Is There a Jewish Art?

A History Or Jewish Art.
by Franz Landsberger.
Cincinnati, Union of Hebrew Congregations, 1946. 369 pp.

“Is there such a thing as Jewish art?” This challenging question, raised by Dr. Landsberger at the outset of his discussion, was asked with much insistence seventeen years ago by the late Ernst Cohn-Wiener in his Juedische Kunst. Operating with the then current concept of “Kunstwollen” (or “will to art”), Cohn-Wiener denied in the Jews—or at least in the ancient Israelites—the presence of any elemental urge to recreate the visual world. The ancient Jews, he pointed out, had produced no sculpture in the round and nothing in the way of portrayals of national heroes and historical events. They had practiced the applied arts of decoration and some minor arts; in architecture they had been dependent on foreign guidance.

Cohn-Wiener discussed Jewish art in subsequent periods down to the 19th century in the same vein, desperately struggling for a definition and troubled by the apparent inability of Jewish art in the past to equal the high achievement of others. Only in the art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries did Cohn-Wiener see Jewish creative energy at last released. This, for him, was the drama of Jewish art.

Dr. Landsberger, on the other hand, accepts Jewish art with all its past limitations, and thus abandons the reticence and apologies that once sharpened our sense of frustration in connection with Jewish art. He is able to do away with such inhibitions, in part because, in line with a general contemporary trend, he includes the lesser arts in the field of his investigation. The discovery of Mexican popular art and the recognition of the merits of provincial art, amateur art, and domestic art in general—the art of simple craftsmen like coachmakers, boat-builders and the like—have in recent years promoted what we might call a democratization of art criticism and scholarship. Once the presence of art is admitted and recognized on every level, we may candidly enjoy a “cug-page” used for a love letter, or—to turn to the Jewish field—a Misrach tablet, as we would a poem or picture.

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Dr. Landsberger is faced at the start, in Biblical times, with the problem of the Tyrian craftsmen who were called to Jerusalem to work on the building of the Temple. Such arrangements were by no means unique to the Jews, but in later periods it became a permanent situation; and thus the problem of the Tyrian craftsmen takes on symbolic significance. Scattered among the nations and restricted by exclusively Christian guilds, Jews had to employ Gentile craftsmen to build their synagogues and fashion their ceremonial objects. And whereas the Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine had subjected foreign artisans to its own customs and traditions, the case was reversed in later times. The Christian silversmith in Frankfort who manufactured a Hanukah lamp for a Jewish patron was largely free to express himself. And yet this Hanukah lamp shows some stylistic features in common with Hanukah lamps made in other countries by other Gentiles. However slight, the influence of the Jewish employer was apparent. Hence, Dr. Landsberger argues, the lamp became a work of Jewish art.

But what about a history of Jewish art? Is Jewish art a continuous process, interrupted by migrations, but resumed nevertheless and carried on in a constant and specifically Jewish spirit? Landsberger is aware of this problem and attempts to link together such widely spaced phenomena as the Great Jewish Basilica at Alexandria, hypothetically envisaged on the basis of a Talmudic description, and a 12th-century synagogue at Toledo in Spain. Whether such a link can be proved is not a matter to be discussed here—but the search for such links is bound to produce results Again, a particular aptitude of the Jews seems to have been seal-engraving, and the Biblical seal-makers of the period of the Kings find their counterparts in the Jewish seal-makers of the 18th century in Europe. Of course, the weakness of such speculations is the assumption of permanent national characteristics—which still have to be demonstrated. The 18th-century seal-engravers were for the most part coin minters, and mint-leasing was one of the Jewish professions. Thus social and economic factors, and not inherited aptitudes, may fully account for the Jewish seal-engravers of the 18th century.

In the light of modem research, which shows how every trend in art tends to become “international” and gather up peoples of different ethnic backgrounds, it may be less important to prove the originality and “specialness” of Jewish art than to account for the existence of Jewish art at all in the face of the Second Commandment. Here Dr. Landsberger shows that there were popular sects in Biblical times that opposed urban life and the arts associated with a higher standard of living, and that it was these sects that may have given the commandment its traditionally strict interpretation. Yet it appears most plausibly, that there was nothing permanent about the prohibitions in the Second Commandment—that they were matters of fluctuating influences. The arts may have flourished at one time, only to be attacked at another, but without their right to existence being necessarily threatened as a matter of religious principle.

Another problem confronting the historian of Jewish art is its relationship to Christian art. Recent excavations have confirmed Strzygowski’s anticipations of a now vanished post-Biblical Jewish art that inspired Christian art in its beginnings. Dr. Landsberger even asserts that Gentiles adopted Jewish design to such a point that in many cases all they did was to substitute the cross for the seven-branched candlestick. Here, Dr. Landsberger obviously oversimplifies the situation, without offering enough evidence for his contention.

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Do artists of mixed descent belong in a history of Jewish art? Do half-and quarter-Jews who embraced Christianity belong there? The author has included them all, sparing no effort to trace their ancestries.

“What, then, is Jewish art?” I was asked by a friend to whom I showed this volume.

“Can you tell me,” I retorted, “what is French or English art, honestly and in a few words? I know,” I hastened to add, anticipating his reply, “you will think of Watteau or Manet, and then of Gainsborough or Reynolds-Constable perhaps. . . .”

“That’s it,” he said. “I do not see Jewish personalities.”

This brief dialogue directs us to a weakness of Dr. Landsberger’s book. His broad and generous definition of Jewish art makes a place for everything. In his anxiety to give a many-sided picture of Jewish artistic activity, he has neglected, it seems to me, to pay attention to specific quality. He uses the word “beautiful” too often, perhaps. But beyond beauty lies the problem of personality in art; and personality produces quality. Those who have lectured before Jewish audiences have heard that ever-recurring question: Do we Jews have great artists, works of great significance?

I am afraid that we have failed to interpret our Jewish artists with the same enthusiasm and interest that we have shown about such of our great writers as Bialik, Sholom Aleichem, Peretz—who have been, time and again, related vividly to our living experience and shifting values. We have failed to examine our artists against their Jewish background and to integrate them in the general scene. This, no doubt, helps account for the scepticism we are met with when we refer to Jewish art.

He who sets out to write a history of Jewish art should not evade the problem of personality. It is crucial. For only the emergence of strong artistic personalities among Jews will justify our claim that Jewish art exists. However tolerant we mean to be with regard to the past, one thing is certain—if, with all the opportunities an artist has today, we can still produce only mediocrities, then no well-meaning surveys will ever convince our public that Jewish art has yet accomplished anything of significance.

Lionello Venturi, an Italian, worded the subtitle of a recent book of his: “From Giotto to Chagall.” This was indeed a great tribute to a Jewish painter, but there are other Jewish artists, too, who deserve not only to be mentioned but to be evaluated with warmth and enthusiasm.

It would take another book to develop a conception of Jewish art history on these lines. Such a book would have to be, perhaps, the product of a collective effort.