“Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any idol, nor any image of that which is in heaven above or on the earth beneath. Thou shalt not bow down before them, thou shalt not worship them…”. This Second Commandment has caused a great deal of ink to flow. Among the numerous interpretations it has given rise to, the most minimalist suggest that the prohibition would bear exclusively on the practice of idolatry, while others affirm that it extends to all forms of representation. Be that as it may, and despite this initial indeterminacy, the idea took hold of a “prohibition of images” admitting neither exemption nor transgression.
That said, no one is unaware that on the one hand there is the rule, the law, the norm, and on the other life, the movement of history, actual practices. It follows that, put to the test of facts, well or badly understood, this Second Commandment has been transgressed time and again. This self-evident observation gives the lie, without appeal, to the idea that, because they would be the people of the Book, the Jews would also and necessarily be a people without images. Must these repeated “transgressions” be entered into the file, as a charge, of unfaithfulness?
“The unfaithfulness of the Jews”! This expression resounds like an old refrain, as old as Judaism, never out of fashion, always topical. Already mentioned in the Scriptures, the unfaithfulness of the Jews is there denounced by God and the prophets before being confessed by the Jews themselves in their practices of devotion, of repentance, of mortification. This reputation for unfaithfulness has earned them many misfortunes and torments, the enemies of the Jews having quickly seized upon this theme of unfaithfulness to make of it a weapon to their own advantage. But that is not the object of this meditation on faithfulness and unfaithfulness.
Let us return, then, to images. The number and diversity of Jewish objects, ritual or in everyday use, bearing images, attest that from Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages the Jews did not hold to a pure and rigid aniconism (refusal of images): engraved steles, embroidered fabrics, painted or chased cups, Bibles, haggadoth and other decorated, illustrated, illuminated, micrographed makhzorim and siddurim offer up a quantity of images. And so the question is worth asking: did the artisans behind the mosaics, pieces of goldsmithing, frescoes, and manuscripts in which creatures with human faces stand alongside traditional motifs — representations of the Temple, floral and animal motifs — have serious reason to dread, on account of their activity, the wrath of their god or the thunderbolts of their leaders? Was there grounds to suspect them of unfaithfulness, on the same footing as their Hebrew ancestors guilty of having fashioned an idol in the shape of a calf from the gold extorted from their people? And if they were, to whom and to what were they unfaithful? To their god or to their leaders? To the Second Commandment recorded in the sacred text or to its interpretations? To the faith of their fathers? To the tradition of their masters? In the exercise of their art, did these engravers, goldsmiths, painters, embroiderers, illuminators, scribes place themselves outside the law by transgressing one of its most essential commandments? Did they cross a line? Did they play with the prohibition, at the risk of excluding themselves from their community? In fashioning these objects with their hands, were they brushed by the feeling that they were committing a sacrilege and turning their Jewish recipients off the straight path? Finally, and to put it another way, must we consider them distant emulators of Abraham’s father, the idol-maker?
Many arguments plead in favor of the contrary thesis, which prefers to see in them faithful servants of the divine message, men devoted to their people and to their communities, indeed mere executants under the orders of their Jewish commissioners, clerics, or pious notables. For what else were they doing than continuing to keep alive, by other means — in this case the image and the gaze — a tradition that privileged speech and writing? Do the images they invented not say the same things, do they not tell the same stories as the texts, midrashim, legends, traditions, learned and popular, from which they drew their inspiration? The mosaics of the synagogues of Hammath and Bet Alpha, the frescoes of Dura-Europos, the haggadoth of Barcelona and Provence are part of the Jewish patrimony on the same footing as the Talmud or the Western Wall. Figurative or not, these pieces draw on one and the same fund, that of the Jewish tradition. A tradition that, to be sure, has greatly evolved in its forms and its contents since Antiquity and that is not quite identical to itself from one epoch or one place to another. And so nothing permits us to doubt that the artisans to whom we owe them were moved by one and the same intention, one and the same will: to give the text and the word to be seen, to embellish and animate this text and this word by endowing them with forms, faces, colors.
Another argument, capital and exculpatory, aiming to acquit them: the suspicion of unfaithfulness would be all the less founded in that Jewish artists and artisans do not find themselves confronted with the theological question of the representation of the divine. When it means to be figurative, their art belongs more modestly to what it is customary to call a narrative art, which confines itself to representing mythical, legendary, or historical personages, to illustrating episodes of the Bible, to taking up descriptions of the Temple, to making use of symbols, to putting into images moments of Jewish life, such as the cycle of festivals or rites of passage. Unlike his pagan or Christian counterparts, the Jewish artisan or artist is not supposed to be either the inspired instrument of the divine or the faithful interpreter of dogma. Unlike the statues of Zeus, Aphrodite, or Athena that are the object of a public cult, unlike the Byzantine icons that are the object of a fervent devotion and adoration, the images he offers are foreign to any religious stake, of whatever nature, liturgical, dogmatic, or theological.
This remark entails another, on the margin of the question of faithfulness or unfaithfulness to the Second Commandment, for these figurative works call into question not only the Jews who invent images, but Judaism as a whole — men, women, dogma, and institutions included — and its capacity to integrate and to make its own what comes to it from outside. Indeed, the most surprising thing in these productions of images is doubtless less, or as much as, the audacity of their authors in their art of ignoring or circumventing the prohibition, than the visible imprint of the cultures in which these creators found themselves immersed. By steeping themselves in these cultures — those of their countries of residence or those they happened to brush up against in the course of their peregrinations — by rubbing shoulders with local practices, by traveling, by observing what was done around them, by frequenting the workshops of pagan, Christian, or Muslim artisans from whom they went to learn, Jewish artisans acquired know-how, techniques, styles. Thanks to these close and repeated contacts they were able to refine their aesthetic sensibility while at the same time broadening their vision of the world and the field of their inspiration. It is notorious indeed that, in all times, the Jews have borrowed from their host countries their ways of expressing themselves, of dressing, of feeding themselves, of believing, of praying, of practicing song, music, and the arts. For all that, the Jews did not passively absorb these external contributions. Too anxious to protect themselves from exogenous influences and their dissolving effects, not only did they hasten to “Judaize” these elements come from elsewhere that they intended to appropriate, but they always operated a meticulous sorting between what was admissible with regard to their principles and their values, and what was not.
The borrowing from the nations, the imitation of their art of living and their practices, the ardent desire to be and to do like the gentiles, including with respect to the cult of idols, is a constant in Jewish history, even before the experience of the diaspora or the Greek and Roman occupations of Palestine. This fascination-attraction with the surrounding world is already present in the Bible, as this account from the book of Samuel attests, in which the Hebrews implore the prophet to give them a king so as to be “like the other peoples” (I Samuel ch. VIII). Condemned in its principle but irrepressible, this fascination had to be managed by submitting its concrete effects to a strict regulation. In this regard, dietary practices doubtless furnish the most significant example of the equilibrium that the Jews permanently sought to maintain between the contrary pressures exerted upon them: the appeal of otherness and of all that is not oneself on the one hand, the concern to remain within the limits of the law on the other; the acculturation of Jewish gastronomy on the one hand, the scrupulous respect for kashrut on the other.
Must this curiosity turned toward the outside and the adoption of the ways of being and doing of the gentiles be entered into the file, as a charge, of unfaithfulness? The question remains open. It continues to feed the controversy between the proponents of a timeless, ideal, and pure Judaism, supposedly exempt from any alteration tied to the contingencies of place and epoch liable to tarnish its original — and therefore “authentic” — character, and the pragmatists, anxious to perpetuate and transmit a living Judaism, in touch with its time, who understand the ineluctable character — and some of whom rejoice in it — of the fecund intrusion of culture and history into tradition.
From the prohibition of the image to the uses of images
Precisely, it is indeed of history that there is question, a history made of continuity but also of ruptures, and it is these latter that will hold our attention now. With modernity, the question of the faithfulness and unfaithfulness of the Jews is no longer measured — if indeed it ever was — by the yardstick of their relation to the prohibition of the image. Henceforth the pertinent question is not the prohibition of the image, but what, by means of the image and the visual arts, the Jews intend to say and show of themselves and of their relation to the world. For it is indeed this double relation to oneself and to the world that finds itself called into question in the whirlwind of change brought by modernity. Indeed, from the moment that majority societies open up to the Jews and that, from that moment on, the latter never cease to enter into them and to find their place there, the question of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, reversible to infinity, is posed in renewed terms: how to remain oneself, that is, Jewish, while immersing oneself in the Other / how to identify with this Other while remaining oneself? How to become this Other without being caught up by the self? How to make the Other forget — or, on the contrary, not allow him to forget — that one is oneself? Without losing sight of the fact that, with the secularization of the Jews and of society, the border between inside and outside, between us and them, tends to blur.
From the second half of the nineteenth century, the artistic field where creators, intermediaries, and amateurs1 rub shoulders presents itself as a privileged site for observing the encounter between the Jews and the societies into which the latter begin to enter and integrate and between which they circulate. The faithfulness / unfaithfulness dialectic expresses fairly well the new identity stakes that are knotted there and the recompositions that accompany them, these recompositions finding matter to incarnate themselves in the visual arts and finding their place of social expression in creative milieus. At once a vector and an expression of these stakes, art presents itself indeed alternately and simultaneously as a privileged channel of insertion into global cultures and as a language of identity affirmation for the Jews. Hence the ambiguity and the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of tracing a line of demarcation signaling where faithfulness ends, where unfaithfulness begins. A few examples.
Before the second half of the nineteenth century, the Jews are little present in art circles. One must wait for the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for the young Jewish bourgeoisie, then in full phase of social ascent, to begin to take an interest in art, to frequent salons and museums, to travel for pleasure, to acquire works, and for a Jewish patronage to develop. This holds true in France, in Germany, but also in Vienna, in Budapest, and, up to a point, in Russia, then in full revolutionary effervescence.
In France, the first Jewish painters admitted to the Academy begin to present their works in the official Salons from the Second Empire onward. Together with public recognition, they obtain there their first medals. A few names: Édouard Moyse, Édouard Brandon, Émile Lévy, Benjamin Ulmann, Jules Worms, Rosa Bonheur. For all that, the Jewish artists who take their first steps as artists in this period do not all pass through the Academy, even if most of them align themselves with the dominant styles and aesthetic currents. Such is the case of the German painter Moritz Oppenheim (1800–1882), generally considered the first modern Jewish artist, or of the Pole Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879) and of most of those who make a name for themselves in this period. Although they belong to distinct disciplines and to different currents, two celebrities depart from this rule: Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), one of the fathers of Impressionism, whose official biographies and whose work yield not the slightest indication of his Jewish origins, and Mark Antokolski (1843–1902), the first Jewish sculptor of international renown, who undergoes a training at the Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Petersburg from which he emerges with a medal, but who refuses academicism and whose very personal subjective style already announces expressionism and bears witness to a great sensibility at once plastic and social. Unlike the former, his Jewishness makes no mystery and impregnates a part of his work, in paradoxical fashion, notably and among other things through his figures of Jesus and of Spinoza.
In this pivotal period, the Jews who commit themselves to artistic creation are few in number, and their sociological profile as Jewish artists is atypical: they belong to a generation in which the commitment to art is, in itself, significant of the changes occurring within the Jewish world, whatever may otherwise be the aesthetic orientations and the meaning or ideological content they intend to give their work. They are already no longer marginals insofar as they are recognized by critics, amateurs, and their peers, and no longer need to belong to a Jewish corporation or guild as was the case for the Jewish artisans of the Middle Ages. Nor are they marginals any longer insofar as their passage marks a stage that advances history: Jewish history, the history of Western culture, and the history of art. They are not yet, however, artists quite like the others, on account of the social markers that characterize them. If, as artists, they can be considered pioneers in rupture with traditional social and cultural practices and who open new paths for the Jews, not all of them can, however, be assimilated to the avant-garde, whether on account of their conservatism in matters of art and aesthetics or of their social aspirations which, far from indicating any will to rupture, manifest on the contrary a profound desire to enter society as it is and to be welcomed, accepted, recognized there.
The artists of this period are interesting, doubtless less for the quality of their work than for what they teach us about themselves and about the state of mind of the Jews of their milieu and their epoch. These works, indeed, often express the ambivalence, the uncertainty, the identity discomfort characteristic of this first generation; a generation of transition that already no longer belongs to the world of the shtetl or the ghetto but that does not yet feel either quite at home or quite at ease in global society, that finds itself torn before choices to which each responds in his own manner while feeling obliged to justify himself. With Maurycy Gottlieb, for example, who likes to place himself personally in situation in his paintings with Jewish or orientalizing themes, we are still far from the offhandedness of a Larry Rivers who, a century later, half-grave, half-ironic, will take a mischievous pleasure in playing with his Jewish origins, with the symbols and figures of Jewish history as with his Jewish predecessors in painting — Gottlieb notably — and who will have no scruple in transforming his uncle Aaron, in an irreverent pastiche of Rembrandt, into a pitiful comic-book Moses.
Numerous are the artists who set themselves at that time to render, through painting or drawing, the climate of effervescence proper to this period of rapid urbanization and modernization. While authors like Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin write admirable pages on the city, its lights, its arcades, its animation, the likes of Monet, Caillebotte, Grosz paint the railway stations, the street, life, the urban agitation, well before Delaunay, Picasso, and still others take up in their turn the theme of the city in every mode. In Berlin, one of the principal centers of art and culture of this period, Jewish painters obviously seize upon this theme, proof if proof were needed that they are in touch with the reality of their time and its metamorphoses. From Max Liebermann (Berlin, 1847–1945), who will play a major role in the Secession movement, to Lesser Ury (Prussia, 1861–1931), by way of Jakob Steinhardt (Poland, 1887–1968), all are fascinated by the urban phenomenon. On this theme, the one who produces the most striking work is unquestionably Ludwig Meidner (Silesia, 1884–1966). He is the Berlin painter of the city who goes the furthest in the expression of the violence that accompanies the process of urbanization. While most artists show a living, even turbulent and cruel, city but one always on a human scale, Meidner presents the city as the setting of a tragedy that crushes man. He paints a city disemboweled by construction sites, lacerated by the opening and piercing of new arteries, an explosive city caught in whirlwinds of speed and madness where man no longer has his place. His urban landscapes are landscapes of apocalypse where man finds himself alone and powerless, as if he were not an actor but acted upon and ground down by the city. The word apocalypse is moreover present in the titles of his works.
Without pushing the exegesis or the analysis of Meidner’s urban landscapes too far, it does not seem excessive to suggest that in this painter the city is a metaphor. At least as deep as these abyssal urban chasms, the question that gnaws at Meidner in these canvases does indeed seem to be that of the identity and the place of man in this new world being painfully born before his eyes, indeed the place of the Jewish part of the man that Meidner himself is.
This Jewish dimension is explicitly present in the work of Moritz Oppenheim, Meidner’s elder. Highly prized by the German Jewish bourgeoisie in quest of normality and respectability, Oppenheim offers an idealized vision of traditional Jewish life, a vision steeped in serenity and dignity, in perfect consonance with the image of Judaism that this bourgeoisie means to put forward. In particular, his series of paintings entitled Scènes de la vie juive traditionnelle (Scenes of Traditional Jewish Life) stages family life, the cohesion and the warmth of the family home gathered around the observance of rites and of religious tradition. Oppenheim’s choice to situate his figures in the epoch of Moses Mendelssohn, that is, in a décor and costumes of the eighteenth century, the century of the Jewish Reform, is doubtless not fortuitous. Oppenheim’s paintings enjoyed great success. Reproduced and widely diffused, they hold pride of place in the emancipated Jewish homes of the middle classes, where they fulfill a precise social function. Besides the fact that they offer a quality counterpart to the edifying scenes of Christian life one frequently finds hung on the walls of German homes, they allow these Jews — disoriented by the rapidity and radicality of the changes that have occurred in their lives in the space of one or two generations and who find themselves deprived of identity bearings — to identify positively with their past and to display scenes of the life of their ancestors — as figured by Oppenheim — with a certain pride. In fact, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a strong Jewish demand for works with Jewish themes manifests itself on the art market.
In the same period, other Jewish artists explore other identity paths, no longer by seeking proximity with their German compatriots, but by attempting to assume their otherness, real or supposed. For if the Jews consider themselves wholly German and deploy considerable efforts to that end, numerous are the Germans who persist in considering the Jews as wholly non-German. One knows Gershom Scholem’s position on the supposed Judeo-German “symbiosis.” For Scholem, this symbiosis would have been only an illusion maintained by the Jews who refused to see the reality and the unilateral character of the so-called contract concluded between the Jews and their German fellow citizens.
Not unaware that they are perceived as foreigners come from elsewhere, certain Jewish artists will take up for themselves the thesis or the fantasy of Oriental origin. Let us not forget that we are in the period when, in the wake of the great colonial and ethnographic expeditions, Orientalism is all the rage in Europe, not only in architecture, but also in the decorative arts, painting, literature, fashion. It is a rather ambiguous Orient, with complex connotations, but above all an Orient perceived through a Western gaze, which combines tawdry exoticism, nostalgia tinged with romanticism, and the arrogance of the colonizer. Certain Jews themselves, among them artists, do not resist this fascination with the Orient, the supposed cradle of their origins. And all the less so in that works with biblical themes lend themselves particularly well to this genre. That said, the great difference with respect to the Anglo-Saxon Orientalists who preceded them, such as Edward Lear (died 1859) or David Roberts (1796–1864), lies in the fact that the approach of Jewish artists proceeds from an identity aim. Whether it be Abel Pann, this son of a rabbi born in Latvia in 1883 who dies in Jerusalem in 1963 after having spent some ten years in Paris and New York; or Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874–1925), a Berlin illustrator and adept of the Jugendstil; or Hermann Struck (1876–1944), an engraver-draftsman inspired by Rembrandt, known for his portraits of traditional Jews; or Lesser Ury, already cited regarding his pictorial interest in the city and urban life; or the poet-draftswoman Else Lasker-Schüler (1868–1945), muse of the Berlin avant-garde who will also end her life in Jerusalem, turning toward the Orient and the Bedouins — these Jews who take as models the Jews of Bukhara or of Yemen are in quest of “authentic” Jews, that is, of what they themselves feel they are no longer. What is more, this plunge into exoticism and the past must also be read as a profession of faith turned toward the future. By taking the Orient, the landscapes and inhabitants of Palestine as themes of inspiration, these artists of Zionist sensibility intend to reappropriate a land and a history. In fact, these painters and illustrators express in their own way ideas developed and theorized by the young intellectuals of the Jewish Renaissance. Proclaimed in 1901 by Martin Buber, the Jewish Renaissance is a Judeo-German cultural movement in quest of a synthesis between Zionism, Jewish tradition, and modernity, a kind of third way between the ghetto and the bourgeois-liberal integration incarnated by the Centralverein, the organ of the Jewish establishment. This Jewish Renaissance presents itself as an alternative Jewish response in the face of the chauvinist nationalist-populist reaction born of the failure of liberalism and of the acknowledgment of its social cost.
It is precisely in this context that there emerges that other face of Jewish Oriental otherness, its dark face this time: that of a wretched, archaic world, an invader of the West. That Orient no longer has much to do with the romantic Orient of Delacroix or with the mythical Orient of the Bible. That Orient is the preserve of the Ostjuden, Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe who surge in waves toward the center and west of Europe. Now, this other face of the Orient also has its Jewish painters. To cite but one among others, famous or remained obscure, one need only mention Maurycy Minkowski and his evocations, in a miserabilist realist style, of pogroms and refugees. An image of misfortune that will become a stereotype taken up many times over.
Let us change context and push farther toward the East. During this period in which Russia undergoes the upheavals one knows, what of the Jews, and more particularly of Jewish artists? What answers can art claim to bring to the fundamental questions that this period of strong turbulence brings to the surface? Here again, where does the border between faithfulness and unfaithfulness lie?
The Jewish artists who belong to the generation born between the 1880s and the end of the century are for the most part originally from the shtetl or the Pale of Settlement: Chagall (Vitebsk, 1887–1985), Chana Orloff (Ukraine, 1888–1968), El Lissitzky (Russia, 1890–1941), Zadkine (Russia, 1890–1967), Kikoïne (Russia, 1891–1968), Lipschitz (Lithuania, 1891–1973), Soutine (Lithuania, 1894–1943), Mané-Katz (Ukraine, 1894–1962), Rybak (Ukraine, 1897–1935). Nathan Altman, Baranoff-Rossiné, Feder, Krémègne are likewise children of this shtetl culture. Some will carry this universe within them all their lives; they will find in it the images and themes of their inspiration; others will not. Forests, snow, small trades, typical figures, ritual objects, the cycle of Jewish life, weddings, festivals, burials, antisemitism, pogroms, violence, revolution. Pictorial transcriptions of lived experiences or the reconstitution, after the fact, of a world that is no more — a simple matter of date and generation. On the same footing as the Talmud and the Western Wall, these images and these representations, having since become veritable stereotypes by dint of being taken up and banalized, henceforth form part of the Jewish patrimony. Others will refuse to confine themselves within them and will entirely expel these themes from their palette, or will know how to give them a universal value, raising them to the rank of paradigms of the human condition.
When one runs through the biographical notices of these artists, one notes that they travel a great deal. To be sure, this is an old tradition among artists. Since the Renaissance, and doubtless before, artists travel as much as diplomats and merchants. But the Jews still more than the others. Krémègne, Kikoïne, Soutine, and others will settle in Paris. Others like Chagall will make round trips before settling there provisionally or definitively. Still others, sometimes the same ones, will opt at one moment or another of their life or their career for Palestine or Israel: Orloff, Mané-Katz, Marcel Janco, Kikoïne. Others, finally, like Rybak, Altman, or Lissitzky, will return to Russia after one or several stays abroad. They will use their talents to set themselves apart from their community of origin, to affirm themselves as citizens of their country, Russia or, later, the Soviet Union, to commit themselves to the universal, revolutionary, and socialist adventure, or to affirm themselves as representatives of a national and minority culture, Jewish culture, and to work for its renaissance on modern and secular bases. Some will circulate among these various options before choosing their own path.
This triple ambition — individual, universal, and national — is shared by many of their coreligionists who see in change the occasion to escape their condition. But among the artists, this ambition to move forward also takes on an artistic dimension. The Jews who commit themselves to artistic activities know that Russification will not make Russians of them. They can identify with Russia and, later, with the Soviet Union, be bearers of Russian culture, peerless creators who participate in Russian culture, they can be loyal citizens, but in no case can they become Russians in the full sense. Quite simply because to be Russian in Tsarist Russia, then in the Soviet Union, is a privilege that is not granted to all who aspire to acquire this status, which will become a nationality.
Along with many others, the Jews therefore stand as candidates for integration into the common culture, while knowing, whether they accept it or not, that their origin will continue to interpose itself between them and their expectations. The question that poses itself to them is that of the construction of a secular Jewish identity that is at once rich in its particularisms and anchored in the modern universal. To attain this, they have at their disposal, like the other minorities or nationalities, a cultural patrimony from which they can draw. If traditional culture and folklore do indeed belong to the past, nothing nevertheless prevents recycling them, putting them in the service of the renaissance of a modern and secular Jewish identity. To do this, they must manage to establish the link between their Jewish roots and their aspiration to the universal. One of the paths that opens to them is their participation in the avant-garde currents. Painters as famous as Chagall and Lissitzky, but also lesser-known ones such as Yehuda Pen, Léon Bakst, Nathan Altman, Solomon Yudovin, launch into the illustration of traditional Jewish life. The challenge for them consists in finding the visual and aesthetic supports apt to consolidate the renaissance and the affirmation of a national Jewish identity. If they attach themselves to the folklorist tradition as regards content — it is in this case a painting of proximity, of intimacy, of testimony, indeed of nostalgia — they do not intend, however, to stop there. It is evidently toward the modernist currents that they turn — Impressionist, Cubist, Fauve, Expressionist — for all that touches the formal aspect: the composition, the style, the colors. It is generally considered that Chagall is the creator of the pictorial style of this Judeo-Russian artistic renaissance, through the alloy he invents in associating themes borrowed from Judeo-Russian folklore, the Cubist style, and Fauve or Expressionist colors.
The interest of Jewish artists in Jewish folklore is not self-evident, particularly on the part of artists who want to escape their traditional universe, to emancipate themselves from its conventional modes of representation, and who aspire to impose themselves as artists outside their community of origin. It is explained, however, by the ethnographic vogue that takes hold of the entire intelligentsia, the academic and artistic milieus, and that means to confer their titles of nobility upon popular arts and traditions. It is explained, too, by the identity awareness that takes hold of a part of the cultivated Jewish world and makes it aware of the richness of its cultural patrimony. Finally, this folklorist and modernist current brings together all the actors of the young Yiddish culture — painters and graphic designers, writers and poets (Der Nister, Peretz, Ilya Ehrenburg), people of the theater — actors like Solomon Mikhoels, authors like An-ski, theater directors like Granovsky. All set themselves to giving Jewish culture a new impulse.
When the revolution comes, a number of Jewish artists — writers, musicians, visual artists — participate in the new official culture. During the first years, a cooperation sets in between the avant-garde artists and the regime. The former profit from the benevolence of the latter while the latter uses their competencies. Artists reputed to be avant-garde find themselves assigned to official posts and functions, indeed to representative functions: Chagall is entrusted with the directorship of the School of Fine Arts of Vitebsk, Nathan Altman with the charge of organizing the artistic and cultural life of Petrograd; Chaïkov and Rybak teach in Kiev; Lissitzky becomes a member of the national commission for the arts. There will also be Jews in the pockets of resistance and private rebellion: Osip Mandelstam, Vassily Grossman, Boris Pasternak. Among those who commit themselves, some cease to consider themselves Jewish; they change their name or Russify it. Mixed marriages multiply. From there on, one loses their trace, as Jews. It is only later, at the moment of the purges and the Stalinist trials, or later still at the moment of perestroika, that some resurface in the course of a denunciation, an accusation, or a condemnation for Zionism or cosmopolitanism, or thanks to an identity return. These Jews devoted to the cause of the revolution make a radical choice, which they must assume to the end.
This inquiry could be pursued, in France, in the United States, all the way to Palestine and Israel… but the pages of Plurielles are numbered. And so we must conclude, provisionally, and return to the identity problematic contained in the faithfulness / unfaithfulness couple. This conclusion will be inspired for us by the approaches of Rybak and Lissitzky who, in their theoretical research on visual art, think they find the Jewish element in what is called non-objective art, that is, in the evacuation of the subject, by going beyond representation — the most appropriate way, according to them, of reflecting the Jewish manner of thinking. The weight of the Second Commandment will push the abstract Expressionists of New York — Barnett Newman, Rothko, etc. — in the same direction: that of the search for the sublime in abstraction. This search moreover joins the other radical currents of the avant-garde: the Suprematism of Malevich, the spirituality of Kandinsky and Mondrian. It joins the social utopias of fusion and harmony, the universal logic of this tendency — to which Naum Gabo, Pevsner, and Lissitzky rally — being to efface the ethnic elements of art so that it cannot be claimed or appropriated by anyone, ethnic group, religious or national group.
As for the identity ambivalences, they find their visual expression in the hybridization of styles and contents issuing from pictorial traditions far removed from one another. Divided between multiple identity and cultural references — Jewish, Russian, German, French, orientalizing… — divided between multiple stylistic choices — naturalist, folkloric, naïve, Cubist, Jugendstil, Expressionist, abstract… — the Jews have, before the coming of the Messiah, ample time to decide between creative unfaithfulness and paradoxical faithfulness.
Notes
For reasons of space, it will be a question, in the remainder of this article, only of the former, the creators.↩︎