THE WANDERING IMAGE: CONVERTING THE WANDERING JEW By Joanna L. Brichetto Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in Religion May, 2006 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Jay Geller Professor Leonard Folgarait To Michael and Margaret ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the Vanderbilt Graduate Department of Religion and the Vanderbilt Jewish Studies Program. I am grateful to Professor Jack Sasson for inviting me to apply to the program, where I was the first candidate to come in, and now, the first to go out. I am especially indebted to Dr. Ryda D. Rose—my benefactress—who cheerfully provided the balance of my tuition, and who continues to support every educational endeavor. Without her encouragement and example, I could not have begun the program, much less finished it. Thank you to Professor Jay Geller for agreeing to read my paper, and for directing me to unconsidered sources. I am grateful to Professor Leonard Folgarait for guidance with the reading of images and for encouragement to trust my own eyes. Boundless thanks go to my husband and daughter, who have borne untold inconvenience because of this project, and yet have never wavered in their support of it or me. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION............................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS............................................................................................ iii LIST OF FIGURES........................................................................................................ v CHAPTER I: WANDERING JEW IMAGERY Introduction........................................................................................................ 1 Historical context............................................................................................... 2 Origins.......................................................................................................... 3 Function: the Wandering Jew as antisemitic iconic projection.................... 7 Function: the Wandering Jew as other......................................................... 9 Jewish precedents and precedence of wandering............................................. 11 Scriptural wanderings................................................................................ 12 Liturgical and rabbinic wanderings............................................................ 13 Modern wanderings................................................................................... 17 Iconography of the Wandering Jew.................................................................. 22 The Romantic Wandering Jew: Doré’s paradigm “Q502.1”...................... 33 The Nazi Wandering Jew: Asleep at the whip........................................... 38 CHAPTER II: IMAGES BY JEWISH ARTISTS........................................................ 43 Samuel Hirszenberg................................................................................................... 45 Reuven Rubin............................................................................................................ 48 Marc Chagall............................................................................................................. 52 Der Vandernder Yid (film)........................................................................................ 56 Arthur Syzk............................................................................................................... 60 Adolph Gottlieb......................................................................................................... 65 Mordecai Moreh........................................................................................................ 69 Evgeny Abesgausz.................................................................................................... 73 Michael Sgan-Cohen................................................................................................. 79 Samuel Bak............................................................................................................... 84 Zoya Cherkassky...................................................................................................... 88 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................ 92 REFERENCES............................................................................................................. 96 ivii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Cover of Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasverus, (1602).................................................................................................... 6 2. Illustration from Ashkenazi Haggadah (ca.1450).................................................. 16 3. Illustration from Washington Haggadah (1478).................................................... 16 4. The Wandering Jew (1901), Alfred Nossig............................................................ 19 5. Ivory Casket Panel (420-430 BCE)....................................................................... 25 6. Photograph of patient (“Gottlieb M.”) from Henry Meige’s 1893 dissertation on the Wandering Jew in Saltpêtrière ......................................................................... 27 7. Cheese label (n.d.).................................................................................................. 28 8. Le Juif Errant (1852), [attributed to] Gustave Doré.............................................. 29 9. Cain and Abel, Gustave Doré ................................................................................ 30 10. Le Juif errant (1820-1830), François Georgin....................................................... 31 11. Le Vrai Portrait du Juif errant (before 1837)........................................................ 31 12. The Wandering Jew (2 of 12: La Légende du Juif errant, 1856), Gustave Doré... 35 13. Der Ewige Jude (1937).......................................................................................... 39 14. The Wandering Jew (1899), Samuel Hirszenberg.................................................. 46 15. Jésus et le juif, or la Rencontre (1919), Reuven Rubin......................................... 49 16. Le Juif Errant (1923-25), Marc Chagall................................................................ 53 17. Over Vitebsk (1914), Marc Chagall....................................................................... 53 18. Jew with Stick (1913), Marc Chagall..................................................................... 54 19. La Révolution (1937), Marc Chagall...................................................................... 54 20. Still from Der Vandernder Yid (1933).................................................................... 57 v 21. Oh Ye Dry Bones (1944), Arthur Szyk................................................................... 60 22. De Profundis (1943), Arthur Szyk......................................................................... 61 23. Drift (1971), Adolph Gottlieb................................................................................ 67 24. The Wandering Jew (1968), Mordechai Moreh .................................................... 70 25. My Old Home (1976), Evgeny Abesgauz.............................................................. 74 26. The Wandering Jew (1983), Michael Sgan-Cohen................................................ 79 27. The Wanderer III (1996), Samuel Bak................................................................... 85 28. The Wandering Jew (2002), Zoya Cherkassky...................................................... 88 iivi CHAPTER I WANDERING JEW IMAGERY Introduction The Wandering Jew is not Jewish. It is an ancient Christian legend: an antisemitic iconic projection that encodes and enforces difference using a vocabulary of attributes seen in sources ranging from medieval manuscripts to neo-Nazi blogs.1 In 1899, Jewish artists begin to appropriate stereotypical Wandering Jew iconography and convert it. They create concrete, subversive responses to the antisemitic figurehead and invest an old image with new meanings.2 The phenomenon of Jewish appropriation of Wandering Jew visual imagery emerges with the fin de siècle dialectical interplay of modern anti- Semitism, modern Zionism, and modern Jewish art. This paper offers a critical reading of eleven visual images of the Wandering Jew created by Jewish artists. My readings consider the presentation, representation, and context of the Wandering Jew figure, based loosely on what Erwin Panofsky called 1 I use the terms antisemitic and anti-Jewish frequently. Both are problematic. “Antisemitic” connotes racial discourse and “anti-Jewish” connotes religious discourse, and since Judaism is not a race, and Jewish identity is composed of far more components than religion, both terms are woefully inadequate if not downright dangerous. Even issues of hyphenation and capitalization are freighted. For the purposes of this paper, however, I employ both interchangeably—especially in reference to sources or contexts which feature one or the other—and I assume their meaning to be that which is negative toward Jews. For an introduction to this topic, see Nicholas de Lange, “The Origins of Anti-semitism: Ancient Evidence and Modern Interpretations,” in