Jewish Life in Prints
A Jewish Iconography.
by Alfred Rubens.
The Jewish Museum (London). 160 pp. 75 illustrations. $14.80.

It is a great pity that we have so little pictorial documentation of Jewish life in the Middle Ages. The little that has survived consists largely of drawings and woodcuts showing expulsions and massacres of Jews, or, in a gentler vein, Jewish notables offering gifts to a prince, Jews taking the oath more Judaico, or trading with peasants. Individual Jews were caricatured as Sons of the Devil, excepting, perhaps, an occasional physician or a celebrated minnesinger like Süsskind von Trimberg. Jews portrayed in their usual surroundings and occupations appear only in a few illuminated Hebrew manuscripts adorned with drawings by soferim (Jewish scribes).

From the 16th century on, however, an ever increasing number of artists drew Jews as they actually appeared, to satisfy the curiosity of the Christian world rather than to incite it to pogroms. The invention of engraving in the 16th century, and of lithography in the 18th, made possible the reproduction of pictures in almost unlimited quantities, and a good number have survived in prints.

We would no doubt have more pictures of Jews but for the Jewish taboo itself against personal portraiture. Alfred Rubens, in his Anglo-Jewish Portraits (1935), to which this present volume is complementary, tells of an eminent London rabbi whose portrait was painted, without his knowledge, by an artist working in an adjoining room while he was being entertained by friends. There are, however, many 17th-and 18th-century portraits of professing Jews who sat for artists without considering themselves guilty of transgressing the Second Commandment. Often only the prints made of these drawings and oils have survived.

These historically as well as artistically invaluable prints might never been collected and catalogued but for Alfred Rubens. About thirty years ago he began to ferret them out of bookstores, printshops, and the dusty corners of Europe and the United States, his hobby then turning into a life-work. The two large volumes he compiled are painstakingly accurate catalogues raisonnés of his own collection, plus a number of items to be found in the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York and elsewhere. Quite a few prints of British origin are listed in the current volume, and several of them are reproduced, but on the whole the scope is larger than that of his Anglo-Jewish Portraits. A Jewish Iconography ranges over all of Europe from Amsterdam to Constantinople, and even includes material from Alexandria, Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem. And also the number of illustrations is much greater, offering a more valuable and imposing panorama.

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Catalogues, of course, do not make the most exciting reading, and this one is no exception. But fortunately A Jewish Iconography is more than catalogue. In part, for one thing, its alphabetical listing of the portraits of Jewish personalities constitutes a kind of Jewish biographical dictionary. Most of the likenesses are of people from Continental Europe; these include Lassalle, the Mendelssohns, Jacob Meyerbeer, Joseph Suess Oppenheimer, the Rothschilds, Sabbatai Zevi, and Spinoza. Among the Americans we find Mordecai Manuel Noah.

Secondly, the book, which is handsomely bound in half vellum and blocked in gold, has an intrinsic artistic appeal thanks to its many woodcuts, engravings, etchings, and lithographs. Many of the artists represented in it are unimportant, but there are at least a few samples of work by such outstanding men as Chodowiecki (Germany); Dalle Piani (Italy); the Cruikshanks, Hogarth, and Rowlandson in England; Picart, Ruysdael, and the great Rembrandt in Holland. Of the Jewish artists, the most significant are Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Edouard Moise, and Simeon Solomon. Quite a few of the tradecards, watch papers, and ornamental bill-heads are the work of generally anonymous Jewish engravers—engraving, like embroidering, being an art in which the pre-Emancipation Jews excelled and having an ultimately Oriental origin.

Thirdly, the volume is a form of Kulturgeschichte in its depiction, both in the reproductions and in the texts describing prints not reproduced, of bygone customs and costumes. Mr. Rubens devotes a good deal of space to artistically inferior but historically fascinating little prints, many of them caricatures, that enjoyed an enormous vogue, especially in the 18th century. The general populace did not then read newspapers, many people were barely literate, and it remained for cartoonists, political and otherwise, to give an account of the most sensational, most picturesque, though not necessarily most edifying characters and episodes of the day. Thus there are more pictures of mountebanks and scoundrels, adventurers and crackpots, than of saintly men and women. These cheap and generally crude prints, which were sold in the streets for a few pennies, offer an exciting social history covering the period, in England, from Henry VIII to Queen Victoria. There are, inevitably, many gaps in such a collection of prints, partly because the paper on which they were printed was too flimsy to survive, and partly because the victims of the unflattering ones, or their relatives, bought up and destroyed them. The family of Lord George Gordon, for example, an 18th-century convert to Judaism whose subsequent misfortunes held the attention of a half-amused, half-infuriated public, made strenuous efforts to destroy the sensational broadsheets in which he figured.

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Mr. Rubens’s social history embraces more than England. We are taken to Constantinople, where in 1528 a Jew, after being converted to Christianity, is martyred by the Turks; to North Africa, where Jews were forced to wear a distinctive dress long after their co-religionists shed it in other parts of the world; to the Crimea, with the distinctive synagogues and burial grounds of the Karaite sect; to Bordeaux, where Jews cried their wares through the streets, “Vieux habits, vieux galons!” or “Quelque chose à vendre!” In Frankfort-on-Main, the plundering of the ghetto follows the riots instigated by Fettmilch, the Haman of 1614; in Hamburg, the publication of Dr. Jenner’s revolutionary work on vaccination prompts a hostile cartoonist to lampoon the English physician and his German translator as despicable Jews because Hamburg’s Jewry welcomed vaccination.

Emancipation came to European Jewry by way of the French Revolution and the Bonapartes. There is a picture showing the Grand Sanhedrin assembled to receive the Emperor Napoleon’s address, and one showing Jews on the balconies of Amsterdam synagogues cheering Louis Napoleon on his entry into the city.

In its emancipation of the Jews, England was a hundred years ahead of the Continent. But the mass of the people remained prejudiced, and a flood of venomous pamphlets and cartoons greeted the “Jew Bill” of 1753, which permitted the naturalization of foreign Jews. Sir Robert Peel, who at the beginning of the 19th century worked hard to repeal what anti-Jewish legislation remained, was frequently the butt of cartoonists.

Anti-Semitism seems not to have been as vicious and vituperative in England as in other countries. A cartoon in which a farmer voices this complaint to a Jewish peddler at a fair:

Sirrah! I tell you you’re a knave
To cry up razors that can’t shave

appeared in the same year as one depicting an old-clothesman in a kindly light:

A Jew may have a heart as pure
As any Christian I am sure.

Jews were frequently attacked by hoodlums in the 18th-century London streets; as they could not expect help either from the police or passers-by, they were quite defenseless. The Jewish street men replied to this by taking up boxing and routing the ruffians. A newspaper, quoted by Mr. Rubens, refers to a diminutive Jewish orange vender who was charged in court with having assaulted a porter twice his size. Several Jewish professional boxers were in high favor in England’s pugilistic circles and one of them, Mendoza, became a national hero. Terms like “a Mendoza” and “Jew’s blow” crept into the jargon of the sport.

But the general reader will pay most attention to the illustrations (which are reproduced in collotype), and rightly so. Most mirror the spirit of the Baroque Age, others reflect Rococo and Neo-Classical styles. In quality, they range from crude folk art to great graphic work, such as the engraving made after Guérin’s charming portrait of Fanny von Arnstein, or the etching of an Algerian Jewess made by Guérin’s most famous pupil, Eugène Delacroix. Nor are the quite unpretentious tradecards—one of a Jewish optician and mathematical instrument maker to His Royal Highness, the Duke of Gloucester, and to His Grace, the Duke of Wellington; another of a “slopman” (purveyor of cheap readymade clothing) to his Royal Highness, Prince William Henry—devoid of charm. And the story of Jewish emancipation cannot be expressed more dramatically than by the juxtaposition of the offensive wood engraving of “Jobst Mellern,” a 16th-century dweller of the Prague ghetto, barefoot, in a cloak bearing the “Jew badge,” and the delicate stipple engraving of that elegant 19th-century American gentleman, Major Mordecai Manuel Noah.

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