, we find countless examples of its influence on monuments of Jewish art. Alexandrian culture indeed gave birth to the Graeco-Semitic culture of Mesopotamia, which also absorbed some Parthian ele-

ments, of which we find evidence in the paintings of Dura Europos, where the artist clearly knew examples of Greek art, having probably even studied under Greek masters.

Yet the painters of Dura Europos who actually signed 16

FORM

AND

CONTENT

their work were all Semites, as their names imply, and probably also Jews. In any case, their minds were impregnated with the artistic atmospheres of Hellenism and their art was thus an offshoot of the Graeco-Syrian art of

their period, though they had completely modified its techniques and its traditional subject-matter. The folds of the costumes of those figures, in the Dura Europos paintings, which are dressed according to Greek styles have all, for instance, been schematized and are represented in purely linear terms, no longer fitting the bodies but designed without any effects of relief, as if they lacked thickness or weight. Though the figures themselves still owe their general appearance to the traditions of Greek art, there is already something foreign about such

a cultural survival, which is no longer in harmony with the style of composition as a whole. This is a style, as a matter of fact, of oriental realism rather than of Greek plastic feeling. The composition of the paintings is limited to two dimensions, in which costumes and accessories assume considerable importance, the intention of the artist being not so much to convey to us the majesty or power of a

character as to make us feel the authority of an abstract idea, that of the divine Will, in such a manner as to offset any hieratic appearance of the figures. Nor is it merely that Greek art has here been simplified, adulterated with barbarian elements. The artists of Dura Europos did not produce something differing from the models of their masters out of sheer ignorance or lack of skill. On the contrary, they wilfully resisted the blandishments of Greek art, so that we recognize in their work a Hellenic element,

though it is no longer dominant. In the Islamic

countries, the Jews likewise accepted 17

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

the directives of Moslem art, the influence of which remained for many centuries predominant in many Sephardic communities, to such an extent that we can follow its evolution as something that is parallel to that of romanesque, gothic, renaissance and baroque forms. The popular art of the nations of Eastern Europe can similarly be recognized as a strong influence in the art of the Jews

of Poland and Russia. Never has there been a watertight separation between Jewish culture and the civilizations which have provided its surroundings. Artistic creation is a matter of intuition, not of reasoning, and has thus suggested to artists in the long history of Jewish art, many analogies with the art of other peoples, but also many transformations of what may

have been borrowed. Unfortunately, persecutions have led to the uprooting of Jewish communities and their sudden removal to other and often very different centres of civilization, so that each one of the latter seems to have imposed its mark on works of Jewish art; but each one of these marks, in turn, has been erased to some extent by later migrations, and the iconoclastic intolerance of the Rabbinate has also managed

to destroy much that persecutions had left intact. The archaeological discoveries of the past fifty years have, however, brought to light works of art of the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era which, together with monuments and works of Jewish art of the Middle Ages and of more modern times, now constitute a recognizable tradition which lends itself at last to interpretation. Whether in an Islamic country, against a hellenistic background or in a centre of western civilization, all the

changes and exchanges that characterize the major shifts in man’s conception of art are represented in the art of 18

FORM

AND

CONTENT

the Jews. During the third, fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, figurative art was permitted among the Jews, though all manifestations of it seem to have been destroyed in the course of the following two centuries, when Jewish art found a refuge in the ornamental traditions of Moslem art, in its mystical refinements, its abstract harmonies, its ritualistic riches. The non-figurative illuminations of manuscripts of this period achieve a perfect adaptation to the pious spirit of humility that characterises the texts illustrated. But when the Jewish miniaturists of fifteenth century and sixteenth century Italy were able to enjoy the great possibilities which the Renaissance had placed at their disposal, they made use of them liberally, yet without sacrificing the arabesque decorations which they had learned to use in the Islamic countries. The Italian miniaturists were thus able to achieve a tasteful synthesis of two artistic traditions, whereby the art of decorating Hebrew books, attained new and unprecedented heights during the Renaissance, without however reducing its devotional intensity or its value as a source of spiritual enlightenment. One of the finest examples of the harmony then achieved is the magnificent fifteenth century Bible that is in the Paris

Bibliothéque Nationale (Hébreu no. 15), where sumptuous decorations carried out in the style of the Renaissance are brought together with geometrical designs and arabesques richly developed in their unmitigated abstraction. Another testimony is to be found in a monument that is actually two centuries younger than the synagogue of Dura Europos, in the mosaics of the synagogue of Beth Alpha. The murals of Dura had been painted on the banks

of the Euphrates, but the mosaics of Beth Alpha were 19

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

discovered within the boundaries of Israel, when, in 1928, the ruins of a synagogue of the beginning of the sixth century were brought to light in the Valley of Esdraelon. As in the case of the paintings of Dura Europos, the mosaics of Beth Alpha owe their survival to an accident, in fact to an earthquake which managed to save them from the iconoclastic fury of the Rabbinate of a later age. These murals and mosaics have now made it possible for us to

reconstruct or restore other works of art which had been found elsewhere in a mutilated condition, in other ancient synagogues. At the same time, they offer us a key for the interpretation of later works of Jewish art. If one then considers the luminous evolution of Jewish art as a whole throughout all these centuries, one cannot over-estimate the fortunate nature of the circumstances

which have allowed the paintings of Dura Europos and the mosaics of Beth Alpha to survive, or the importance of these works as testimony. Such rare monuments allow us to appreciate better the nature of Israel’s artistic inspiration as an expression of the belief in our vocation as a Chosen People, in a revealed Law, and in the Messianic hope. It was quite natural that Jewish art should have constantly sought to communicate the full meaning of these beliefs, their universal significance, in subjects that are not too restricted in their relevance and in figurative compositions that are not too intimate in their nature. Ever since the return from the Babylonian exile, fences built up around the Torah helped to justify the anathema pronounced on all figurative art. Philo, for instance,

writes that Moses

“‘cast out of the City the elegant

arts of painting and sculpture, because they corrupt the truth with lies and bring deceit and error into the souls of

men through their eyes’”’.12 This belief was current in the 20

FORM

AND

CONTENT

age of Jesus too, though Rabbi Gamaliel probably tolerated and even owned some works of art. But one should also note that a less strict trend, in the interpretation of the Torah, had meanwhile gained some support, forbidding all idols but not all images. The effects of this new trend can be observed in the third century synagogues of Galilee. Rabbi Judah the Prince, in the second century, and Rav and Samuel in the third, as well as some passages in the Palestinian Targum of the fourth century, no longer solemnly ban all statues, and Rabbi Jochanan bar Nappacha (Palestinian Amora of the second generation, deceased in 279 c.E.), as well as Rabbi Abbun in the fourth century, do not ban mosaics and paintings

from synagogues, provided they do not represent the sun, the moon or the stars. But every form of sculpture, whether in the round or in relief, remains absolutely forbidden.* From the first to the third century, Christian art likewise remains symbolical, and it was only in the fourth century that historical and monumental art came at last to the fore. After the puritan rigors of the obscurantist period that followed, only the floral ornaments, in the synagogue of Capernaum, for instance, were allowed to subsist; in Naaran too, all representations of man and of animals were made to disappear. It was from now on that the artistic schism between the Christian Church and Judaism began to acquire more and more importance. A recurrence of the iconoclastic quarrels within the

Church,

then

brought about

in the ninth and tenth

centuries, as a kind of diversion, a greater concern for the elements of liturgy. The admirable Biblical miniatures of Shalomo Ha-Levi Barbuya, discovered in the Fostat Geniza, are of the year 930 c.E. and are actually dated.

21

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

They represent the elements of the Temple and are carried out in an Islamic style. But the holy ikons were brought back to Hagia Sophia after 842, and the Church, has never since pronounced a ban on all images. With the exception of the movement started in

renaissance Florence by Savonarola, only the Protestant Reformation has been clearly hostile to the figurative arts. Within Judaism, however, the problem of figurative

representation, contrary to all generally held beliefs, has never been finally settled and has always remained a matter of controversy. Maimonides, for instance, had acquired the habit of closing his eyes, while praying, in order that his attention should not be distracted by the tapestries of the synagogue, in which animals

and birds were probably represented. The judaica vela made by the Jews of Alexandria, from the second to the fifth centuries, were probably used as hangings for the Eastern ' wall of their synagogues, the one oriented towards Jerusalem. In the fifteenth century, on some Perachot, one could see Moses receiving the Tables of the Law. In the twelfth century, Rabbi Eliachim ben Joseph inveighed

against the stained-glass windows of the synagogue of Cologne, while other Rabbinical authorities expressed opposition to there being animals in the decoration of the

synagogues

of Bonn

and Meissen.

In

the

thirteenth

century, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg expressed his disapproval of the miniaturists who would illustrate a machzor with animal figures which, he felt, drew one’s attention away from prayer. Nevertheless, it is worth repeating that only works of art sculptured in the round were at all times formally forbidden by rabbinical law. From the thirteenth century onwards, one finds more

and more Jewish manuscripts, in the countries of the 22

FORM

AND

CONTENT

west, that are illustrated with illuminations representing human figures. Finally, even sculpture in the round was to obtain approval and to be allowed as a form of artistic expression. A bust, that of the “Portuguese” magnate of Amsterdam, Baron Antonio Lopez Suasso, who died in 1689, after financing the expedition which brought William of Orange to the English throne, can be admired in the Jewish section of the Municipal Museum of Amsterdam. But it was only a century later, in 1785, that a Jew who was faithful to his religious traditions, Moses Mendelssohn, allowed his own bust to be reproduced, by the sculptor P. A. Tassaert, during his lifetime. Even in the nineteenth century, there was still occasional resistance, on the part of the more strictly orthodox Rabbinical authorities, to sculpture in the round. Moses Sopher of Pressburg, for instance, demanded of a young Jewish sculptor who had attained fame, Joseph Engel, that he mutilate all the human faces that he had ever sculpted. It can thus be seen that the debate, with its alternatives that constantly swing one way or the other like a pendulum, was never concluded, through the centuries, in an absolute manner. Can such a debate ever be concluded, and what authority would ever dare impose a conclusion, now that artistic creation has become increasingly popular in order to satisfy, like music, one of the most characteristic tastes of man in our age? Whereas ornamental decorations accompany and enhance the solemn nature of ritual and stress, like jewels, the sacred character of Holy Writ, we have become accustomed to figurative illustration as an aid to the better understanding of certain actions by associating the image of a human figure with these episodes and identifying them with the features and character of an individual. Nor is this merely a matter of 23

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

pleasing or diverting us since the Biblical or liturgical texts concerned are not thereby pushed into the background nor even of casting light on their meaning by rendering them visually more understandable. The purpose of such illustration is, on the contrary, to bring to our attention the thoughts and feelings of an individual who takes part in these actions or ceremonies and thus

becomes a projection of the spiritual evolution of a whole community or of the social class as a whole to which this individual belongs. Illustrations and ornaments that accompany them help to stress truths that are experienced in common, beliefs revealed in their very essence. Jewish art can therefore be seen to act as a mirror reflecting the Jewish soul in its varied manifestations throughout the ages. Mystical periods, permeated with devotion to liturgy, are followed by rationalistic periods _ In which the actions narrated in Holy Writ are examined

and analysed in detail as testimony of the Will of God and of man’s relationship to God, of the part played by Israel in

the evolution of humanity as a whole and of the individual man. Historically, the truths which are the heritage of Abraham’s progeny are thereby brought into relief and, whatever the age, this heritage is founded on certain fundamental principles, on key ideas which remain the permanent essence of Judaism. It is the mission and the privilege of Jewish art, through the changes and interrelationships of all its forms, determined as these are by

each age and by the environment that it imposed, to reveal elements that are constant and are closely bound to this essence.

24,

CHAPTER

III

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ANCIENT SYNAGOGUE If we now return to the murals of Dura, we should be able to see that these, in the richness of their execution and the exact detail of their composition, communicate to us quite explicitly the spirit in which they were conceived.

Those analysis.

that surround Among

the

the Ark others,

deserve the

most

a separate important

series of panels represents Moses delivering the Jewish people from Egypt, Samuel anointing David, who is destined to be the ancestor of the Messiah, Elijah, who comes to announce the Messiah, the prophet Ezekiel calling the dead back to life, and Esther who saved her people. There is no chronological regularity in this series of scenes, which obviously does not aim at illustrating the Bible literally, but at supplying us with a transcription, in terms of images or pictures, of the Messianic faith as it was deeply felt by the Jews of Palestine and Mesopotamia in the third century. The architectural orientation of the synagogue served to express this idea even more clearly. In the western wall, between two columns, a niche was

provided, its rear wall curved in the shape of a shell. Beside it was placed the chair of the head of the community, who presided over the synagogue. The House of Worship was thus turned towards the West, towards Jerusalem. But let us return to the summary description of the synagogue that Count du Mesnil de Buisson has given us.

25

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

The chapel containing the niche for the Torah was placed in front of the main entrance, against the wall at

the back of the synagogue and towards the middle of its long western side. As soon as one entered this gatheringplace, one’s gaze was attracted to a jutting and rectangular piece of masonry that rose some ten feet above the floor and was about five feet wide. The niche itself, built within this smaller edifice, was

very deep, having a minimum depth of some four feet. The purposes of this whole edifice were twofold: to contain the Ark, the Aron haKodesh, and to indicate the

orientation of the whole building. The niche was indeed situated in such a manner that, if one stood opposite it, one faced the direction of Jerusalem almost exactly (See I Kings 8. 44 and 48, and Daniel 6. 10). It is important to

note that the Jews of the third century identified this direction by means of such a niche.

As one enters the synagogue, one is struck by the elements and the scene that decorate the pediment of the niche (plate II). Against a blue background, there stands out, in the centre, an image that must be of great importance, considering the place of honour that it has been

granted. It seems to represent the facade of an edifice. On a horizontal base, four columns have been erected, two at each end. Their capitals have a bulbous base and remind one of the lotus-flower or of baskets of a specific shape. Above them, an entablature with cornices rises towards a series of rounded merlons. In the middle of this fagade, we recognize a door with two panels that are closed. The central covering bead of it is adorned with seven discs,

each one of them marked with a point at its centre. In the middle of each door-panel, there is a ring that probably serves as a door-knob. The door is framed on its sides by

26

THE

SYMBOLISM

OF

THE

ANCIENT

SYNAGOGUE

two scrolled columns and; above, by a rounded tympanum

adorned with a shell. In the edifice that adorns the niche, the door, the columns, the crown and the base are yellow, which indicates that they are intended to suggest gold; the wall at the back is of slightly mauve pink, which may have corresponded, in the eyes of the painter, to purple. The whole design is thus ,a conventional rendering of the Temple in Jerusalem, and the object represented in the middle is the Ark of the Covenant; concerning the latter, the shape of the Ark in other sections of the murals allows us no reason to doubt. In this period, a representation of the Ark thus seems generally to have been identified as the Aron haKodesh, and the ideas of the artist concerning the prototype copied are quite unambiguous. To the left of the Temple there has been painted a gigantic seven-branched candlestick, an object that was considered, in the era that immediately followed the

Diaspora, to be the most characteristic utensil of the whole Temple, and which is reproduced on a great number of Jewish objects or inscriptions. To the right of the menora are the lula and the etrog, whereas the right part of the pediment of the central niche is occupied by a scene depicting Abraham’s sacrifice (Gen. 22. 1-13). Here, the artist has illustrated verses g and 10 of this chapter of Genesis. One can recognize the altar and the faggots of wood arranged in a strange triangle and, above them, the figure of Isaac lying down. Abraham, standing in front of the altar, holds in his right hand a powerful knife that is pointed upwards. Above Abraham, a right hand that is wide open appears out of a cloud, the hand of God. In terms of oriental stylisation, the artist has also depicted, side by side, the

27

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

ram and the bush, which is a small tree. This is the first

known representation of this scene, which constantly recurrent theme in Jewish art.1¢

LHe.

became a

As for the mosaics of Beth Alpha, these undoubtedly

( 32-4)

ala atC

had much in common with the murals of Dura (plate VI). As one entered the synagogue, the first scene that one saw, depicted in the mosaics, was that of Abraham’s sacrifice; the centre of the panel is occupied, however, by a representation of a solar deity riding his chariot and surrounded by the signs of the zodiac with, at each one of the four corners, an allegorical figure representing one of the four seasons. Finally, in the third and furthest panel, the one closest to the niche of the synagogue, we find a representa-

tion of the Temple. Important differences should, however, be noted between Dura and Beth Alpha. In the latter, for instance, the

Ark is completely identified with the Aron haKodesh, and one can see in the mosaic the eternal lamp burning before the Ark as before the Aron haKodesh. On the tympanum of this little edifice, there are two birds, and the Ark is also guarded by two lions that remind one of the Cherubim of the Ark. In addition, two seven-branched candlesticks are likewise placed on either side of the Avon or Ark, which is situated beyond a pair of curtains (perachot) that are raised, one to the left and the other to the right. But the paintings decorating the niche in Dura and the mosaics of Beth Alpha still have two importantthemes in

Pa common: the sacrifice ofof Abraham, that‘is to say, to use theterminology of of Judaism, the binding of Isaac, who was ) not actually sacrificed but only bound on the altar, and the Menora with the Messianic Temple. These remain, for many centuries, the basic iconographic Jewish. art.

28

themes

of

THE

SYMBOLISM

OF

THE

ANCIENT

SYNAGOGUE

Before analysing these two themes in greater detail, it is worth devoting some consideration to the central panel of the Beth Alpha mosaics: the solar deity driving his &the. chariot drawn by four steeds, beneath the rays of the moon and the stars, and surrounded by two circles with, in their segments, the signs of the zodiac and their designa- 4 alae tions in Hebrew. In each one of the four corners of this central panel, as we pointed out before, a winged figure represents one of the four seasons. Is this syncretistic symbolism exceptional, indeed unique in Jewish art? One finds it elsewhere, in the mosaics of the synagogues of Isfiya, on Mount Carmel, and of Naaran, though these mosaics have unfortunately been severely damaged.” In the reliefs of the synagogue of K’far Birim, the signs of the zodiac are likewise represented, and the zodiac seems Folaeindeed to have occupied a central position, at time, one in Jewish religious thought. The Sefer Yetzira, for instance, written in the same period as that in which these synagogues were built, as well as the liturgical poetry of Kalir, composed in the seventh century, give us complete enumerations of the known constellations of the heavens.

Josephusdiscusses their relationship to the twelve loaves of the shewbread, and Philo compares them to the twelve precious stones with which the High Priest is adorned, whereas theMidrash relates them to the twelve tribes. The constellationthat presides over the month of the birth of any man determines his destiny, and the word MAZAL,

originally meaning, in Hebrew, a constellation, thus came to mean ‘destiny’ or ‘luck’. The seasons, each one represented by a winged genius, are familiar symbols in traditional Jewish iconography. In a little illuminated book of the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Seder Shemirat Shabbat of Isaac Luria that can

JA

29

D

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

be seen in the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem, the zodiac signs and the seasons are an exact replica of the designs of the mosaics of the ancient synagogues of Palestine. Human

destiny embraced within the cycle of nature, the resurrection and re-birth of man, after his death, in a better world: this is also the basic element in the teachings of the mystery-religions of Asia Minor, which had penetrated Jewish beliefs too.18 When one realises how widely these beliefs and images had been propagated, one can no longer consider the symbols used by the artists of Dura or of Beth Alpha as , merely ornamental fantasies. Pagan symbols had indeed ’ been adopted by theJews of the hellenistic era, buthad * been integrated in general a understanding, a spiritual

initiation. The Jews invested tl these alien symbols with the figurativema meanings of _their own centuries, they remained a part of of Le too.19 Orpheus, for instance, can also be According to the Jews of Alexandria,

thought and, for the Jewish ‘heritage recognized in Dura. he had been a wit-

ness to the Unity of God; in any case, he had been assimilated to David, the Minstrel King, the ancestor of the Messiah. In the ancient synagogue of Hammam Lif, in Tunisia, a fountain of life, in the catacombs, and designs representing crowns or winged figures symbolize the triumph of the righteous and the hope in a future life and

in immortality. The semantics, of pagan mythology have vanished, its emotional‘impact i has been transformed and it is through the channel of Judaism that all these figures

and symbols pass into Christian-art where, together with the symbols of Judaism inherited from the Bible,. they all acquire forms

remain

a new

meaning.

the same,

Though

they now

30

the

suggest,

outward as beliefs

THE

SYMBOLISM

OF

THE

ANCIENT

SYNAGOGUE

follow their evolution, different emotions and different

ideas. It is by a similar confrontation with the change in the evolution of ideas, ever since its first appearance

as a

symbol, that we must try to understand the meaning of the solar deity and all that this figure is intended to suggest to us in the ancient synagogues of Palestine.

ss Se re. » eur 4

Driving his chariot, this deity is certainly no merely decorative pattern, no concession to fashion or taste.?° In hellenistic or Roman times, he represented a manifestation of the supreme god, as he had, ever since the most remote times, in Persia and in the Vedas, where he is the

spirit of light, like Mithras radiating from a chariot.”? But what does this figure of a deity become in the context of Judaism, and what meaning does the Greek interpretation of this symbol now acquire? To the Greeks, the symbol had already become a mystery, the purpose of

which was redemption, as it is understood in any mystical faith. God is the absolute, bound to the phenomena of the visible world by a sheaf of rays of light, the logos or sophia, guiding the hopes of man and revealing to us our

final aim, which is to abandon all material things and their sordid complications by raising ourselves to eternal light as we pass through this luminous sheaf.??

This is the key offered to us, in order to decipher the lesson and the directives, by the mosaics of Beth Alpha, as also by the paintings surrounding the Aron haKodesh of Dura. The solar divinity, with the moon and the stars, is a dazzling reference to Ha Shem Tzevaot, Whose features we are not allowed to reproduce. The Akeda, the symbol of

the Chosen People and a prefiguration of the resurrection of the dead, is allied to the Messianic Temple. Art thus casts its light on the riddle of Jewish thought. 31

Light

fe

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

transcends time and space, and Abraham is made to confront the coming of the Messiah. The niche where the Torah is deposited becomes allied to the chariot of the solar

divinity, in a reaffirmation of the doctrine of Philo, according to whom the Torah remains immaculate as long as the sun, the moon and the universe subsist, in order to guide man into the Messianic age.

32

CHAPTER

IV

ABRAHAM, FATHER OF THE CHOSEN PEOPLE ‘When Abraham, our father, bound his son Isaac on the altar, he mastered his emotions as a father in order to carry out Thy will with no second thought in his heart.”

Such are the words repeated each year, in Jewish liturgy, on Rosh Hashana. Liturgy, prayer and art stem indeed from a common spiritual source, offering signs whose true meaning, can be understood only in the light of our emotions. For many centuries, the spiritual life of Judaism threatened to become arid as a consequence of an excessive rationalism. Only the emotion that surges from prayer, from liturgical poetry, from song, from antiphonal chant, could still endow the Absolute with an external form which the common people could understand; only this emotion can ensure an intimate com-

munion between the ego of man as he prays with God whom he addresses as Thou. The metaphors and imagery of synagogal poetry grant us access to the abstraction that is in the nature of our conception of God, and make it possible for us to grasp it. But symbolical transformations such as those that we

have just considered can be achieved only with the aid of a powerful aesthetic impulse which seeks its fruition in song, in gestures, in the creations of the plastic arts. It is no effect of chance that, in the illuminated Hebrew Bibles of the Middle Ages, the Song of Moses and the Psalms are surrounded with more solemn and sumptuous 33

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

ornamentation than any other texts. In an illuminated Bible of approximately 1400, one finds the most ancient known transcription, in terms of design, of the traditional

Hebrew melodies.28 The most beautiful illuminated Bibles of the Middle Ages indeed contain some delightful designs, in which the artist has interpreted the liturgical purpose of the Stdrot and Haftarot that are read aloud in the course of the synagogue service. David Kaufmann deserves our lasting gratitude for having stressed the intimate connection between liturgical inspiration and the figurative designs of art.*4

Abraham, the father of all Israel, conferred upon his progeny

its powers

and

its strength.

He

is the very

incarnation of the birth of Jewish history and remains the hero whom the Rosh Hashana liturgy celebrates. He is consequently the most important figure in Jewish art. The most popular episode of his life, the one that is most frequently depicted by Jewish artists, remains of course the scene in which he binds Isaac on the altar. In the religious concep) tion of the Jews, human sacrifice is forbidden. That is why this episode is never referred to as the sacrifice of

“Isaac, but always as the Akeda, ‘the binding’. images

of it, Isaac

is represented

In all

as a passive figure.

When the ram is placed there in his stead, as motionless as he, this mere animal becomes as important an actor in the scene as the child. The Akeda represents human perfection in relationships with God, and a proper sense of

proportion in these. This is the meaning that must be attributed to the words of the Angel coming to prevent Abraham from sacrificing his son and saying to him: ‘‘For now I know that thou fearest God’’. The same meaning

should be attributed to the words of the Voice that Abraham hears crying out, after he has sacrificed the ram: 34

ABRAHAM,

FATHER

OF

THE

CHOSEN

PEOPLE

“By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine

only son: That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore ... And in thy seed shall all the nations of the world be blessed; because

thou hast obeyed my voice” (Gen. 22. 16-18). We have already seen that in the synagogue of Dura the first panel of the murals, the one decorating the niche ,

for the Ark represented the Akeda, and that the same subject strikes one immediately in the mosaics as one enters the synagogue of Beth Alpha. In both houses of worship, a hand appears above the head of Abraham. In Dura, this hand appears wherever the artist wishes to express the idea of the effective presence of God: in the scenes of the vision of Ezekiel, for instance, in those of the crossing of the Red Sea, and again in those that represent Elijah resurrecting the widow’s son. Wherever God speaks through the lips of His angel, as in the scene of the burning bush, the Hand appears again.

The Hand of God is thus the most constant symbol in * Jewish art throughout the centuries, up to our own times. The presence of God, or God called upon by man—but always this Hand, almost without exception in the illustrations of the Haggadot (the strong hand) and in all amulets

intended to announce or to ensure divine protection. In the numismatic collections of the Cabinet des Médailles of the Paris Bibliothéque Nationale,” one may see an intaglio that is probably of the same period as the paintings of Dura Europos. It is of ribbon sardonyx and, in the stone’s white ribbon, Chabouillet thought that he could detect, though this was an error, an angel that, on closer examination, proves not to be represented there.

35

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

This intaglio is probably, with the paintings of Dura, the most ancient known representation of this particular Biblical scene. The analogies between the three representations of the same scene, that of Dura, that of Beth Alpha, and that of the intaglio, are all the more important because the engraver of the latter, as a result of the exiguity of the stone, had to be content with giving us only essential features. In the centre, Abraham, of considerable stature, with the knife in his hand, is preparing to sacrifice on an altar the prostrate child, whose hands are bound; to the left, we discover the Hand of God towards which Abraham directs his gaze and, below the Hand, close to a bush, a large ram. There is no reason to doubt that this intaglio is the work of a Jewish artist,2* though the Syrian god Hadad was also represented generally by a hand, which might suggest that the Jews had been deeply

influenced by the culture of Antioch. One should note, however, that the Hand had already been one of the symbols of Franco-Cantabrian art, some forty thousand years ago (see plate I). One of the principal themes of Jewish iconography can thus be found in the story of Abraham binding his son on the altar, then sacrificing the ram beneath the Hand of God. Later, the Hand of God was replaced by an angel holding back Abraham’s knife. But what happened to this theme in Early Christian art? Here the person of Isaac is placed more in the limelight. Isaac is no longer bound, but stands upright beside the altar, or is represented there kneeling. Often, too, he is seen bearing the faggots destined for his own sacrifice as a burnt offering. But what do these changes mean? According to the Christian explanation, Isaac is a prefiguration of Christ: “Isaac ergo Christi passuri est typus’’.?? 36

ABRAHAM,

FATHER

OF

THE

Christian artists of the Near

CHOSEN

PEOPLE

East for a long while

found it distasteful to depict the Crucifixion. They felt that this would degrade divinity to a merely human level and they therefore preferred to depict scenes from the Old Testament. The sacrifice of Isaac thus came to be identified with the Crucifixion; Isaac bearing the faggots became a symbol of Christ bearing the Cross, and Isaac on the altar was Christ on the Cross. One of the works of art where these variations are most strikingly illustrated is the Saint Gregory of Nazianza

manuscript of the Paris Bibliothéque Nationale (Ms. grec no. 510), which was composed, copied and illuminated in Byzantium in the ninth century. The miniature representing the sacrifice of Isaac obeys the dictates of continuous narrative. In it, one sees Abraham leaving his two servants behind and tying his ass to a tree; then Isaac climbing the mountain, bearing a faggot bound with a rope to his shoulders. Further on, Abraham prepares to thrust the knife into the throat of his son who is kneeling, his head firmly held back. Hearing the angel’s voice, Abraham then discovers, behind a rock of the mountain, the ram. On the altar in front of him a fire is burning. But we see how, in the Christian catacombs and the reliefs of sarcophagi of the first six centuries, the various scenes of this episode diverge more and more from their Jewish prototype.”8 Yet the Akeda continues, while these transformations are being undergone in Christian art, to lead another life in Jewish art. Nathan ben Yechiel, a famous Talmudist of the eleventh century, refers to it again,”® and the same figures are still found in Jewish Bibles and other illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth century. In the British Museum’s Franco-German Pentateuch (Add. 15282), the figurative Massora that frames the

37

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

Biblical text in diminutive Hebrew script forming an ornament, for the account of the Akeda, adopts the form of a ram caught in a bush. The same, accompanied by knives painted

in gold leaf, to make

it even

clearer,

illustrates the Spanish Bible of Joshua ben Abraham ben Gaon, a manuscript which, begun in 1275, was completed in 1301 (Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Hébreu no. 20). In the German machzor of the David Kaufmann Library in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Cat. Weisz No. A 387), under the design of the ram the name of Isaac is

repeated twice. In the Ulm machzor of the same collection (A. 383), a hand holding a knife is drawn next to the name of Abraham. This same traditional

again

in the

thirteenth-century Bible of the British Museum

scene

appears

(Add.

11639), in the Haggada of the same collection (Add. 27210), then in the fourteenth-century German machzor

of Breslau University Library, and in that of the Darmstadt Library (Cod. Or. 13). One can find it too in the miniatures of the Bible (B.30) of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, where the angel is depicted holding back Abraham’s knife, in a French Bible (Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Hébreu no. 36), in the Rashi manuscript, dated

1233, of the Munich State Library (Cod. Hebr. 5), in the Maimonides Mishne Torah of the David Kaufmann Library in the Budapest Academy of Sciences (A-77) that was written in Cologne in 1296, in all of which we find similar versions of this scene, except that, in the last, the

outspread wings of the angel reach into the clouds and a nimbus surrounds the angel’s head. But this last manuscript, with its surprising new detail, already belongs to an era when Jewish art was again allowed to depict winged angels, after a long period when, the human figure being 38

ABRAHAM,

forbidden,

FATHER

OF

THE

CHOSEN

PEOPLE

these angels had also been forgotten.

In a

curious and moving series of reciprocal influences, it was Christian art, which had originally borrowed so many of its themes from Jewish art, that now, because it was still directly in the tradition of hellenistic iconography, began

to be the source from which Jewish artists borrowed certain themes.*? An enumeration of representations of the scene of the Akeda such as we have just given can scarcely claim to be complete. Be that as it may, we have seen fit to stop before reaching the Renaissance, when figurative works of Jewish art were again numerous and of high quality, the Akeda remaining in them, as always, a major theme. But Jewish artists now tended to eschew those traditional images which had become ambiguous because Christianity had invested them with its own particular meanings. A certain conflict and confusion resulted from the reciprocal influences of the two religions, from the ebb and flow of this movement of borrowings. It would therefore be useful

to try now to elucidate once more and in greater detail the exact

relationship

of Jewish

semantics

to

Christian

semantics. The Akeda suggests three distinct meanings on which Jewish religious thinking is based. Abraham represents the fear of God, the source of all human perfection. But this is not a unilateral relationship, based on mere

constraint. On the contrary, it is a covenant: “I swear by myself.” There is to be no sacrifice, and the divine command was thus but the simulacrum of a command. Isaac was indeed bound but not sacrificed. In the service for Rosh Hashana, dominated by the thought of the Akeda and originally dedicated to the creation of the world, the divine commemoration (Yom ha-Xikaron), the kingdom 39

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

of God, and the supreme judgment were all three subordinated more and more to the idea of the Covenant. Abraham’s love for God, God’s love for Abraham, His friend, and for Abraham’s posterity, all these find their accomplishment in the Covenant with the Chosen People and its seed, thanks to which all the nations of the world

shall at last be blessed. Very strictly, very scrupulously, as Christian art assim-

ilates more and more completely the theme of the Akeda to that of the story and the Passion of Christ, Jewish art retreats jealously to the magic lesson of the Covenant, a contract of love entered into freely, without violence, with-

out any crisis or outburst, between God and man. In the Midrash that is preserved in the Yalkut Shimoni, the appeasing substitution of the ram is granted its most glorious interpretation. The angel goes to seek this animal in Paradise, where it had been set aside, at dusk of the sixth day of the Creation of the world, and had been pasturing ever since close to the Tree of Life. Abraham remains, however, the supreme figure, brandishing a knife that is often a sword and hovering on the very verge of crime, then avoiding it by his Covenant with the Will of God, thanks to the Hand of God. Thus the Covenant between God and mankind is sealed for all time, and the Akeda is transfigured with light, as the first step along the road that leads to the peak of Sinai where Israel was destined to be confirmed in its mission of achieving the Kingdom of God on earth. ““Then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people:

for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom

of priests’

(Ex. 19. 5-6). From this supreme

teaching, a corollary of the double Covenant, arises what can now be read on the walls of Dura as well as in the 40

ABRAHAM,

FATHER

OF

THE

CHOSEN

PEOPLE

mosaics of the floor of Beth Alpha, the message of the Messianic faith: ““The Lord God shall blow the Shofar,

and Jerusalem shall be delivered; the Lord of Hosts shall reign, shall save and protect Israel. It is out of the horn of the ram which was sacrificed in Isaac’s stead that

the prophetic sounds announcing the redemption through the Messiah shall sound” (Jerusalem Talmud, Ta’anit

II, 4). Going into even greater detail, the Midrash adds that the other horn of the same ram is to be used to summon Israel to the promulgation of the Torah given upon Mount Sinai. The Midrash goes even further: The ass on which Abraham went up the slopes of Mount Moriah is the same one as that which carried Moses on his return from Midian into Egypt, and as the one on which the Son of David, the Messiah, on the day of the Redemption, shall wend his way in humility and glory to Jerusalem. In the synagogue, the Akeda is soon followed by the Amida, the prototype of all prayer, which tells of the resurrection of the dead, of the immortality of the soul, of the consecration of Redemption. According to tradition, Isaac himself was the author of the end of the second of these eighteen benedictions. When his father bound him on to the altar, Isaac’s soul escaped, but returned as it heard the liberating voice of the angel. Isaac then burst into

song: ‘“‘Praised be the Lord, who reviveth the dead !’34

41

CHAPTER

V

THE CANDLESTICK OF THE REDEMPTION From century to century, throughout thousands of years

of its history, Israel has never lost sight of the future. In this persistent optimism we must seek the answer to the mystery of Israel’s survival. Ever since the destruction of the Jewish State in 70 c.z., the Jewish people has always and everywhere been a minority, a national or a religious minority without any state where they could gather together and form again a majority. Could they ever

allow themselves any imperialistic ambitions? How could this eternal minority have been able to claim any right

to impose its will on other peoples or to dominate them? How could such a people claim to expand its power, and

on what could it found the legend and the glory which might have allowed it to claim sovereignty over any other nations which might have fallen from their glory? An imperialistic state can turn back towards its own past and find justification for the legitimacy of its political dynamics in the great episodes of its own history, in the exploits of its national heroes. But the Jewish people has set its own

hero in the future, the hero announced by the prophets, , destined to conquer and abolish sin by establishing the i reign of righteousness, when the whole world shall at last ) be filled with the glory of a God Who is ONE and Whose name shall be ONE. Israel shall then be His servant, accomplishing its mission as a kingdom of priests. And this hero of the future

42

THE

CANDLESTICK

OF

THE

REDEMPTION

is to be even more: he is to be the Messiah-King, destined to annihilate all the enemies of the Chosen People. The State of Israel then shall be re-established within the

\

in-gathering of all the righteous in Jerusalem, where the Temple shall be rebuilt. The Messianic faith thus adopts an objective character, acquiring temporal aims too. Whenever the sufferings of

the people become unbearable in fhecous ofthere-

peated bloodbaths of its history,the Messi revived, becomes a burning fire, a seething ca

is om

wehick tayotic.vislong brie> expression as_an of the imea the expectations and the hopes of th the believers. b

daw s

HE

Msi

,

ow.

times, was extinguished ina blood: bath, 1the whole sur-

viving Jewish world was electrified, as if shaken by terrific tremors,

while

a wave of Messianic ianic_muysticism spread

throughout_its_“scattered communities. This_ spiritual tempest rose again in the fourthcentury, a terrible age of persecutions and martyrdom. The sufferings inflicted on the Jews of Western Europe at the time of the Crusades, the persecutions that preceded the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, the massacres of Polish Jews in the seventeenth century—each of these in turn revived the powerful flame of the mySstical belief iin the comingof the Messiah. In Jewish history, this faith has expressed itself in such great movements as that of the mediaeval German Hassidim, that of the mystical Sephardic community of

Safed in the Holy Land, that of the revival of Hassidism in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century.

Rationalist thinkers such as Moses Maimonides may well be able to consider the age of the coming of the Messiah as being, above all, that of the reign of righteousness and wisdom, but the more turbulent faith of the 43

| é no

THE

aot tCS

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

mystics sees in it rather the resurrection of the dead, the re-establishment of the State of Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple. As Sa’adya Gaon once taught, from all the nations of the earth, from each territory in turn, the Jewish inhabitants must then be gathered to the Messiah King, who will gather them back to their true fatherland in Zion. But art is the twin brother of mysticism, and we can

therefore, throughout eighteen centuries, follow its evolution as it develops parallel to that of Jewish mysticism. Though the forms of works of art may change, their inspiration indeed remains the same. Until the destruction of Judaea as a State, before the capture and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 c.£., the Messianic faith of the Jews was still that of the prophets.

Rabbi Joshua the Galilean writes that the name of the Messiah is Shalom, Peace: ‘‘For unto us a child is born, ee us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The

Prince of Peace”’ (Is. 9. 5). All this refers to a purely spiritual conquest. After the

™ destruction of the Temple, however, national aspirations / were grafted upon such a purely spiritual and religious A Messianic faith, and the Messiah came to be seen as a jcomcacton who will annihilate all the enemies of His people ‘as the latter is gathered together again, from the four corners of the world, in Jerusalem, to a Temple that is at last rebuilt. This people had long been living in darkness but is now to be bathed in a great light as the Kingdom of the One God spreads throughout the world.

Throughout the first thousand years of the Christian era, this vision of conquest remains uppermost in Jewish 44

I.

The

Sacrifice of Abraham.

(Third to Fourth

century)

Further information about the illustrations appears on pages VII and VIII

sleyriqy

oy) ‘ojduiay, oruvissoyy

(‘ao Shs ynoqe) voyLIOVG

pur viouspy

24],

“IT

EET

a

“TIT

ae eae

(‘a0 Ghz mmoqe) sodomy ving ‘poryozy Jo uostA YT,

(ao Shs ynoqe) sodomy ving ‘paryezy Jo uorstA 94,

“AT

“A oUT,

uoIstA jo

‘eryazgving

sodomy ynoqe) Sh

(ao

su

‘I FAN

ae

Or

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,

sOLSs

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(EZ PS

fv

es Me

\

|: \WKe{ f pooh

e \

WW as

wov78

soIpog pap sy} Jo UOTIIIIMsaI OY SUIMOYS SAT 27e[g jo wed pur JI] 2] q uo poonpoidas payaryfo uois1y ayJ,JO UOTDIS VY} Jo SUIMeIC,

Nex)

SN

ie

x ree E x

jt] 02 Og WYSno1q peop sy} Surmoys A 2°] uo pue ‘AT avg Jo wed uo pronposdas jayarqfo uowsiy ayf, JO UOTVS oYy2 Jo SuimeiqY

“3 FANOI

A WIP)|

ESR C7 BE

VAG

Mosaic of the Beth Alpha synagogue.

(Sixth century)

VII.

The Sacrifice of Isaac. Cologne. (1296)

m7 aT Meas VIII.

The Inventory of the Messianic Temple. (1299)

5te Cir le

a

(iid,

ie

IX.

Figurative Massora [Tree of Life and Shield of David or Magen David}. (1299)

X.

The Menora:

Abraham’s Sacrifice and the Judgment of Solomon. (1300)

(Aimjus9 “UOULOTOG Y}UI9}IN0, “TX

ae

Te +

a aUe a,gM

Ls

x Il. Mizrach. Etching - by Markus Donath of Nyitra (c. 1830)

XIII.

Curtain

for the Ark [Parochet] Obuda. (1747)

of the Synagogue

of

XIV.

Moses receiving the Torah. (1450)

THE

CANDLESTICK

mystical thought

OF

THE

REDEMPTION

and expresses itself in eschatological

beliefs (Olam HaBa), in visions of the punishment of the wicked, of the Last Judgment, of the resurrection of the dead, of the renovation of the whole universe. In the\ first century, for instance, one hears the imperious suppli- )

cations of the Amida for the re-establishment of the throne / of David and the rebuilding of the Temple.*? The figure |

of Elijah the prophet acquires a new importance: “Behold ¢ I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of

the great hte dreadful day of the Lord” (Mal. 4. 5). Elijah shall pacify the people, but shall also have another mission: to bring back to Israel, in those Messianic days, the jar containing the manna, the food of the righteous, the

~

cup of water for their ablutions, the flask of oil for the © anointment, for Elijah must anoint the Messiah. He shall also bring back the rod of Aaron which ‘had sent out buds, blossomed and ripened into almonds”, for this rod

must serve as a sceptre for the Messiah.?* On that day, “It shall come to pass, nations which came from year to year to and to keep the feast

that every one that is left of all the against Jerusalem shall even go up worship the King, the Lord of hosts, of Tabernacles” (Zech. 14. a

mations, translates theseimperious in promises ene a of the Messianic stick thus became

faith. The seven-branched_candleits central symbol. An_emblematical

representation of the Tree of Life, it isplaced immediately in front of the Sanctuary (See Ex. 25, and Zech. 4. 9-14), on the day of Judgment, as a source of light in the darkness

of the Latter Day. In thehellenistic_era, this focus of Ca served to light the Temple bby day and hight, expressing the everlasting light of the heavenly bodies. Its seven branches \ pus corresponded to the planets, among x which the highest light *.i: JA 45 E

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

was the sun, which dominated the other heavenly spheres.

But what could this mean in terms of the resurrection, | when the Messiah would come? That the righteous would / then shine like heavenly bodies, splendid indeed as the sun.®° On the Arch of Titus, in Rome, among the other indicia of the Jewish faith, the seven-branched candle-

stick is prominently represented. As a part of the whole, the menora

was_a symbol of the permanent

character of

menora ‘vanished. But one knew for certain that itacta reappear in its proper place with the advent of the Messiah, in whose reign, as we have already seen, the Temple was expected to be rebuilt, in Jerusalem.*® There exists, however, in Jewish art, an architectural }) expression that is even more ancient than this symbolical

> language of the menora:

the very_orientation

of the

synagogue, as a first announcement of the coming of the Messiah. All the neighbouring nations of the Near East oriented their temples towards one of the four cardinal points, where those natural forces which were the objects

of their adoration were

situated: thus, the Egyptians

oriented their sanctuaries towards the south, where

the

Nile was known to have its source, and the peoples of Mesopotamia towards the east, where the sun rises. As long as the Aron was not permanently placed in the synagogue, it was always brought there, at the beginning of the service, and placed between the two main doors, indicating the direction of Jerusalem, But once the

Ave hed tetcmea!permanent element in the synagogue, the Aron ha-Kodesh was placed there, as we have seen in Dura, in a niche that directed the bieunon of the faithful /towards Jerusalem. Pagan temples had similar niches, con46

THE

CANDLESTICK

OF

THE

REDEMPTION

taining statues of divinities, which attracted the attention of those who came there to pray. In the synagogue, the

very position of the niche directed the gaze of the faithful towards the Holy City, the promised setting of redemp-

tion. In this niche, was placed the Torah, a code of divine Will which would find its accomplishment in redemption. The Mihrab of the Mohammedans is thus, as a niche

intended to orient the prayers of the faithful towards Mecca, an exact replica of the niche of the ancient synagogues; it has even adopted the same shape as the classical niche for the Torah,?? and when one of the Moslem faithful prostrates himself on a prayer-mat, the niche of the synagogue is again designed in it before his

eyes that are oriented, for prayer, in the direction of Mecca. The Coptic Church has likewise adopted niches to orient the attention of its faithful. But Christians, in general, seem to have given up the habit of turning towards Jerusalem whenever they prayy very early; instead, they adopted the custom ofdirecting the axis of theirchurches c towards the east, but one still sees them, in some cases, designating the the gered orientation of their churches by

placing a niche there. In the case of the niche of the Dura synagogue, the pictorial decorations were intended to stress the meaning of this orientation towards Jerusalem. The texture of its

artistic themes is composed like a series of chords that combine all the liturgical and prophetic meanings of the Ark that leads towards Jerusalem, of the Ark of the Covenant with God, which the artists have made more glorious by lavishing gold on their decorations. Majestic scenic views synthesise and illuminate the various phases of prophetic anticipation of the coming of the Messiah. To

47

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

the left of the Ark, a huge menora occupies the same space as, to the right, the scene of the Akeda. Near the menora, we recognize also the /ulav and the etrog.

In the synagogue

of Beth

Alpha,

the Ark

again

appears—the Ark, the Aron haKodesh—flanked on either side by a lion, above each one of which is a bird,

symbolizing the Cherubim. Two large menorot light up the Ark, and the parochet or curtain before the Ark, the lulav

and etrog, the blossoming rod of Aaron, the Shofar and the incense-burner are no longer relics of the destroyed Temple, but victorious attributes of the Temple rebuilt by the Messiah. The greatest masterpiece of the Jewish illuminator’s art in the thirteenth century, the Sarajevo Haggada, uses an even more convincing kind of figurative argument. When the narrative reaches the moment of the invocation for the coming of the Messiah, the Ark appears in the very centre of the Messianic Temple. In the Jewish catacombs of Rome and throughout the Roman Empire, one finds inscriptions, nearly always in Greek but also, though more rarely, in Latin, that are accompanied by “numerous representations of the menora, on funerary plaques where often a single Hebrew word, SHALOM, meaning ‘peace’, the name of the Messiah, also appears. Nor is this mention of peace an invocation of peaceful repose. Sometimes, as in the case of the funerary stones of Tortosa, in the sixth century, and of those of Narbonne, that are of 688 (Musée de Narbonne, no. 196), the whole idea is clearly expressed: next to the Latin inscription and the menora, one can read there, in Hebrew, SHALOM AL YSRAEL, meaning “Peace to

Israel’”’.3® This is also written in the mosaics synagogue

of Isfiya, on

Mount 48

Carmel,

of the

between

the

THE

CANDLESTICK

OF

THE

REDEMPTION

representations of two candelabra.*®® In the synagogue of Jericho, an Aramaic inscription likewise reveals clearly the eschatological meaning of the word SHALOM, which applies semantically to the whole of Israel.*°

There is thus no room for doubt or confusion: the Messianic meaning of the word is explicitly brought out and expressed.41 On the doorway of the Jewish tomb from K’far Yosef that is now in the Louvre, a menora again confirms our interpretation of the idiom of Jewish art and of its solemn function as a means of spreading certain basic ideas; this particular menora is, moreover, placed above representations of the Aron haKodesh and of

the vessels for the manna and the oil. But let us now consider some other manifestations of Jewish art. In very early times, the Jews happen to have been master-craftsmen in the field of glass-making, and may even be credited with having introduced the techniques of the production of gilded glass to the western world. In several musuems, including the British Museum, the Vatican Museums and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, one can admire fine gilded glasses that were once used as Kiddush cups and are adorned, almost without exception, with representations of the menora and also, at times, the Messianic Temple. On the cup that is in the Vatican collections, the Greek inscription which runs round the Ark reads as follows: The House of Peace.*2 Amulets and personal jewellery express the same faith by displaying the same symbols: an instance of this is the sixth-century ring, bearing the name of Asterius, which was found in Bordeaux.** Countless oil-lamps are also adorned with this symbol. Wherever there were Jews in

antiquity, in Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Ephesus in Asia Minor, Carthage in North Africa, Cyprus, Sicily or the

49

THE

ESSENCE

OF

JEWISH

ART

former Roman province of Pannonia in the Danube basin, the lamp remains the typical symbol of Jewish religious life, whether in the home or in the synagogue. In Delos, the immediate surroundings of the synagogue were thus

found to be veritably littered with fragments of such earthenware lamps. The Kiddush cups of antiquity were not all made of cut

glass. Many of them were made of ceramic, for Jews who could not afford the more expensive silverware or glass ones. In the Louvre, there is an engraver’s point probably used in order to shape cups that were made of sigillated pottery which bears a menora around which are

inscribed the Latin words DEO GRATIAS and UTERE / FELIX. Moreover, Jewish coins of two whole centuries offer us valuable evidence, beginning with those of the last of the Maccabees and ending with those of the second War of Liberation, after which, for close on two thousand years, the Jewish State did not exist. In these coins, the life of symbols and their death can be recognized, then their resurrection too, with a new meaning that then

persists for many centuries. The first Hasmonean kings seem to have adopted the seven-branched candlestick as a symbol of the feast of ‘) Chanuka, which they had but recently instituted. Public illuminations, on this occasion, were intended to commemorate the popular and democratic victory whereby they had established their regime. They even went as far as to change the shape of the menora in order to endow ~

it with a distinctive and characteristically Jewish appearance.** The last of these kings, Antigonus Matathias, who

) reigned from 40 to 37B.c.z, had ascended the throne by ) usurping regal powers from his brother, the legitimate ( © king; he then struck coins with the image of a menora 5O

THE

CANDLESTICK

OF

THE

REDEMPTION

in order to proclaim universally the popularity and the prestige of his ancestors. But this purely political propaganda was none too felicitous. It aroused the protests of the Rabbis, who had assumed the responsibility of enforcing those traditions which forbade any representation of the liturgical implements of the Sanctuary. The menora then disappeared from all Jewish coins and remained forbidden for over two hundred years, as a symbol that might be used in art. When it appeared again, it signified something different. During the First and the Second War of Liberation, th menora was never used as a symbol on Jewish coins, which bear only the symbols of the ritual wine, with all its variations, such as the /ulav and the etrog, the palmbranch and the citron, represented in the corners of the coin’s design. When, however, an important element of the population of Judaea, including perhaps even Rabbi Akiva, recognized in Bar Kochba, between 132 and 135, the true Messiah, the emblems that this national’ hero chose for the coins that he struck testified clearly to his Messianic ambitions. The lulav and the etrog symbolised the victory of the Messiah King, and the coin that actually bore his name, Simon, suggests also King David, the forefather of the Messiah, by bearing a representation of a harp. Above all, the Messianic Temple was also represented on these coins, where it had a star above

it, signifying

the meaning

of the name Bar Kochba

“Son of the Star”. These representations of the Messianic Temple reveal it moreover as a mere fagade, with four columns, exactly as we find it also in the mosaics of synagogues of that era, with the Ark and the Scrolls in the middle of this facade. Two generations after

the destruction of the Temple, the proud ambitions of the 51

THE

Jews had

ESSENCE

already

OF

assumed

JEWISH

ART

a concrete

form, in the

Messianic Temple, in the actual physical appearance of their synagogues: in the middle, with considerable emphasis, the Ark announced that the universal reign of the Torah would some day be re-established. It is interesting to examine to what extent, and how constantly too, these sécret symbols of the Jewish Messianic

hope, without ever being rigid or exclusive, have developed even in close contact with religions that were

sometimes violently opposed to Judaism. In these religions, Jewish symbols were used as decorative elements

in art, stressing its esoteric significance, and this was achieved by means of constant adaptations and approximations of the kind that art can easily allow. Thanks to liberties that only art can take, the affirmation of the Messianic faith was able to perpetuate itself without ever suffering a break in its continuity or an eclipse. The plastic expressions of its undying hope have never been completely banned, never ceased to appear visibly. - Throughout antiquity, they could always be seen and i deciphere fun their three basic intentions: the liberation of the Jewish people from its slavery under the Romans, the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the eschatological belief of the Jews in the resurrection of the

)

righteous and in the establishment of the Kingdom of God. Towards the end of the first millenium of the Christian era, the two last named of these three ideas predominate in most works of Jewish art. The most important monument of this art is the Cairo Pentateuch that Shalomo ha-Levi Barbuya illuminated in 930. Fragments of this masterpiece were discovered in the Geniza of Fostat and are now preserved in the Library of Leningrad. Its miniatures are enhanced with 52

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gold leaf, thus reviving the tradition of antiquity; the most important

one

among

them

represents

the Messianic

Temple, the jar of manna, the vessel to contain the oil for anointing, the rod of Aaron, in fact all the classical symbols, with the exception of the lions guarding the Ark and the birds protecting it with their wings. The Cherubim are indeed represented only by two small wings, so completely stylised that they are almost like the leaves of a tree. But in these miniatures, the decorative spirit already assumes an important function, and the composition is very similar to that of the sumptuous arabesques which one finds in Jewish manuscripts composed under Moslem

influence. Tapestry-work reveals the effects of a similar trend, as can be observed in the magnificent sixteenth century prayer-rug from Konia, in Turkey, where the representation of the Ka’aba, in the centre, reminds one strikingly of the tent of the meeting.* Here, we no longer find any exact representations, any attempt at realism; on the contrary, the traditional iconographical elements of Jewish art seem to disappear as a new vision of the world is created, expressing thought that no longer has anything in common with direct or explicit communication.** Forms now seem to detach themselves from imagery and to live an independent life of their own. The massora figurata, a Jewish analogue of the carmen figuratum of Christian art, written

in microscopically

small

lettering

that

flourishes

in

arabesques and calligraphic fantasies, then made its appearance, and soon became the favourite mode of expression of the artists who illuminated Hebrew books in that era, remaining popular until as late as the nineteenth century. One would expect the rationalists to see in this abstract 53

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art of decoration a form of homage rendered exclusively to writing, to the sacred text, in fact a luxurious frame-

work contrived for thought, for the Word. But Jewish abstractions, like those of Moslem artists, remain penetrated with vital mysticism, however much they may seem to eschew any direct contact with nature and with

life. This explains why such a mystical art continued to flourish very late in history, contemporaneously with a revival of figurative art, in all the countries where Islamic art also exerted an influence. From Spain, it spread to

the south of France and to northern Italy. Jewish mysticism, which had flourished so richly under Way SUAS +)

the influence of the Kabbala, was certainly affected later

by a revival of rationalism, the very spirit of which is generally hostile to all art. But the truly mystical vision of the Jews, as well as their artistic inspiration, continued to

seek expression, in spite of all the obstacles that might be put in its path. Drawing their force from the very depths of the human soul, even compounded of the same essence, art and mysticicismcontinued to experience similar and closely related emotions, expressed_ by the 1 mystics in_words, in ecstatic utterances, in devotional gestures, and_by the artists, whether poets,musicians or adepts of the plastic arts, in those forms that are peculiar to each art. Mysticism indeed managed to transcend all abstract form and to possess itself of those true expressions of experience and life that we find in some Islamic or Jewish manuscripts of the Middle Ages, so that these forms of expression have been carried over into far later ages. In the Jewish art of western Europe, this precious tradition became at the same time less rigorous and more deeply rooted. By the thirteenth century, figurative art had

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already begun to reappear. Thanks to the more numerous 54

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examples of this art that have survived, the many illuminated books, liturgical implements and other Jewish works, we are now able to follow, through all its meanderings, the course of this common inspiration of mysticism and art that no rigorous theological ban has been able to discourage or repress. From Spain, France, Germany and Italy, we have inherited admirable books, powerful testimony to the constant concern of the Jewish artist for the problems of beauty: Bibles, books of ritual (machzorim and siddurim), Haggadot, Megillot, theological works, copies of the Mishne Torah of Maimonides, talmudic treatises, copies of the Arba Turim of Jacob ben Asher, medical treatises, manuals of customs (Minhagim). Even after the invention of printing, manuscript books, especially books of prayers, Haggadot, the Tikkune Shabbat of Isaac Luria, books of benedictions or of fables or of local chronicles (Pinkas) all these continued to illustrate the great tradition of Jewish illuminated manuscripts from which the mysticism of the heart and of the senses had never completely banished figures. The spiritual and artistic life of the Jews was in no era strictly partitioned or segregated and Judaism thus maintained its contact

with the cultures of the nations in whose midst it survived. There only remained, in most cases, in the style of Jewish works of art, a certain time-lag, as the impact on Jewish life artistic currents was delayed. Thus one of the masterpicces of the gothic art of the Rhineland, the Mishne Torah of Maimonides illuminated in Cologne in 1296 by Simon ha-Levi, now preserved in the Kaufmann Library of the Budapest Academy of Sciences (A 77), continues to use romanesque forms, though gothic forms were already developed in the Rhineland. In the Paris Bibliothéque Nationale, there are numerous Bibles of French, German 55

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or Spanish origin which would

ART

prompt

one

to make

similar observations. The basic themes of this art remain, of course, the same, though with numerous variations in the order in which the attributes appear. The Messianic Temple _is always most prominent, but the symbolsthat we have.seen used

J with it in antiquity, the Julav and the etrog, no longer accompany

the menora.

The

Feast

of Tabernacles,

a

harvest festival, is no longer as important, and representations of it occupy less space in the modified semantics of

the Messianic faith. The symbols of this feast are indeed replaced by the jar of manna, brought back by Elijah the Prophet, as the food_ of the-righteous, together with the fruit of the Tree of Life, the flesh ofLeviathan and that of Shor Habbar, both of ‘than wonderworking beasts. The Messiah is to be anointed with Holy Oil, and the rod of Aaron is to be his sceptre, while Elijah Becomes the High

Priest Phineas and supplies the Messianic Temple with all its sacred requisites. Over and above the destruction of the Jewish State, the sufferings of the Jewish people at the time of the Crusades

so the persecutions

which

later culminated

in the

expulsion of the Jews from Spain, all contributed to encourage the Messianic expectations of Jewish mysticism. This great wave

of faith is reflected in Jewish _;art_too,

though not when it concerns itself with Kabbalistic speculation; Kabbalist asceticism remains fruitless in this respect, allowing only that which defies all visible expression to appear in symbols. The Zohar, written in the thirteenth century, thus allows little scope for art, but Hassidism, in its successive forms, managed to palliate the

rigorous and narrow intolerance of talmudic scholarship, allowing art to become more fruitful and less constrained. 56

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The sufferings of the Jews in mediaeval western Europe

inspired the Hassidism of German Jews in the thirteenth century; towards the end of the greatest period of PolishJewish history, the pogroms of the seventeenth century

similarly inspired, on the one hand, the rebirth of a Hassidic piety and, on the other, the emergence of the mysticism of the followers of Shabbetai Zevi which, in the eighteenth century, went as far as the nihilistic excesses of the followers of Jacob Frank. The deeply moving fluctuations of Jewish mysticism are

reflected in the illustrations of thirteenth “century Bibles, which do not follow a chronological order, as in the illustrated Haggadot and Megillot. The miniatures and ornaments that appear on the frontispieces of such manuscript Bibles or at the end of the Pentateuch reveal to us the nature of the thoughts or meditations of the artist or of the pious donor who had ordered the precious book. The ornaments that surround the first words of each book of the Bible are often sumptuous, and the microscopic writing and decoration of each massora is so rich in its inventiveness, so creatively exuberant, that it reveals the inspired talent of the scribes who copied so many of these manuscripts, such as the Paris Bibliothéque Nationale Bible (Hébreu 5), written in Western Germany (format:

approx. 15”x20”)

in 1298 by Solomon ha-Cohen, who

adorned it with fantastic animals of a truly oriental character and an infinite variety of floral or geometrical arabesques. Three great full-page illuminations illustrate this Bible too: on the face of folio 118, there is a superb menora and, on the preceding page, on the reverse of folio 117, the High Priest bearing in his right hand the lamp to light the menora and, in his left, a cauldron containing oil. The High Priest is represented

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in a kind of loggia, surmounted by small towers and supported by lions. Aaron or Phineas, with on each side of him a heraldic beast, one of which bears the sacrificial knife while the other one bears a rod, moves towards the menora. On the following page, a man wearing the pointed hat of the Jews of this period is seen plucking

olives from a Tree of Life with seven branches and extracting the oil from the olives in a press, from which the oil flows into a vessel similar to the one held by the High

Priest in his left hand. Another superb example of calligraphy is a manuscript, probably from the Rhineland, of the beginning of the fourteenth century, but clearly influenced by French art (Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Hébreu no. 48). The first word of Exodus is here inscribed in a square crest with a blue median band against which it stands out in gold, the _ band itself being placed against a vermilion background adorned with a dragon defending the Tree of Life, the latter shaped like a menora. In the upper part of this crest, two eagles face each other, as a version of the Cherubim guarding the Tree of Life.” A miniature that fills a full page of the Biblical commentaries of Rashi in the Munich Library (Cod. Hebr. 5), painted in Wiirzburg in 1233, represents a golden menora against a background that is green, red and blue. In the Mishne Torah of Maimonides copied in Germany

by Isaac ben Abraham (Kaufmann Library of the Budapest Academy of Sciences no. 78), the golden menora is

set between two heraldic lions. The Bible of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, written and illuminated in the thirteenth century in Southern Germany (Cod. Hebr. B. 30, 31. 32.), contains a page where Elijah the Prophet is depicted as he leads the Messiah King, the Righteous 58

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King, the Victorious King, humbly riding on an ass. In Jewish exegesis, this picture of humility is commonly interpreted as a symbol of the whole Jewish people.® The same idea is again found in the representation

of the Messiah in the Niirnberg Haggada (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, no. 7121), where the Messiah is to be seen before the gates of Jerusalem, mounted on an ass and preceded by Elijah, who blows the shofar and is followed by the Righteous. In the fourteenth century South-German Regensburg Bible, a series of illustrations tells the tales of Isaac, of Esther, of Job and of the revelation of the Law on Mount Sinai, and a whole page is devoted to a description of the implements of Jewish ritual, with Aaron facing them as he kindles the menora. The Messianic meaning of these illuminations is selfevident.4® Whether copied in Spain or in Southern France, most of the Bibles of this period follow the same train of thought in their illustrations, and the same general style. In 1299, Solomon ben Raphael in Perpignan in Southern France, completed his task of illustrating a Bible (Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Hebr. no. 7) in which two large miniatures, enhanced with gold and silver, summarize an inventory of the utensils of the Sanctuary. The menora and its accessories occupy the most important place and, beneath the menora, one recognizes also the jar of manna and the rod of Aaron flowering as a Tree of

Life, as opposed to the withered rod of the other tribes. In the remaining space of this full-page miniature, the Tablets of the Law are seen covered by the Ark of the Covenant, which is surmounted by the Cherubim, repre-

sented here with human faces. Nor is anything missing: the table for the shewbread, 99

the censer

and, on

the

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following pages, the shofar, the vessel of oil, etc. ... Drawings in red ink accompany the text, recalling the liturgy, the Haftarot, for Rosh Hashana for instance, which are announced by a man blowing the shofar (plate VIII).

The most remarkable of all these ornaments are those that one finds at the end of the Pentateuch and in the colophon. These are indeed planned to illustrate the sidrot and represent the Tree of Life in a manner that closely resembles the style of Islamic art, where the same tree is called Shujair, or the “‘little tree’’®® (plate IX).

The Bible which is in the Copenhagen Royal Library is dated 1301 (Bibl. Regia Hafnensis, Cod. Hebr. II) and is so much like the Perpignan Bible that we have good reason to believe that it is a product of the same scriptorium. Only the background of the miniatures is different, being blue and red here, whereas that of the Perpignan

miniatures in Paris is white. A Bible which is now in a private collection in America®! is also illuminated with the same miniatures. One of the masterpieces of Jewish book-art is to be found in the collection of D. 8. Sassoon, in London, it is

the famous Farchi Bible, named after the family that owned it for many years. An artist of Provengal origin, Elias ben Abraham Benveniste, both copied and illuminated it, beginning the task in 1366 and completing it in 1382. The undeniable artistic quality of the minia-

tures should ensure this artist a well-earned reputation as one of the great masters of his craft in the Middle Ages. Some of the miniatures represent, among other scenes, the labyrinth surrounding the city of Jericho, the tents of

Jacob and of his wives, the men who had been sent out to reconnoitre Canaan returning with their bunches of grapes; as always, the most important miniature is de-

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and to the utensils of Messianic

liturgy.

It is probably in Spain that Jewish book-art achieved its apogée, benefitting there from its contacts with Islamic art, which had developed such exquisite techniques and

traditions. The Paris Bibliothéque Nationale preserves one of the finest examples of this Jewish art, a fourteenth century Hebrew Bible (Hébr. no. 1314-15) in which the text

is adorned with arabesques of almost inexhaustible fantasy, its first page adorned with a fine menora in gold leaf that is framed, against a mountain background, by two Trees of Life and the jar of manna; on the following page, we find the rod of Aaron and the other elements of the Messianic Temple. In 1404, Hayyim ben Saul Vidal Sartori completed in Saragossa his task of illustrating the Bible now catalogued as Hébr. no. 31 in the Paris Bibliothéque Nationale. Here we find the same arrangement of the illuminated miniatures, and the same religious themes: the jar of manna has the shape of curve of a fine mudejar pottery vase and the flowering rod of Aaron appears as a Tree of Life. The three pages which show us the implements of Jewish ritual are then followed by a large miniature representing a tree set between two birds. As in the German Bible of the Paris Bibliothéque Nationale (Hébr. no. 38), the sebirds represent the Cherubim, and Hayyim ben Vidal Sartori had made their significance clear by quoting the prophecy of Zacharia concerning the day of the coming of the Lord into Jerusalem, when His feet shall touch the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives shall be cloven in its midst, from the east to the west. Towards the Mount of Olives, all those Righteous men who have died in exile shall then pass by

JA

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means of tunnels which the Lord shall prepare for them in order that they be able to come back to life there and share in the Messianic joy.*” The unity achieved by the pathos in all these miniatures is indeed due to the force of the Messianic hope focused on Jerusalem, with all the fervent repetitions associated with objects and ritual which we must repeat over and over again, just as they are repeated in one book after

another. Even more explicit, in their affirmation of faith, are the miniatures of the most lovely of all SpanishJewish books, the Kennicot I Bible in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, copied in Corunna, for Solomon de Braga, by Moses ibn Zabara and illuminated in 1476 by

Joseph ibn Hayyim. Very few works of art offer us such complete harmony, such restraint in their splendour, as they express, as if bathed in supernatural light, the artist’s complete devo-

tion to the sacred texts which he has illustrated. In the margins, four figures appear: Balaam with an astrolabe, Jonah with the great fish, King David, then Phineas wearing a.great crown. David, seated on a throne, holds in his right hand a sceptre that can only be Aaron’s rod, whereas Phineas is armed with a shield and a very long spear “sharpened with the zeal of God’’. In the choice of these

guides of Israel’s destiny, one can detect the Messianic passion of the Jews of Spain, who must have already foreseen the catastrophe they were destined to experience only

sixteen years later. The gothic art of France inspired two

masterpieces

of Jewish illumination, one now in the British Museum, the other in the Paris Bibliothéque Nationale. The one in London (British Museum add. 11639) was written in 1278, with forty-one miniatures illustrating the text. 62

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Here too, we can detect no chronological order in the topics chosen, which remain inspired by the same great themes as those of the decorations of the ancient synagogues. These burning themes are indeed to be found again in every age of Jewish history, like huge visions foreseeing and indefatigably prophesying the one permanent obsession, the Messianic hope which, in its very monotony,

gives us proof of its power, in that it embodies the obstinate faith of the masses. The emblems of this faith are repeated again and again: again the Akeda, again the angel holding back Abraham’s knife and pointing out to him, on the left, the ram caught in the thicket. In five of these miniatures, we again find the menora, and again twice the High Priest pouring the oil into the lamps, and twice again Aaron’s rod. In three other miniatures, Leviathan, Sor Habbar and Bar Yokni, then the Tree of Life guarded by four angels. In two miniatures, the signs of the zodiac, the sun, the moon and the stars. In others, young David killing Goliath, then again as a crowned king playing his harp; also, the crossing of the Red Sea, the main scenes of the Book of Esther, King Solomon reading the Torah, then again delivering judgment. In another, the High Priest, in his official robes, is seen wearing a crown of gold, but the great iron fountain-basin of the Temple, instead of resting on the backs of oxen, is shown to rest on the backs of lions, which indicates that the artist was no longer thinking of Solomon’s destroyed Temple but looking far ahead, into the future, to depict the Sanctuary of

Redemption. The admirable gothic Bible of the Paris Bibliothéque Nationale (Hébr. no. 36) was copied and probably also

illuminated by Joseph ben Benjamin Zeb of Pontarlier, who completed the task in 1300 in Poligny (format:

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approx. 192”x 144”). It is adorned with figurative massoras of unrivalled perfection, representing lions, wolves, cats,

birds, dragons and trees. The whole fantastic bestiary of gothic art has been ransacked

for this purpose

and

Jewish thought does not seem in that age to have minded including the human figure in such a world. The illuminated initials are conceived with delightful fantasy. At the end of the Pentateuch, on a full page,

a particularly

splendid miniature immediately

classes

this manuscript among the masterpieces of its kind. It represents the emblem of Jewish Messianic thought, a huge golden menora with, between its branches, a rich decoration of floral motifs, of fantastic animals and monsters, one of these half human and half lion and represented shooting an arrow at a gazelle, while elsewhere there are also dragons, greyhounds pursuing bulls,

gigantic rams, regal lions with wolves’ heads that bear crowns, facing a bird that has the head of a woman, likewise crowned. Are all these inventions intended to reveal

some symbolic idea? It would be difficult to answer such a question. Be that as it may, there is nothing abstract in

all this, no Kabbalistic geometry; true to the prevailing tastes of contemporary French art, all is fantasy and charm. Yet the Jewish artist never allows himself to be overcome by this charm that he loves; at all times, he masters it thoroughly, never forgetting his mission, which

inspires him, like a solemn recurring litany pronounced

7

each time with some variation in its colours or its forms. In one miniature, for instance, a High Priest is seen wearing a blue robe and a purple cloak, which may have been originally scarlet, in the upper right-hand corner of the

page, lighting the first lamp. His face is beardless and his golden hair is held in place by a head-dress that seems to

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be of gold, like a crown and at the same time like a halo

(plate X). Lower down, on the left-hand side, we see the Akeda, with Isaac lying on the altar, his hands and

feet bound. Abraham wears a red hat and a purple mantle as he raises his knife, and the angel that appears above the altar is likewise dressed in red, pointing out, with his right hand, the ram that is close to the altar, while his left hand

holds a scroll, the divine message. In a corner, one sees the servants too, holding the saddled ass by its bridle. On the right, the judgment of Solomon is depicted in great detail. The King is seen wearing a crown of gold, a yellow robe and a purple-violet mantle as he sits on his throne, beneath one of the arcades of his palace. In his left hand he holds the sceptre while, with his right, he points towards a petitioning figure, that of a woman kneeling at his feet. Further to the left, a woman is seen standing as she hands over a naked child to the executioner. The path of Jewish Messianic thought is thus revealed ever more clearly to our dazzled eyes. The menora of the Messianic Temple is seen kindled by the High Priest Elijah-Phineas, and is depicted here between nee nee that take place in the Sacred City: the Akeda and Solomon as King of Peace in Israel, “if he remains faithful to the practice of the Commandments and of the orders of the Lord.” For the Torah is the source of all wisdom, and the mystics of the Middle Ages believed that the “Primary

Torah” was the expression of the actual Wisdom of God. Solomon, according to their beliefs, had discovered, within this hard shell, the sweet and secret core of the Torah, and

had thus been able to say “I went down into the garden of nuts” (Song of Songs 6. 11). The theme of Solomon’s intimate relationship to the

Torah is everywhere depicted. In the miniature of the

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British Museum’s thirteenth century French Bible (Add. 11639), he is seen studying the Law; in the South-German machzor of the early fourteenth century in the Kaufmann

Library of the Budapest Academy of Sciences (No. 384), he is seen seated in glory, pointing with his finger towards the Torah (plate XI); in the Nurnberg Haggada I (Germanisches Nationalmuseum No. 7121), he is seen as the messenger of the Torah, the delegate of the Lord, the judge of the Universe, executing divine justice; in Constantinople, a Greek miniaturist of the tenth century, in a manuscript preserved in the Copenhagen Royal

Library (No. 6, 2), that contains Proverbs, the Book of Job and a few other texts, took pains to express the majesty of Solomon as he holds the

Sefer

Torah,

and

seems almost certainly to have been inspired here by Jewish originals. We can thus see that in the Middle Ages, on all sides, } Messianic hopes seemed to be confirmed, in Jewish / thought, and corroborated, in fact formulated ever more exactly and insistently, in terms of the Torah. To fulfil the Law was then believed to be the best and most certain way of preparing the coming of the Messianic Age, a reign which, according to Maimonides, would be that of wisdom and justice. The Torah is Solomon, and Solomon is the Torah. In the

\ Mishne Torah,>?

Maimonides predicts that the Messiah

| will be even wiser than Solomon and, through the fulfilA ment of his prophecy, the equal of Moses, teaching the \word of God to all, while all nations bow down before his

wisdom. All that which is but a dream shall then come true, and Israel shall again be sovereign in Palestine. At the dawn of the Messianic era, a miraculous triumph of the

Torah shall be seen, exactly as the prophets have predicted 66

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it, before the wars of Gog and Magog, in a unique era of peace among the nations, marked also, as many have

predicted, by the second coming of Elijah.®4 A surprising flexibility can be observed, indeed a strange co-existence of contradictory traditions, in Jewish books of the thirteenth century. In spite of the rigorous banning of figurative art that distinguishes all that is Jewish, in the age of Maimonides, the Torah and reason sought to govern the Messianic hope and keep it within reasonable bounds. Yet these illuminated books, so devout in every other respect, reveal to us numerous and striking examples of an innocent and deeply moving heresy: again and again, representations of human figures creep in

among the liturgical implements depicted; and thus we even find some portraits in their midst. “In order to open the eyes of the soul, one must close those of the body,” insisted Maimonides, echoing the

words of Plotinus. But many disciples of the Rambam fortunately failed to take this principle into account, and one of the most admirable masterpieces of thirteenth-century book-illuminating is a copy of the Master’s own Mishne Torah, now in the Kaufmann Library of the Budapest Academy of Sciences (plate VII). It was produced in Cologne, by Nathan ben Simon ha-Levi. A fourteenthcentury copy of the Hebrew translation of the Guzde to the Perplexed has moreover been adorned, whether in Spain

or in Italy, with admirably fine illuminations that include, at the beginning, two delightful portraits (Paris, Biblio-

théque Nationale, Hébr. no. 689); and the fine Hebrew Bible of the same library (Hébr. no. 7) is the work of an artist from Perpignan, in Southern France, a city which was, at that time, a great centre of Maimonidean thought. It is fascinating to follow the meanderings of Jewish

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thought and imagination. Constrained as they are by the most austere spiritual injunctions, they yet manage to escape into rich fields of purely visual art peopled with

all that lives and moves on earth. Beneath the terrible pressure of centuries, often inhumanly cruel, the Messianic hope becomes urgent and pressing in its anxiety to experience the actual coming of the Messiah. In such moments, the ascetic practice of frequently repeated ritual, the obsession that is born of strict discipline, the ecstasy engendered by song and prayer, all these communicate a kind of fever to Jewish art which, as a result of the proximity of Christian art, undergoes curious changes, abandoning for a while some of its own traditions to follow suddenly others that are alien. In modern times, however, the menora is no longer used as a pure symbol of Messianic perfection. It appears less frequently, since in mediaeval Christian iconography it also symbolized the perfection of the Virgin Mary.® Yet it does not disappear completely from the realm realm of Jewish art, though its purpose is limited more strictly to ritual, in compositions that are intended to provide an orientation for prayer. Generally, the menora thus appears in the beginning of psalters, as in the fine siddur that was copied and decorated in 1723 by Moshe Leib Trebitsch for the family of Samson Wertheimer, now one of the treasures of the Budapest Jewish Museum, in the British Museum Viennese machzor of 1720 (Add. 17.867), or in the little Mizrach by Marcus Donath, engraved on a copper plate around 1830. Popular Jewish art thus also began to surround the menora with countless playful fantasies that are expressions both of religious

fervour and of innocent inventiveness (plate XII). In spite of this attenuation in the intensity of the 68

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menora as a symbol, the text that accompanies such representations of it generally remains that of Psalm 67: “O God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us; Selah. That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations.

Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee. O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth. Selah.” This is indeed an expression of Messianic frenzy, the text that is sung on Saturday evening, before the ceremony of the Havdala when, in the interval between the end of the Sabbath and the new weck, Judaism expresses its eternal hope. The curiously unconscious fumblings and lapses of this faith are constantly compensated for by wonderful moments of piety, and all this has left its mark, in a strangely original manner, on some of the spice-boxes that are used for this ceremony at the conclusion of the Sabbath. These are indeed but minor ornaments, however exquisite and however much they may be treasured in a Jewish home. Yet one of their traditional forms is that of a turret, the Tower of David. But why this tower, this perfumed turret, the shape of which has remained constant ever since the Middle Ages? We must turn to Christian religious art of

the thirteenth century for an explanation. The great chandelier of the cathedral of Aachen, in Germany, was given, the shape of a walled city defended by towers.

What is the name of this luminous city? An inscription on the chandelier tells us that it is Jerusalem, the Heavenly City.5” The songs that are chanted before the Havdala ceremony and after it are dedicated to Elijah, the herald who announces the coming of the Messiah by blowing the

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shofar. According to the talmudic interpretation, Elijah must not appear on the eve of a Sabbath or of a Yom Tov

and that is why it is hoped that he will appear on a Saturday evening. The expectation of the prophet’s second coming is so intense that, as one returns home that day, one begins while still in the street, to invoke Elijah with these songs, and this is what one actually sees represented, so movingly, in an eighteenth century spice box, the work of a silversmith of Frankfurt-am-Main, now in the L. Loeb Collection in Paris. At the top of the round turret, a little figure of Elijah is seen blowing the shofar; he wears the costume of a German Jew of the eighteenth century, and in each age Elijah’s costume indeed changed, according to the customs of the Jews of the artist’s own community. Though Elijah remains one of the most hieratic figures in the Bible, his attitudes also change, as he is represented again and again through the ages. In a thirteenth century book of ritual containing the Pesach Haggada (Paris, Bibliothéque nationale, Hébr. no. 640), he is represented as a royal herald. In a fifteenth century Haggada (Munich,

Staatsbibliothek, Cod. 200), he walks very simply ahead of the Messiah, who is represented riding an ass while Elijah blows the shofar. In the eighteenth century wallpaintings of some of Poland’s timber-built synagogues, Elijah has the appearance of a messenger of the Imperial Russian postal administration.*® At the Seder, on Pesach, the Haggada is read aloud. In the books that contain these texts, the miniatures made a special effort to depict, with a great wealth of detail and

imagination, the liberation of the Jews from their slavery in Egypt, which was the first stage of the Messianic liberation and of the re-establishment of the Temple in Jerusalem. 7O

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Elijah the prophet is always present: the most precious cup is set aside for him, the door of the house is opened when the service reaches its climax with the singing of the psalms and the recital of its special litanies, and the participants then pray that the Temple be soon rebuilt, ‘‘in our own days”. The miniatures in Haggadot of the thirteenth and

fourteenth centuries describe all these episodes of liturgy and illustrate them with scenes derived from the book of Exodus. In the most famous of these manuscripts, such as the fourteenth century Spanish Haggada of the Sarajevo Library, the fourteenth century one of the Kaufmann Library in the Budapest Academy of Sciences or the thirteenth century French Haggada of the British Museum (Add. 27210), some of the more important scenes of the book of Genesis are also included. In the Sarajevo Haggada, for instance, a whole page is devoted to a description of the Messianic Temple; in the middle, the Ark, in the form of a tabernacle or cupboard, is surmounted with two wings and, bears the Ten Commandments on its two doors. But the most richly illuminated page of all these Haggadot is always devoted to the appearance of Elijah. The printed Haggadot of a later age continued to follow the order and hierarchy of these various illustrations, allowing however for some freedom whereby the artist could express his own personality. In the Haggada that Gershon ha-Cohen printed in Prague in about 1515, Elijah, riding on an ass, is represented with the pitiful features of a poor Jew, whereas we recognize him again, in the Haggada printed in Mantua, in Italy, in 1560, by the press of Giacomo Rufinelli, blowing the shofar and leading by the bridle the ass that bears the Messiah, in front of a house that awaits them with its open pi

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door. In the Haggada printed in 1629 in the Bragadin Press in Venice, then in many other Haggadot printed in Venice and Leghorn, Elijah is seen blowing the shofar as

he precedes the triumphant Messiah; the gates of Jerusalem are opened as they approach and the remnants of Israel converge towards them from all four corners of the

world. In the middle of the walled city, the sanctuary can be recognized in the form of the Dome of the Rock. The

famous

Amsterdam

Haggada,

printed

in

1695

by Moses Wesel with copper-plate engravings by Abraham bar Jacob, offers us, instead of a view of the Holy City, a representation of the reconstructed Temple, according to the conceptions of Jacob Jehuda Leon, known as @ Templo because, in 1642, he had designed in Amsterdam a Messianic version of the Temple that was much discussed

in his age, that of the pseudo-Messiah Shabbetai Zevi. It is known that Spinoza owned a copy of this model of the Temple, with the accompanying text in Hebrew.

In the same

period, the Megilla,

likewise lavishly

illustrated, is classed among the messages that predict the coming of the Messiah. In the Megilla, decorated with

copper-plate engravings, of which one copy is now preserved

another

in the Vatican

Library

in the Kaufmann

(Vat.

Library

Ebr.

533)

and

of the Budapest

Academy of Sciences (No. A 15), the last engraving, borrowed from the Venice Haggada, represents the Messiah before the gates of Jerusalem. Everywhere, the imagination of Jewish artists thus seems to be intent on the

Messiah. The appearance

of the Dome of the Rock

is

generally adopted for representations of the Temple, as a signet for seals, with the Hebrew motto Bet haMikdash;

the Giustiniani family of Venice popularized this emblem, 72

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which served as a prototype for more than a hundred years. Everywhere, it was reproduced in Haggadot, in Minhagim, even in Ketubot,®® (marriage contracts); the wedding-day, being a day of rejoicing, inevitably suggested thoughts of Jerusalem and of Redemption.

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Jewish art can thus be seen to have followed a difficult

path in its passionate seeking after Redemption, though it often progressed on its own, towards the same goal as the religious

practices

and

meditations

of more

strictly

orthodox thinkers. It indeed expressed the obstinate and lofty ideal of the Jewish belief in the coming of the Messiah, obsessed for centuries with the images that are emblems of this prophecy. By following the evolution of these emblems and the history of their appearance in works of art, we have tried to elucidate what the latter all mean, though our accumulation of evidence may, at times, have seemed merely pedantic. We have also seen how the Messianic hope could never be abated, and how untiringly Jewish art sought to stress its intimate connection with faith in the Torah. In Dura

Europos, in Beth Alpha too, the Messianic Temple and the menora are represented as inevitably accompanying the Ark. In the Sarajevo Haggada again, the tabernacle

is placed in the centre of the Temple. To conclude this study, we would now like to discuss a few more manifestations of Jewish art that are centred on the Torah, that loftiest of all guides to salvation. The Jews were at all times famous for their fine weaving and the textiles that they produced were highly thought of.

We know that Maimonides refused, as he prayed, to let his thoughts be distracted by the sight of the figurative embroideries that curtained the synagogue. Though 74

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none of the embroidered synagogue-curtains of his age have survived, we still have a fourteenth century Spanish carpet®® where the Temple is represented in the likeness of an Aron haKodesh, and the rich collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague include hundreds of

embroideries of a later date that were intended to be used as adornments for the Ark. The Rabbinate forbade the embroiderers of these curtains to sign their work, so that the names of most of the artists remain unknown. It is too often forgotten, however, that for many centuries, embroidery remained a typically Jewish craft; among other craftsmen whose names have come down to us, the earliest seems to have been Solomon Goldsticker, whose masterpiece, dated 1590, can be admired in the Jewish Museum in Prague. Simcha, the wife of Menahem Levi Meshulami, embroidered in Italy, in 1681, the fine curtain that is now in the New York Jewish Museum. In the eighteenth century, Elkon Naumburg and Joseph Koppel Gans were both famous master-embroiderers, though most of their work is now

lost or destroyed. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Charles Griinwald signed a fine parochet in Budapest.*! In the New York Jewish Museum, one can still admire the brilliance and freshness of a parochet that Jacob Koppel Gans embroidered. A huge menora adorns the parochett and thus dominates the whole synagogue.

On the drapery (kaporet) that surmounts the Ark, Gans embroidered a menora surrounded by all the elements of the Temple. Two gryphons on the parochet and two

birds on the drapery represent the Cherubim.

In this

connection, one should not overlook the Obuda parochet

of 1747 that is now in the Budapest Jewish Museum, nor the draperies of the Altneuschul in Prague. In the Prague 75

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High Synagogue, which was built in 1568 by the Jewish architect Meisl, the Aron haKodesh is moreover surmounted

by a wood-carving that imitates a drapery, but the symbolism of wings remains a dominant theme, announcing

the Ark of the Covenant by means of the Ark (plate XIII). But what place was reserved for Moses in the works of all these Jewish artists who set out to interpret the Torah that had been revealed to him? In the Dura Europos synagogue, his place is one of importance. One of a pair

of paintings represented Moses before the burning bush, while only the lower part of the other has survived, in which we can see that his robes are adorned with Tzitzit,

that he is bare-footed, and that his sandals are placed in front of him. Probably, he was here represented holding

the Tablets of the Law.® In any case, we find here a reference to Deut. 5. 2: “The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb”, In Byzantine miniatures of the ninth and tenth centuries, Moses is likewise

represented ascending Mount Sinai bare-footed (Homilies of Saint Gregory of Nazianza, Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Grec no. 510, written around 880; Bible of Queen Christina in the Vatican, Pal. Gr. I.; Psalter of the

tenth century, Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Grec no. 139). The first of these miniatures represents Moses at the top of Mount Sinai, while one can observe at its foot, through an opening, a group of Israelites in the depths of a cavern, an allusion to the Midrash where God buries

the Jews beneath a rock because they were unwilling to assume the burden of the Law.® A Jewish archetype of this scene representing the giving of the Torah has also come down to us, and a replica of it can be found

in the copy of the Mishne Torah of Maimonides that was made in Cologne in 1296 by Nathan ben Simeon, in 76

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which the Jews are seen imprisoned in the rock. In the machzor of 1450 that was made in Ulm by the Sofer Abraham (Kaufmann Library of the Budapest Academy of Sciences, no. 363), Moses is likewise seen bare-footed

as he receives the Torah. Jewish art has frequently offered commentaries

on

another aspect of the revelation of the Torah on Mount Sinai, on the bounds that Moses set round about the

mount (Ex. 19. 12). Rabbinical doctrine insists very much on these bounds, protecting the approach to the Torah and its application, and this theme supplies the subject of a miniature in the fifteenth century machzor of the Palatine Library in Parma (De Rossi 2895)** and of numerous engravings illustrating Bibles, Haggadot or Minhagim; besides, it is also illustrated in the embroideries of the parochet, among which one of the most interesting, in this respect, is that of the eighteenth century synagogue

of Metz, in France® (plate XIV). No materials and no objects were neglected in this task of perpetuating in art the Messianic idea. The scrolls of the Law were also used for this purpose. The wooden cylinders on which the strips of parchment are rolled are commonly known as Fiz Hayyim, tree of life, and the liturgical verse that must be pronounced as one takes hold of these supports clearly indicates their mystical meaning: “The ever-lasting happiness of those who follow the precepts of the Law’. These cylinders are moreover decor-

ated, for the purposes of the service, with the usual synagogal appurtenances

that are known

as rimonim, which

means ‘pomegranates’, fruits of the Tree of Life. Originally, these rimonim indeed had the shape of pomegranates, like those that one sees in a miniature of

the Vatican machzor (no. 324) of 1399 which is a work JA i G

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of Nehemiah ben Samuel, or in the machzor of 1450 that is in the Kaufmann Library of the Budapest Academy of Sciences. In the Orient, the rimonim, have, moreover retained this traditional form, as can be seen from those of Palestinian origin that are preserved at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.6* It was indeed only in the thirteenth century that one began to prefer the shape of turrets, the symbolical meaning of which, as we have

already explained, is remembered even today by Sephardi Jews. The oldest known turret-shaped rimonim are those that are now preserved in the cathedral of Palma, on the island of Majorca. What traditions were maintained, in paintings decorating synagogues, in the centuries that followed the age of Dura Europos? For many centuries, we find no trace of

any synagogue

paintings that have survived; only in

writings do we find some reference to the existence of paintings decorating synagogues of the Middle Ages or of more modern times, though one should not neglect, in this respect, the paintings that decorated the wooden synagogues of Poland and Russia. The joyful and poetic fantasy of this art seems to derive its mystical and creative force from the philosophy of Hassidism, which was a source of collective rejoicing in ceremonies which seemed to contradict all those merely intellectual speculations that tend to pervert the Torah and transform it into a rational-

istic exercise. The Hassidic soul, with its conception of the duties that prepare for salvation and its ways of accomplishing these duties without any ritualistic rigours, seems to have inspired, for instance, the delightful paintings with which that great artist Hayyim ben Isaac Eisik Segal adorned the synagogue of Mohilev, and the Tree of Life that he has depicted, guarded by a dragon, seems to be 78

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watching over the city of Worms which, ever since the days of the Rashi, has been remembered as a great centre

for the study of the Torah. On the walls of other such synagogues, the Eternal Zion of salvation is also represented, and one is tempted to believe that there exists a direct connexion between these masterpieces of Eastern European Jewish popular art and the more modern compositions of Marc Chagall, whose brilliant colours would thus be a pure expression of Messianic optimism. We have already explained that one of the horns of the

ram sacrificed in Isaac’s stead is said to have been blown on Mount Sinai, and that the other horn is destined to announce that the Messiah-King is about to pass judgment on the world. The fourteenth century German machzor in the Library of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, adorned with sheer marvels of gothic fantasy, and the small Italian machzor from Pesaro, dated 1481, in the Kaufmann Library of the Budapest

Academy

of Sciences

(no. A

1380/II),

a splendid

example of the joyful beauty of the Italian Renaissance, both leave to those who blow the shofar the task of exalting the Name of God, King of the World (Malchiot), of glorifying the Supreme Judge (Kichronot) and of exultantly watching for the Coming of the Messiah (Shofarot). One of these two books is a masterpiece of the art of a land that is bathed in sunshine, the other was produced in the narrow streets of Jewry of some Rhineland city. The

earlier one is in the gothic style, the other in that of the Italian Renaissance. Yet the thought that animates both of them remains the same, and this reveals how constant Jewish semantics can be and how Jewish art uses these

semantics as a means of suggesting the emotional cohesion which binds together the many communities of a people 79

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dispersed among other peoples. The diversity of the cultures of these other peoples affects the style of Jewish works conceived in their midst. The physical appearance of the spirit that animates

artistic creation

may

thus

change, presenting many variations in the course of the centuries; but through these styles that are typical in turn of each land and each age, something constant can be detected, a specifically Jewish element that is represented

by the beliefin salvation promised to the seed of Abraham, salvation through the Torah, through Justice for all peoples, to be brought to us by the Messiah, whose name

shall be Peace, a peace to be dispensed to the world from Jerusalem. In this contrast and, at the same time, this constancy,

we can discover how deeply moving and how widespread can be a faith and a philosophy that nothing could daunt. Dispersed among other nations, the Jewish people has experienced in turn every kind of fate, so that it might well, at times, have seemed unrecognizable even to itself. Its art has followed it through these many metamorphoses, loving it, sustaining it, understanding it, and making it understand itself as it experienced its dreadful vicissitudes, sometimes descending into depths of horror and degradation from which it was expected never to recover. Jewish art

has never betrayed the Jewish people, never allowed one to misunderstand its will and its mission. The seed of Abraham indeed progresses towards salvation through

Law and Righteousness. Only from Jerusalem, can the Peace of the world be dispensed to the whole world.

While Christianity never liberates itself from the dreadful image of an execution and Buddhism dazzles itself with

the visionary serenity of its meditations,

the soul of

Judaism remains indefatigably intent on hope.

80

NOTES 1 Henri Focillon: “Lettre 4 Josef Srzygowski. Civilizations.” in Correspondance vol, 4, Paris, 1935, p. 131. ? Heinrich Miiller and Julius von Schlosser: “Die Haggadah von Serajevo,”’ Vienna, 1898, David Kaufmann: Zur Geschichte der Fiidischen Handschriften. 8 David Ginzburg and W. V. Stassoff: L’ornement hébreu, Berlin, 1905. “ Bernard Berenson: Esthétique et histoire des arts visuels, Paris, 1953, p. 190 of the French translation. 5H. Bergson: L’evolution créatrice, Paris, 1921, p. 178. 6 Hermann Cohen: Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Fudentums, (1919), pp. 43, 62 and 494. 7 Bergson: op. cit., p. 178. ® Comte du Mesnil du Bussion: Les peintures de la synagogue de Doura Europos, (1939), pp. 94 ff. ~® M. Rostovtzeff: Dura Europos and its Arts, Oxford, 1938, p. 125. 10 M. van Berchem and E. Clouzot: Mosaiques Chretiennes du IVe, au Xe siécle (1924), pp. 11 to 18, figures 14 to 58.

~*11 Rostovtzeff, op. cit. p. 85. 12 De Gigantibus, See: J.-B. Frey, La question des images chez les Fuifs a la lumiére des récentes découvertes, in Biblia XV, 1934, p. 265.

18 W, F. Albright: The Archaeology of Palestine, 949, p. 172. 44R, Wischnitzer: Jewish Art in Jewish People, Past and Present, vol. 3, p. 279. 15 Comte du Mennil du Buisson, of. cit., pp. 11-12. 16 Jhid., p. 23. ~ 17 See: A. Reifenberg: Ancient Hebrew Art, New York, 1950, p. 114. 18 See: F. Cumont: Un fragment de sarcophage judéo-chrétien, in Revue Archéologique, 5th Series, Vol. III, 1916, p. 10. 19 See: E. R. Goodenough: Symbolism in Hellenistic Jewish Art, in Journal ~ of Bibliological Literature LVI, p. 107, and The Crown of Victory in Judaism, in The Art Bulletin, Vol. XXVIII (1946), p. 140. 20 Rostovzeff: op. cit., p. 106. 41 [bid., p. 36. 22 F, R. Goodenough: By Light-Light (1935), p. 6. 28 See: B. Szabolcsi: Zsido zenei nyelvemlek: a legrégibb kottazott bibliadallam, in: Libanon VI (1927), pp. 67 ff. ~

81

NOTES 241, Kaufmann: Sens et origine des symboles tumulaires de ?Ancien Testament dans V’art chrétien primitif, in: Revue des Etudes Fuives, XIV (1887), pp. 33-48 and 217-253. 25M. Chabouillet: Catalogue général et raisonné des camées et pierres gravées de la Bibliotheque Impériale (1858), p. 191, no. 1.330. 26 Carl Wendel: Der Thoraschrein in Altertum (1950), passim. 87 St. Ambrose: De Abraham, I, c. VIII. 28 A, M. Smith: The Iconography of the Sacrifice of Isaac in Early Christian Art, in American Journal of Archaeology XXVI (1922), pp. 159 ff. 29 J. Leveen: The Hebrew Bible in Art (1944), p. 59. y 8° F, Landsberger: The Origin of the Winged Angel in Jewish Art, in Hebrew College Annual XX (1947), pp. 227 ff. Also, E. R. Goodenough: The Crown of Victory in Judaism, in The Art Bulletin XXVIII (1946), p. 143. 31 Pirké de Rabbi Eliezer, ch. XXXI. See: D. Kaufmann, of. cit.

32 J. Klausner: Die Messianistische Vorstellung des Fiidischen Keitalter der Tannaiten (1903), pp. 17 ff. — *8 W, Bacher: Die Aggada der Tannaiten, I. p. 94. 34 J. Klausner, op. cit. p. 61.

Volkes im