Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

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THE MYSTERY OF THE SLASHED NOSE AND THE

EMPTY BOX

Melissa Raphael

To cite this article: Melissa Raphael (2006) THE MYSTERY OF THE SLASHED NOSE AND THE
EMPTY BOX, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 5:1, 1-19, DOI: 10.1080/14725880500511126

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Melissa Raphael

THE MYSTERY OF THE SLASHED NOSE

AND THE EMPTY BOX
Towards a theology of Jewish art
mraphael@glos.ac.uk
Modern
10.1080/14725880500511126
CMJS_A_151095.sgm
1472-5886
Original
Taylor
5102006
Professor
00000March
and
&Jewish
Article
Francis
MelissaRaphael
(print)/1472-5894
Francis
2006
Studies
Ltd (online)

Supported by cultural and historical studies of Jewish art, this article challenges twentieth-
century Jewish religious thought’s resistance to the visual image by construing Jewish art as
a revelatory process carried within the patterning of Jewish diasporic movement across time
and space. This movement produces a spectacle that thereby defines Jewish art not as the
production of ceremonial or cultural artefacts, nor as anti-images of absence and deliberate
distortion, but as the dance or figure traced by the sanctificatory passage of divine presence.
As a holy convocation of bodies upon whom the glory of God’s presence resides, Israel becomes
God’s object (and its own source) of aesthetic judgment. This article’s aesthetic construal of
Israel as a metonymic representation of divine presence is supported by the argument that
creation, revelation and redemption are primarily aesthetic phenomena effected by God’s
imagining of the world at creation, by the world’s primordial revelation to God of its beauty,
and by Israel’s fidelity to God’s arch-commandment of love in its redemptive restoration of
the divine image from the ravages of history.

In 1916, in the Balkan trenches, a young German Jewish soldier, Franz Rosenzweig,
wrote a series of theological reflections on postcards that he sent home; they were
published in 1921 as the now classic work, The Star of Redemption. Explicitly rejecting
the Augustinian supercessionist claim that Jews are blind to God’s revelation, he argued
that the Jews are blind not because they do not accept Jesus’s Messiahship, but because
they stand, as it were, at the center of a flaming Star of David whose light blinds them
to the world and to themselves. Jews possess no vision of God precisely because of their
blinding proximity to God – Israel is itself the image of God’s revelation. 1 Rosenzweig
is not alone among twentieth-century Jewish theologians in his aestheticization of reve-
lation. Recognition of the aesthetic dimension of revelation was at least implicit in the
twentieth-century Jewish existentialist theology of Rosenzweig, Martin Buber and
Abraham Joshua Heschel – all of whom, in their different ways, sought to discern or
encounter the presence of the living God within the given historical and experiential
situation rather than in the halakhic process as such. Yet these writers’ aesthetic is one
that focuses more on feeling and experience than on the qualities of the visual as such;
none of these writers would have challenged the basic priority of the written, spoken
and heard word in Jewish religious thought. 2
This article questions the received Jewish view that the word is and should be the
predominant or sole means by which revelation is transmitted. It offers a brief survey of
cultural and historical studies of Jewish art from which to launch a theological argument

Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Vol 5, No. 1 March 2006, pp. 1–19
ISSN 1472-5886 print/ISSN 1472-5894 online © 2006 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14725880500511126
2 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

urging Jewish thought to reconsider its customary indifference or resistance to the visual
image. Jewish art can be understood theologically as a revelatory process rather than a
set of cultural objects by construing revelation as a figure shaped and patterned by
Jewish diasporic movement across time and space. This movement produces a spectacle
that thereby defines Jewish art not as the production of ceremonial or cultural artefacts,
nor as the anti-images of absence and deliberate distortion sanctioned by halakhah, but
as the dance or figure traced by the sanctificatory passage of divine presence. As a holy
convocation of bodies upon whom the glory of God’s presence resides, Israel becomes
God’s object (and its own source) of aesthetic judgment. This article’s aesthetic
construal of Israel as a metonymic representation of divine presence is supported by the
argument that creation, revelation and redemption are primarily aesthetic phenomena
effected by God’s imagining of the world at creation, by the world’s primordial revela-
tion to God of its beauty, and by Israel’s fidelity to God’s arch-commandment of love
in its redemptive restoration of the divine image from the ravages of history. Since this
theological position is historically and culturally grounded, the article will fall into two
parts. The first of these will engage a range of historical attitudes to images and the
permissibility of images, and the second will elaborate the theology of Jewish art
outlined above, illustrated by reference to paintings by nineteenth- and twentieth-
century modern artists.
Judaism’s aniconic, logocentric tendency does not, of course, originate with
modernity. Its origins lie in the biblical Second Commandment that prohibits the
making of an idol or the worship of images, whether in the form of anything in the heav-
ens, on the earth or the sea (Ex. 20:4–5 and Deut. 5:8). This does not imply a biblical
antipathy to beauty as such. There are numerous instances in which the Hebrew Bible
finds the more impressive forms of natural beauty redolent of divine power and numi-
nous majesty, and sacral beauty is regarded as conducive to worship. In its turn, post-
biblical Judaism expresses some guarded admiration for beautiful objects and persons,
and encourages the decoration of religious artefacts in order to “beautify the service of
God” (BT Shabbat 133b, on Ex. 15:2). However, rabbinic aesthetics are in some senses
theologically limited. To take but one example, the Babylonian Talmud views cultural
beauty (and that of the female, as distinct from the male form) as merely ornamental.
Berakhot 57b observes somewhat in passing that a beautiful wife and a well-appointed
household refresh a man’s spirits and expand his mind (see Reines 100–107; Urbach
228–245).
Reinforcing ancient Jewish aesthetic misgivings and reluctances, modern Jewish
thought was powerfully shaped by the Protestant and Kantian iconophobia of those
intellectuals whose approval the German Jewish community sought in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Even by the end of the twentieth century, when the polit-
ical and philosophical climate was profoundly altered, the nineteenth-century view
continued to be very widely rehearsed and still in roughly the form proposed over a
century earlier by Heinrich Graetz in The Structure of Jewish History: that Greek revelation
is visual and the Hebrew, verbal; that Greek deities could be visualized, but not God.
The God of ethical monotheism was to be listened to, but not seen (Graetz 68–69). 3
Space does not permit a full survey of the range of Jewish practical and theoretical
interpretations of the Second Commandment: some are lenient, others are more
restrictive. What is of more immediate concern is the broad elaboration of a traditional
religious aesthetic and, to date the most authoritative outline of such has been that of
 THE MYSTERY OF THE SLASHED NOSE AND THE EMPTY BOX 3

Steven Schwarzschild. As Schwarzschild notes, it is not so much the depiction of mate-

rial objects that Judaism proscribes, but the depiction or imaging of spirit (his mentor
Herman Cohen’s modern Kantian reading of the Second Commandment consisted in
the words “Thou shalt not make an image of the moral subject.”) As Schwarzschild
further points out, it is not only the Jewish view that one should not make instantiated
images of spirit, but that one cannot do so without making an egregious category
mistake. It is, he says: “[A] mistake with the widest and most grievous consequences:
The whole universe is misunderstood and, therefore, maltreated. It is a sin” (Cohen and
Mendes-Flohr 3)4 For this reason, Rabbi Joseph Karo’s sixteenth-century legal compi-
lation Shulhan arukh permits only the representation of the absence of spirit when
depicting human beings. The only permissible image of spirit and, more specifically
God, is its actual presence, not its re-presentation in art.
In answer to the question of how one might depict an absence, Schwarzschild refers
to what he calls the rabbinic “theology of the slashed nose,” where the nose was split or
one eye removed to symbolize that the body seen in the representation did not really
represent the person. An undistorted and complete representation of a person is not
permissible since humans are ensouled bodies, made in the image of God. To let their
physical appearance represent the whole person is to misrepresent both the human and
the divine. The only legitimate way of depicting a human being is to indicate that the
physical is an incomplete account of the human; and since their spirit cannot be
represented, something must be removed from the person’s appearance. This, for
Schwarzschild, is not a reduction of the human, but “a positive commandment to intro-
duce the human spirit into the human form. In short the slashed nose is the symbol of
the soul” (Schwarzchild 114).5 Also known as “the Jewish principle of incompleteness,”
Schwarzschild claims that this deliberate misdrawing, as well as the rejection of the
Greek principle of art as mimesis or imitation, is one of the earliest and originary prin-
ciples of modernist art: “In modernism, art is assimilating Judaism.” Creativity, then, is
the sole prerogative of God; the Jewish imitatio Dei is one of moral action, not that of
Christian incarnation or Greek poesis, “making” (Cohen and Mendes-Flohr 4–6).
The characteristically Jewish conviction that hearing/obeying the one God (the
word for “hearing” and “obeying” in Hebrew is the same) confers a decisive moral
advantage over those pagans who are able to see a number of (false) gods is marked in
Emmanuel Levinas’s thought. He is perhaps the most significant of recent Jewish philos-
ophers to make a clear distinction between Jewish theological ethics and the aesthetic
(Levinas Otherwise Than Being 72–74). Levinas, like Kant, regards the proscription of
images as Judaism’s supreme commandment (Hand, “Reality,” 141). Beauty, for Levi-
nas, has no role to play in responsibility for the Other whose face should hold no attrac-
tion or aesthetic reward but an ethical demand alone. The self is not “a spectacle” in
relation to the Other; instead, by speaking, “by offering a word, the subject putting
himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays” (Hand, “Reality,” 149). Levinas
(and after him, Lionel Kochan) 6 is morally antagonistic to the visual and argues that the
artistic gaze, in effect, kills or freezes its human object: art, he says, proceeds “as if death
were never dead enough” (Hand, “Reality,” 137–139). The image is both a caricature
and a “disincarnation of reality.” “Eternally, the smile of the Mona Lisa about to broaden
will not broaden. An eternally suspended future floats around the congealed position of
a statue like a future forever to come” (Hand, “Reality,” 134, 138). Not only time, but
nature is eerily becalmed by art: “All the arts, even those based on sound, create silence”
4 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

(Hand, “Reality,” 147). For Levinas, the great moral freedom of Judaism is its spiritual
intellectuality. God is not incarnate in anything but his word so that intimacy with God
is solely a matter of ethical and legal education in Torah (Hand, Difficult Freedom, 17, 23,
144). God’s self-revelation is verbal and he does not intervene – God is a God who hides
his face; there is no palpable presence (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 171, 196, 295–297).
The respective histories of Jewish theology and culture are, however, somewhat at
odds with one another. For against the assumption of Jewish aniconism, historians of
Jewish art have argued that, in fact,

Judaism provides a platform for Jewish art in all of its manifestations, in different
forms and styles. It does not prohibit visual art nor does it restrict it to abstract
representation. Jewish art is an expression of the very soul and spirit of Judaism and
of the Jewish artist. Its visual vocabulary can be religious, philosophical, social and
national. It can open “the curtain behind which Eternity is hidden.”

There is no consistent iconoclasm instigated by Jews themselves. It was only during

periods of intense Christian and Islamic iconoclasm that Jewish art did not exist at all
(Baigell and Heyd 12–33, esp. 22, 29). In short, as Kalman Bland has argued, since the
discovery of the muralled synagogue of Dura-Europos in 1932 and a mosaic pavement
from a synagogue in Sepphoris in 1993, biblical and rabbinic sources are more accurately
understood to have been spiritual and intellectual frameworks, not, in fact, absolute
proscriptions (Bland 18).7 Jewish cultural historians now acknowledge that over many
centuries, Jewish art has been a significant constituent of Jewish thought and identity.
Pre-Holocaust Jewish folk art, and its muralled synagogues in particular, have been far
from visually austere. It is no longer so much a question of how and why Jews resisted
the Second Commandment, but, as Jewish cultural historians have begun to realize,
how they used it in their art, consciously or otherwise, to express their identity as those
with a faith in the one transcendent God (Baigell and Heyd 12).
Nonetheless, because Judaism does not depict the God it confesses, the Jewish art
usually considered most authentically Jewish is art without images. Despite the exist-
ence of elaborately decorated ceremonial objects and synagogues, and the growth of a
(more or less) secular Jewish art after Jewish emancipation, Jewish religious life and
thought has been in retreat from the visual since the medieval period. Jewish communi-
ties in Islamic countries once readily adopted Islamic visual prohibitions that reinforced
their own; Jewish communities in Catholic countries abjured the visual almost on
cultural principle, and Jewish communities in Protestant countries sought their hosts’
approval by flourishing their own biblical repudiation of images (see Bland passim; Wass-
erstrom 224). Not only has this made modern abstract art congenial to many Jewish
artists, even Hebrew letters and words have themselves become a visual art. As well as
the quintessentially Jewish art of micrography, 8 constructivists like Lissitsky used words
as a form of two-dimensional revolutionary architecture. Others like Ben Shahn have
made pictures from them, fascinated by the kabbalistic mysteries of their combinations;
the contemporary artist Grisha Bruskin produces images that are themselves fragments
of sacred text or manuscripts, replete with annotation and erasure.
While nineteenth-century Jewish painters such as Max Liebermann and Moritz
Oppenheimer worked in the figurative manner of the time, Jewish art’s religious or
vestigially religious inclination to abstraction was intensified during the twentieth
 THE MYSTERY OF THE SLASHED NOSE AND THE EMPTY BOX 5

century by the Holocaust that had cast into question “the bond between pain and beauty,
suffering and pleasure” that had “[given] birth to aesthetics in the first place” (Weisberg
13–27, esp. 18). While some have invoked the Second Commandment to prevent
representations of the Holocaust, others have proscribed all visual representation of the
Holocaust. Levinas understandably regrets that “for many Jews, the only meaning of
sacred history and the Revelation it brings us is to be found in their memories of the
stake, the gas chambers. … Their experience of the Revelation is transmitted through
persecution!” (Hand 191–192). Elsewhere, in characteristically magisterial style he
wrote: “I shall refrain from turning the Passion of Passions into a spectacle” (Hand, Diffi-
cult Freedom, 143). Likewise, Claude Lanzmann’s nine and half hour documentary Shoah
contains no footage or re-creation of the Holocaust itself; only its victims speaking in the
present. He regards the catastrophe as morally and ethically unrepresentable – it must
be protected by a circle of flame. We must not be permitted the jouissance or pleasurably
cathartic release of tears by watching agony. Lanzmann says that if he had found footage
of the gas chambers in operation he would have destroyed it. 9 Differently again, the
survivor, Ruth Kluger’s terse summary of Auschwitz speaks for many who resist any
account of Auschwitz that transcendentalizes its horrors as those of the numinous or
sublime: “In Auschwitz I stood in rows of five and was thirsty and was afraid of dying.
That’s it, that’s all, that’s the sum of it” (Kluger 116).
In the twentieth century, then, European Jews not only courted abstraction; they
were themselves abstracted from the visual environment, their lives are now only topog-
raphy and trace; the marks left behind, perhaps where a mezuzah was once nailed to a
doorpost. The visible presence of the Jew in Europe is now eerie – unheimlich. A couple
of years ago in Krakow, in the early spring dusk, I saw a large and animated group
of Hasidic Jews in their long black coats crossing the square of the former ghetto in
Kazimierz to light candles on the grave of a rebbe in the grounds of the Rema synagogue.
Because I was not expecting to see Jews so iconographically visible as Jews in Poland,
these Hasidim embodied Wittgenstein’s very definition of the uncanny: the presence of
what ought to be absent.
The persecution, assimilation and emigrations of the twentieth century saw the
virtual disappearance of many historic Jewish communities, and not only those of
European Jewry. A destroyed Ashkenazi culture can now only be conjured through art
– in the translated Yiddish literature of writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and I. L.
Peretz, in the music of revived klezmer bands, and through the record of photographers
such as Roman Vishniac. And since 1948, ancient Jewish communities have all but disap-
peared from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia and many other countries. The Jews of Baghdad,
Salonika and Cochin, for example, are principally remembered by the architecture,
culinary dishes and dialects they left behind and that have been incorporated as aesthetic
trace – as just an aroma or an echo – in the culture of their hosts.
The Holocaust has also produced a theology of absence that is contiguous with
Schwarzschild’s account of the traditional Jewish aesthetic of absence. The perpetrators’
voiding of God from Auschwitz has been compounded by God’s own apparent desertion
of European Jewry. For most post-Holocaust theologians, God either chose or was
compelled to turn His face and so avert His eyes from the agony and dereliction of the
Holocaust (hester panim).10 He effectively disappeared; his failure to reveal himself
through acts of redemptive intervention meant that he was, as it were, both hidden from
view and could not see – that is, witness and judge, the acts of the perpetrators and the
6 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

suffering of their victims. As George Steiner (229) laments, in the post-Holocaust

“recession of God,” otherness has withdrawn from the incarnate leaving only “an empti-
ness which echoes still with the vibration of departure.”
It is not easy for Jewish thought to affirm God’s real presence or shekhinah when the
rabbinic aesthetic of “the slashed nose,” modern Western aesthetic philosophy and
the historical traumas of Jewish loss and disappearance all coalesce in an account of the
sublime as the defeat of representation. Twentieth-century Jewish spiritual abjuration
of the visual – whether Mark Rothko’s veiling of the void by layers of paint within which
no material object can be found, 11 Barnett Newman’s almost blank colour fields or the
post-Holocaust renewal of the ancient trope of God’s averted face – all produce numi-
nous anti-images of the withdrawal or disappearance of what is loved from view.
What Steiner calls “the recession of God” may have begun long before the Holocaust
period. In Solomon’s Temple, the Ark of the Covenant stood in the most sacred area of
the Tabernacle and it was a box containing objects that functioned as “witnesses.”
However, the Ark within the Holy of Holies of Herod’s Second Temple contained no
objects at all (Revel-Neher 19). Whether after the destruction of the First Temple or
after the destruction of European Jewry, the emptying of the box seems to emblematize
Judaism’s somewhat post-traumatic aesthetic and leaves us with a theological question:
If an aesthetic of “real presence” has been variously denied by both rabbinic and modern
theology, by post-structuralism’s preoccupation with absence, by post-figurative art,
and by the divine and human disappearances of history itself, how are we to affirm the
life-giving historical witness and moral judgement of God’s presence in the world?
It seems to me that the possibility of human witness and divine judgment towards
the resolution of historical suffering and the vindication of the righteous can be most
comprehensively addressed if and when Jewish theology begins to develop an aesthetic
of presence that is prepared to draw upon the visual dimension to a far greater extent
than rabbinic thought through to contemporary Jewish theology has permitted. I want
to argue that the aesthetic is not, as Levinas thinks, an indulgence that is shamefully
indifferent to suffering (“feasting during a plague”) (Hand, “Reality,” 142), but a
medium of re-vision, restoration; putting back together again or, in rabbinic and mysti-
cal terminology, tikkun. The eschatological sense of a beauty that is lost but recoverable
is not the same as destroying beauty as in the almost punitive theology of the slashed
nose. The redemptive drive towards tikkun – a process of completion that restores the
divine image to both God and humanity – is surely in tension with the Jewish mutilation
or distortion of images that Steven Schwarzschild and others consider the defining
characteristic of a Jewish aesthetic that is at once rabbinic and modern. The broken,
dehumanized, incomplete or distorted image of the Jew replicates history’s assault on
the Jewish face (recall the assaults on male Orthodox Jewish faces by Nazis tearing or
hacking off their beards). The repudiation of the visual can find itself complicit in ideol-
ogies of divine and human erasure. Dependence on hearing alone produces a theology
of dereliction that compounds the disappearances of Jewry and the absence and
silence of God in Auschwitz.
As Rosenzweig affirmed, revelation need not be reduced to a formulation of law.
Rather, the eternal God touches the world through the act of revelation. In the spirit of
Rosenzweig, then, it is more than arguable that the “touch” or weight (kavod) of revela-
tion has, among other effects, a visible one. The glory or kavod of God’s presence is an
illumination that makes the temporal translucent to the eternal. When God looks away
 THE MYSTERY OF THE SLASHED NOSE AND THE EMPTY BOX 7

and so cannot see, things are lost to the (re)ordering power of divine creativity and judg-
ment and revert to chaos and darkness.
Some years ago Louis Jacobs was banned from practising as an Orthodox rabbi
because he insisted that God does not only speak to Israel, but through Israel. This article
develops Jacobs’s point by proposing that there are many ways in which God speaks
through Israel, and that divine self-expression occurs not only when God speaks through
Israel, but also when God looks at the world through Israel. If this is so, then the story of
this divine-human relationship can be told through series of images or visual, figurative
revelations that are inscribed in space by being set into movement as a form of dance. In
short, the people Israel – a visual configuration of bodies assembled before God – can
be understood as a (permitted) metonymic representation of God, 12 and as such the
presence and indeed absence of God can be traced or tracked in the choreography of
those bodies as they move across space and time. Consequently, the fact that three-quar-
ters of European Jewry were made to disappear ethically entails a restoration of the
figured. As evoked by the group of Hasidim crossing the ghetto square I mentioned
earlier, in the act of figurative representation and in the patterning of the figures in space
is the re-presentation of presence; it invites a theology of hope. For a theologian, the
Holocaust should not, in fact, deter the aestheticization of Judaism and Jewish history,
but requires it. Not only as an act of resistance to erasure, but because the entire scheme
of creation and redemption has an aesthetic dimension – a condition of revealability – 13
in which all Jewish history can, finally, be imagined.

The aesthetic dimension of Jewish theology

If, as recent Christian theologians have noted, Christian theology has said too little about
the aesthetic, we have seen that Jewish theology has said very much less. Yet while this
article disputes Levinas’s rejection of the aesthetic, he is surely correct in observing that
“the ontological status or regime of the revelation is … a primordial concern for Jewish
thought, posing a problem which should take precedence over any attempt to present
the contents of that Revelation” (Levinas, “Revelation,” 192–193). By its very nature as
a communication to consciousness through the senses, the very regime of revelation,
not only the moment of its intervention in history, is an aesthetic one. (The written
sacred text is not ontologically primary; it is a record of thought and speech.) For such
reasons alone, the question of the visual would theologically exceed that of the permis-
sibility of material images. Yet more than that, the received, but pointless, dichotomy
between hearing and seeing, obligation and entertainment, is abolished in the very first
moment of history, in the creation narrative of Genesis 1. Here God finishes making the
world and looks at it and sees that it is good. In Genesis 1, God sees that the world is
good before he makes moral commandments and he makes those moral commandments
on the basis of what he has seen. God’s first act after the creation of the heavens and the
earth was the command “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3) that enabled us to see. Creation
is also, to God, a material spectacle. There is a kabbalistic oral tradition that God created
the world so that God could behold God (Halevi 5). With the creation of light the world
becomes visible and God can see his own image in the mirror of the world. In that the
world is a spectacle to God, he is not only the revealer, but the one to whom something is
and can be revealed.
8 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

Levinas, Buber and Rosenzweig all insist in their different ways that at the heart of
Judaism is the revelation of the Commandment to love God and consequently to love
the other. To develop the aesthetic dimension of this Commandment one must add that
God not only commands love, God sees on account of that love and wants us to see on
account of that love. Seeing is a means of knowing and responding that enables both God
and humanity to witness history and institute the justice of moral judgment upon it.
Human vision can offer an intimation of God as one who is receptive to and moved by
the sheer spectacle of human endeavor. Contra Levinas, this suggests that God is the
One whose face is turned towards us; whose all-knowing is more properly imagined as
an all-seeing.
Derrida asks: “On what condition is responsibility possible? On the condition that
the Good is no longer a transcendental objective, a relation between objective things,
but the relation to the other, a response to the other; an experience of personal goodness
and a movement of intention” (Derrida, Gift of Death, 50). It is not that ethics is reduc-
ible to aesthetics, but that in aesthetic terms an ethically responsible subject is one who
is detained by his or her own response to the other; a responsible subject is one who
stops to look and thereby to act. The heard command does not, then, as Jean-Francois
Lyotard thinks, demand the closing of the eyes (Benjamin 69–110, esp. 82). God’s
Commandment, as the act of God’s attention to the world, beautifies its object. Israel’s
Levitical task of sanctification is, therefore, also the task of beautification or restoration.
In other words, mitzvot or Commandments order the world according to God’s idea or
creative vision of the world in its pristine, washed beauty. The sanctified world is not so
much one that conforms to a human idea of beauty, but is one ordered in accordance
with commanding vision and with his first sight of the world at creation. Torah – the
sum of Jewish life and thought– patterns the world and its objects into an ordered and
classified whole: an object of divine and human aesthetic judgment. The silver yad or
pointer used by a reader to follow the words of the sefer Torah is a metaphor for Judaism
as helping us to see; helping us to read the world as a visual text whose words and images
help us to be Israel – that is, etymologically, to become “the one who sees God”
(Wolfson 30–51, esp. 50).
In his earliest work, Martin Buber argues that Judaism is relational, not aesthetic;
its beauty is in relationships, not art. 14 Yet in his later work, Buber does acknowledge
that relation can be perfected by the artist’s transformation of the world from figure to
image; from what is seen to what is envisioned. Similarly, the Kantian subsumption of
art to ethics suggested to Herman Cohen that art should depict the Messiah: a vision of
the world as God wills it to be (H. Cohen 96). Perhaps what Cohen and Buber were
edging towards is the notion that visual images are a token of redemption.
The recent consensus is that “there are no unifying theories of Jewish art or of ways
to study it” (Baigell and Heyd xiv). Margaret Olin speaks for many in proposing that
Jewish art may not be intrinsically Jewish, but might “speak Jewish” in certain contexts
and to certain interpreters (Olin, “From Bezal’el,”; Soussloff 33). Here I construe
Jewish history as a definitively Jewish work of art – that is, as an assemblage of persons
and things that, in the completion of their configuration, “speaks Jewish” insofar as it
depicts a final or eschatological perfection of relation. This is not to make the objection-
able claim that the spectacle of Jewish historical suffering is a pleasure to behold. The
reportage of Jewish bodies in their historical abjection (as in photographs of children in
the Warsaw Ghetto or of the corpses photographed during the liberation of Belsen in
 THE MYSTERY OF THE SLASHED NOSE AND THE EMPTY BOX 9

1945) does not render them beautiful on account of that abjection. Rather, just as the
Catholic theologian Patrick Sherry urges that a Christian notion of beauty must include
“the Cross and everything else which a worldly aesthetics discards as unbearable”
(Sherry 83), so, too, a Jewish aesthetic theology must include the spectacle of Jewish
abjection as standing in prophetic judgement on the world and commanding its restora-
tion to glory as that which was first imagined and created by God. The antisemitic cast-
ing of the Jew as ugly or malformed; the suffering servant of Isaiah 53.2 who is without
“form or beauty”; the kabbalistic cosmology that remembers God’s creation of the
world as a convulsion or rupture in God’s being, as well as the brokenness of the Jewish
body in Auschwitz, all demand a radical revisioning of the beautiful as that which can be
made whole by restorative love in anticipation of the restoration ahead.
This article has noted that classical Judaism, through to Lional Kochan’s book
Beyond the Graven Image published just a few years ago, generally proposes that only
defaced, partial or broken images (especially two- or three-dimensional ones) are hala-
khically legitimate. This classical Jewish aesthetic is, I think, obstructive to an aesthetic
theology of redemption since an image of the body as whole and unbroken is not an idol;
rather it remembers the original beauty of the divine image stamped or inscribed on
creation and anticipates the eschatological beauty of its restoration. Because Jewish
beauty is already damaged by a history of murderous abjection and assault, its image does
not have to be broken again to be permissible. Contra Levinas, an image does not only
arrest time and thereby thwart the divine purpose; images can eschatologically conquer
time so that nothing of what is loved – and images are properly only images of what is
loved – can be lost or taken away. They hold their object up to view, just like the
“Women in Black” who stand outside the offices of oppressive regimes, holding up
photographs of their missing or dead children as if to resurrect them.
The present article has so far examined flat, still images of Israel, the collective
Jewish body. Now that body or figure of Israel will be set in motion to see how its move-
ment both mediates God’s self-revelation to the world and can pattern revelation into
the form of an embodied prayer or dance offered back to God as both a gift of thanks-
giving and a redemptive sacrifice.

Revelation danced
Christian art attempts to represent God’s appearance in time and space in the suffering
body of a (Jewish) man, even though Christ’s “two natures” – his being fully human and
fully divine – powerfully deter the representation of either. In Judaism, too, there is a
suffering Jewish body: the body of Israel itself. The notion of Israel as a body that medi-
ates divine self-revelation or presence is found in Jewish tradition, even if it is rarely
articulated. Towards the end of the twentieth century, Michael Wyschogrod’s book The
Body of Faith proposed that God enters the world “through a people whom he chose as
his habitation. Thus there came about a visible presence of God in the universe, first in
the person of Abraham and later his descendants, as the people of Israel” (Wyschogrod
36, 57). Wyschogrod follows Rosenzweig in subverting the antisemitic caricature of the
Jew as grossly carnal by recasting that very carnality as the locus of God’s presence
(Krell 141). Much earlier in twentieth century, Joachim Schoeps had similarly under-
stood the Jewish people to be not so much a holy nation as a holy body. Rosenzweig,
10 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

also early in the twentieth century, drew upon the Jewish philosophers Philo in Roman
Alexandria and Yehuda Halevi in tenth-century Spain, both of whom had argued that
Jews had to be dispersed in order to spread the word of God to the nations. Halevi in
particular had portrayed the Jews as each one carrying the seeds of the amr ilahi (divine
logos) among the nations. Rosenzweig is further indebted to the Medieval rabbinic
commentator Rashi who understood the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 to refer to the
people Israel who suffered vicariously for the world. Perhaps para-Christian, this
scheme helps Rosenzweig to justify Jewish wandering and its afflictions theologically.
Israel is elected to suffer not only for its own sin but for those of the world. God afflicts
Israel so that the nations will be healed (see Rosenzweig 306–307, 314; Krell 38–39,
64–65). Rosenzweig’s gloss on Halevi and Rashi’s missiology suggests that Jewish
movement itself is redemptive. The transmissibility of Jewish revelation is therefore
dependent on the afflictions that produce Jewish migration. And if redemption and
diasporic movement are part of the same process, then the history of Jewish diaspora
can be read not as a series of disappearances, but as the dissemination of revelation; of
seeds and good things carried on the wind, on the spirit of prayer.
I noted earlier that recent Jewish art criticism has insisted that we need no longer
ask whether Jewish art exists (or whether as the sceptics jibe, it is a contradiction in
terms), but rather how or if it can be defined. I want to define Jewish art as itself the
figure traced by the diasporic movement of Jewish bodies across space: a figure that
might finally reveal the form and approach of God’s presence in history. The truly
Jewish work of art, then, is that which is Israel itself: a religious assembly not so much
displaced as processive, whose exilic progress (not dissimilar to the Christian stations of
the cross) patterns and repatterns salvation history; whose line marks the edge of an
emergent order in the chaos of a rushed departure. This cartography of revelation, this
mapping of devotion’s passage forms a figure: a series of lines drawn by those passing
over space.
In Leviticus 25: 23 God says: “You are strangers and sojourners with Me.” Before
the Holocaust, Ashkenazi folk culture was densely populated by God’s sojourners: the
poor and the simple of no fixed abode that God says go with him: the Thirty-Six Just
Men of Jewish legend who, to save God’s heart from breaking, would slip, weary and
unnoticed, from shtetl to shtetl, carrying the burden of the world’s sin on their back (see
Raphael, “Face of God,” 234–246); the Luftmenschen – the peddler acrobats who once
showed us how to live on air; the Purimspielers – or itinerant groups of actors and clowns
who, from the sixteenth century, carried the Purim story, the story of redemption from
erasure, to remote rural communities. Consider, also, how the great Hasidic rabbis are
identified with and by the names of towns and regions in a Jewish Europe that once was
and is no longer. Their names remember real places that their disciples would journey
for days to reach, and where their piety invited and welcomed God’s real presence. The
recitation of these men’s names – Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg; Rabbi Moshe of
Kobryn, Rabbi Shelmo of Karlin, Rabbi Mordecai of Lekhovitz, Rabbi Yehudah Zevi of
Stretyn, Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk, Rabbi Yitzhak of Vorki – calls part of a long register
of devotion to HaShem (the Name of all names, and one of whose other names is
HaMakom, the place). God is one who also moves through the body of Israel from place
to place. The beacon of divine presence might be tracked as if on a clear night bonfires
or torches are lit in succession across the land; as one light is seen, another is lit. Jewish
wandering, then, is not as aimless as Christian antisemitism once made it sound. That
 THE MYSTERY OF THE SLASHED NOSE AND THE EMPTY BOX 11

God declares in the book of Leviticus: “I have set you apart from other peoples to be
Mine” (Lev. 20:26) entails a purposive movement of bodies in space from one place to
another, one which itself secures a covenantal relationship with God.
A Jewish theological aesthetic need not, therefore, invest its Jewishness in
an aesthetic of distortion or damage (the slashed nose) or absence (the empty box).
Its Jewishness may consist more in being an unsettled aesthetic of passage. Edward
Mirzoeff’s (non-theological) diasporic aesthetic serves a theology of passage well.
Mirzoeff suggests that the dislocations and ruptures of diaspora generate visual hybridity
or “intervisuality.” Drawing on Kitaj’s First Diasporist Manifesto (cited in Olin, “Graven
Images,” 38), Mirzoeff recognises that the diasporic perspective is alien to the modern
Cartesian single perspective and proposes instead a multiple viewpoint in which the
visual is located in the interactive, interdependent, intertexual process of encounters
between persons, communities and cultures (Mirzoeff 3, 6–7, 1–18). The static, single
perspective is lost in the turmoil of the moving crowd.
If Mirzoeff is right about the complexity of Jewish seeing, the question of the trans-
missibility of Judaism requires no artificial dualism of hearing and seeing or any facile
ranking of the senses. (In its turn, this article does not rank seeing above hearing or writ-
ing as the visual is interpreted through the tradition’s words and books, and the visual
spectacle of Israel’s history produces a written commentary.) God’s word, like a Torah
scroll on the Sabbath, is lifted up, held aloft, danced or processed around the synagogue
in order to be seen, held, kissed and touched, as well as read and heard. While Levinas
may be right that “on the mean and petty level of day-to-day reality, a human commu-
nity does not resemble its myth” (Hand, Difficult Freedom, 208), from the telescopic
perspective of the religious historiographer each historical crisis can be interpreted as a
tableau or positioning of bodies, the choreography of whose theomorphic movement
through the world marks the pathos and passage of a God in exile and return.
My point can be illustrated by the Auschwitz March of Life: a crudely nationalistic
gesture in which Israeli youth process through Auschwitz under the flag of the shield of
David; but recalling for me the Zionist flag raised by the Warsaw Ghetto orphans in
Janusz Korczac’s care as they attempted to march – a heavy child in Korczac’s arms – to
the Umschlagplatz or ghetto deportation point, on their way to their death in Treblinka
(Zeitlin 56–57; Glatstein et al. 134–136). The theodramatic sweep of Israel’s history –
whether the flight from Egypt, the assembly at Sinai, the gatherings of Jews on Massada,
the ramp at Auschwitz – forms a series of tableaux whose figuration of holy bodies
within and set apart from the world historical it is the task of theology to interpret. Hans
Urs von Balthasar presents the process of Christian redemption as a divine play or theo-
drama. Perhaps Charlotte Salomon also had some inkling of this when she produced a
series of over a thousand multimedia images between 1941 and 1943 as a deposition of
evidence to her humanity. Her Leben? Oder Theater? took the form of a drama or Singspiel
– a kind of operetta with a prelude, central section and epilogue by which she re-staged
her life as a dramatic production. Salomon was deported from Paris in 1943. Newly
married and pregnant, she was murdered on arrival in Auschwitz. For us to witness or
spectate her life becomes an act of justice.
If, after Halevi and Rosenzweig, Jewish movement is redemptive, there might, in
fact, be two distinctively Jewish kinds of seeing: the kind of post-Holocaust seeing that
is an act of witness and restitutionary justice, but also the kind of seeing induced by a
history of passage through the world as those who move as exiles and migrants. In Genesis
12 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

12: 1, Abraham, an old man of 75, leaves his father’s house and the scenes of his childhood
and travels to the land that God wished “to show him.” So too, that which is only glimpsed
from a train or seen in passing from the roadside may constitute some of the distinctive
nature of Jewish vision and its promise. If post-biblical revelation is de-centered and
given on the way, what we see and understand of God may be carried not only as words
in books, but also on the carts laden with furniture rumbling through the mud and dust,
and in the suitcases of pots, pans and clothing that are also necessary to the daily fulfilment
of the Commandment.
For obvious reasons, Jewish art has been troubled by this movement. In Yosl
Bergner’s painting, Flying Spice Box (1966), there is an important instance wherein
dented pots, pans and spice boxes fly through the air on the winds of holocaustal disper-
sion and land where they fall. Or again, R. B. Kitaj’s The Jew etc. (1976–1979) and The
Jewish Rider (1984–1985) allude to both the Holocaust in which the Third Reich set the
whole of European Jewry into motion along a network of tracks and roads, and more
generally to the psychology of diaspora. The riders on the train are unsettled, preoccu-
pied, and have distorted, averted postures. The train has become the symbol of their
homelessness, of the travellers’ constant movement towards a “destination at best
unknown” (Kampf 105; Baigell and Heyd 223–237, esp. 234; Kitaj, “A Passion,” iii).
Undoubtedly, the figure of Jewish history is a complex one: its lines cross, loop and
double-back. The image it traces replicates/recapitulates itself over and over again until
it becomes a recognizably Jewish image. The “primal scene” for the Belgian Jewish
avant-garde filmmaker Chantal Akerman is that of Holocaustal departure. In a prose
poem she writes: “Once the film was finished/I said to myself, /so that’s what it was:/
that again”:

And slowly you realize that it is always the same thing that is revealed,
a little like a primal scene.
And the primal scene for me although I fight against it …
is far behind or always in front of all images barely covered by others
More luminous, radiant even
Old images of evacuation
Of walking in the snow with packages
Toward an unknown place…15

It is, of course, more than possible to represent the procession of Jewish history as if it
were something of a funeral cortege; as if the railway lines of Jewish history all lead with
no return into the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is something religiously
compelling about that. As the Jew Simone Weil knew, writing, unbaptized, on the
margins of Christian tradition, experience can most fully reveal divine love when it is
most painful. Affliction (malheur) has a revelatory power (Weil 17).
Jewish diaspora art has often, and understandably, reinforced what contemporary
Jewish historian Salo Baron has called “the lachrymose account” of Jewish history.
Epitomizing Judenschmerz in a period of pogroms, Exile (1904), a huge, sombre canvas
by Polish Jewish artist Samuel Hirszenberg (1865–1908), depicts the mass movement
of destitute Russian Jewry across an empty expanse of snow. 16 Leopold Pilichowski’s
Emigrants (c. 1906); The Tired Wanderers (c. 1900) and Rest (1900) are of a similar, if less
epic, mood and content.17 Yet Jewish diaspora art has also celebrated the festivity of a
 THE MYSTERY OF THE SLASHED NOSE AND THE EMPTY BOX 13

Jewish life that is not always “back-shadowed” by knowledge of what was to come. This
is a festivity captured in Marc Chagall’s theatrical set designs painted on the walls of
the Kamerni Yiddish Theatre, Moscow, incorporating the rhythms and burlesque of the
circus.18 One thinks, too, of the teeming street market that wound its way along Hester
Street in the Jewish Lower East Side of New York, depicted in Jacob Epstein’s illustra-
tions for a 1902 book, The Spirit of the Ghetto. Or again, Yefim Ladizhinski’s recent
panoramic canvases of Jewish life in Odessa depict brightly colored parades of sailors,
men gathered for prayer in synagogues, weddings, funerals, children playing and moth-
ers hanging out the washing.
If all of Jewish history – its familial and political spectacle – is itself a devotional
work of religious art, and if God’s spirit, or Shekhinah, is active within the historical
process, then history itself becomes a processive dance or theatre of redemption. A
dance is an image or figure set in expressive motion. If the migrations of the diaspora are
a mimetic representation of God’s exile and return, they too might belong to what
Gerhardus van der Leeuw (71), in his classic phenomenology of sacred dance, calls “the
great mystery of movement and countermovement: the one movement which proceeds
from this world to God, and the other movement which proceeds from God to this
world.”
I conclude with a suggestion – not, I hope, entirely a conceit – by which that passing
over of God might be imagined as a theological work of art that is the object of our
“devout beholding”:19 a dance or series of rhythmic movements and trajectories through
space by whose progression Israel makes straight the path of the Lord (Is. 35: 4–10, 40:
3-5). Just as the Messiah is eternally on his way, but will never come, 20 the processive
dance of Jewish history sacralizes the world as it moves through its space and time. The
figure of Israel as a dancing body or sacral corps de ballet is a non-idolatrous image because
it is not static, complete or rendered dead by its representation; it is a living, moving,
volitional image that can never be seen in its entirety, but only from an infinite number
of perspectives and moments. As part of a process of rhythmic movement the
process(ion) of Israel configures into an ordered, graceful whole: a dance that is, by
virtue of its process, always open to the re-formations of the future. Recall how God
says in Isaiah 43: 18–19: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of
old. I am about to do a new thing, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”
A theology of dance can be traced in the Hebrew Bible where creation dances its
worship of its creator: the floods clap their hands, mountains rejoice and spring like
goats, hills skip like lambs. As Van der Leeuw suggests, moved by the spirit, our move-
ment is in the image of God’s. The biblical God is one who moves: his spirit moves over
the waters of chaos, his pillar of fire leads the Israelites through the desert. Dance
reminds us that God’s movement is the expression of his creative love: “God moved,
and he set us upon this earth in motion. That is sublime and impressive. It is the begin-
ning of his work in creation and salvation. It is also the beginning of the dance” (Van der
Leeuw 74). There are numerous types and occasions of Jewish dance. The Jewish dance
tradition includes ecstatic, triumphal, courtship and wedding dances and these reflect
the diverse biblical tradition of dance in, say, praise and victory, and also those of the
diaspora host culture. Jewish mystics especially knew the power of dance to conjure
divine presence. Before sunset on Fridays, mystics in seventeenth-century Safed went
out from the town over the Galilean hills to dance their welcome of the Sabbath Bride
– the Shekhinah – the indwelling presence of God. At the close of the Sabbath, they
14 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

danced their farewell to her. Just as mishnaic sacred geography mapped space in concen-
tric circles around the Jerusalem temple, so, too, the circular form of many of these
dances, in which all arms are linked, illustrate and preserve the eternity, equality and
solidarity of the Jewish people. 21 Evoking a nimbleness of wit and spirit that has enabled
Jews to bear their burden lightly and hold their balance despite the precariousness of
their situation (a posture popularly symbolized by the silhouetted figure of “the fiddler
on the roof”),22 Ashkenazi dance includes the worldwide custom of “dancing” the young
and the weak on the shoulders of the other dancers.
Levinas, predictably, contemplates the elation of dance with suspicion, claiming that

Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assump-

tion, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it.
… In rhythm there is no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage from oneself
to anonymity. (Hand, “Reality,” 132–133)

Yet perhaps an element of what Levinas decries is what makes sacred dance sacred: as
sacral movement, dance retains the spiritual and aesthetic dignity of a unified body; a
convocation. Even as its individual participants stumble with thirst, hunger and exhaus-
tion; they too are carried high on the shoulders of others in the long dance towards
Jerusalem.
Although the Holocaust witnessed the abjected dance of elderly Jews forced by
Nazis to dance before jeering crowds, and of rabbis forced to dance on desecrated Torah
scrolls, there were also male Hasidim who, on the edge of mass graves, before the firing
squads of the Einsatzgruppen, sang and danced themselves into an ecstatic state of
communion with God by which to rejoice at their sacrificial sanctification of his name
(see Berkovits, With God in Hell, 75, 112). The long columns of the deported, the line
for the gas chambers where the congregation of Israel is driven forward towards the
abyss also has a processive element. The procession can be caricatured, even by Jews
themselves (quoting Jeremiah and Isaiah), as that of docile lambs to the slaughter: a
passive shuffle of the herd through the slaughterhouses of history (cf. Jer. 11: 19; Is.
53: 7). Perhaps, just perhaps, these processive movements towards death are not an
undignified, chaotic falling into the pit, but also belong to the pathos and mystery of a
dance of which we, caught up in it, may be too much a part to understand. Just as
fifteenth-century kabbalism construed all Jewish ritual practice as a cosmic signifier; an
“iconographic recapitulation of divine archetypes and intradeical processes” (Bland
106), so, too, this sacred dance recapitulates the story of the exile of Israel and of the
God accompanying Israel so that Torah might be carried from village to village, city to
city: an exile whose purpose it is to bring all other exiles to an end.

Notes
1. Rosenzweig (415–416). I am indebted to Marc A. Krell’s reading of Rosenzweig’s
argument in his Intersecting Pathways (Krell 39ff).
2. See, e.g., Heschel (28–29, 184–185). In these two sections of his book, Heschel both
affirms the extra-textual, experiential dimension of Jewish spirituality and theology
and yet cannot permit the visual representation of revelation.
 THE MYSTERY OF THE SLASHED NOSE AND THE EMPTY BOX 15

3. Such claims are markedly masculinist since for almost all of Jewish history, and among
most observant communities today, a Jewish woman is only an incidental or contin-
gent listener. She is not an interlocutor with Israel where speech is exchanged
between equals nor is she God’s allocutor – the one whom God has addressed.
4. Cf. Halbertal and Margalit, in which idolatry is construed as an error or misrepresen-
tation in attempting to represent what is unrepresentable.
5. A notable example of “the theology of the slashed nose” is the earliest remaining
German Haggadah from the Upper Rhine in Germany: the Bird’s Head Haggadah,
c. 1300. Here, as in other medieval Jewish MSS, birds’ heads, veils, crowns or rear
views are used to portray the human face (see further Bezazel Narkiss). Modern exam-
ples of distortive Jewish art include Modigliani’s sensual elongation of heads and
bodies; Maryan S. Maryan’s distortion of the human image is one the rabbis might
have been especially pleased with (see, e.g., Personage with Donkey’s Ears, 1962). In this
and other such works, the dehumanizations of the Holocaust and the Jewish artistic
tradition of the distorted image are in uneasy conversation.
6. Kochan rebukes the gaze for turning the divine image, Medusa-like, to stone.
(Compare Sartre’s conviction that the look (le regard) is a refusal of our subjectivity
and a reduction of the human to the status of thing.)
7. See also R. I. Cohen’s parallel rejection of stereotypical modern assumptions about
Jewish logocentrism.
8. Micrography is the calligraphic creation of images from minute letters and words used
to almost pointillist effect (see, e.g., Moshe Hayyim ben Menasha Mordecai’s “Moses
and the Burning Bush,” 1988).
9. “Holocauste, la représentation impossible,” Le Monde, 3 March 1994 (cited in Hansen
133–134).
10. The best known studies that both confess God’s capacity to have averted catastrophe and
either mourn or indict his failure to do so are Blumenthal; Berkovits, Faith After the Holo-
caust; Buber, Eclipse of God. Aspects of this position can be found in the early work of Eli
Weisel and in Arthur Cohen. For a feminist analysis of the use of the hester panim trope,
see Raphael, Female Face of God, 43–58; Raphael, ‘The Price of (Masculine) Freedom.’
11. I am indebted here to Avram Kampf’s theologically inflected description of Rothko’s
method and vision (Kampf 162–163).
12. Similarity-based representations of God are properly prohibited and erroneous on
many counts. However, causal metonymic representations of God such as the cheru-
bim behind the curtain in the Holy of Holies are permitted as they cannot become
substitutes for God, but rather are associated with God in their function as his media
of revelation (his chariot). The same is true of the theophanic cloud or fire since these
do not presume to resemble God and are therefore legitimate representations of
divine presence (Halbertal and Margolit 48–49).
13. Compare Jacques Derrida: “The event of revelation would reveal not only this or that
– God for example – but revealability itself” (Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 18).
14. Buber, Jüdische Künstler. Buber is also aware that it was less a matter of the Second
Commandment than historico-cultural factors that robbed Jews of the opportunity to
make art (Buber, Moses, 186).
15. See also Kampf’s discussion of Bergner’s work (Kampf 88).
16. Hirszenberg’s Exile was exhibited in numerous European galleries and was much-
reproduced. The painting strongly influenced Jewish diaspora art in subsequent years,
though some Zionist ideologues objected to its despondent, even tragic, mood (R. I.
Cohen 211–233).
16 JOURNAL OF MODERN JEWISH STUDIES

17. Further examples of the genre include Mauricy Minkowski’s depiction of three gener-
ations of a dazed and disoriented family huddled together in After the Pogrom (1905);
see also Jews Leaving the Town (c. 1910) and At the Train Station (c. 1906–1914).
18. See Chagall’s pencil, gouache and watercolour study for the Introduction to the Jewish
Theatre (1920).
19. There is a medieval Christian devotional tradition of “devout beholding,” leading
through compassion, even tears, to ever greater love of God. Devout beholding was
not a passive, detached, observation, but a transformatory way of looking at an image
of Christ’s redemptive suffering that was tantamount to its indelible impression or
imprinting on the soul. Witnessing Christ’s suffering, indeed sharing in it through
compassion, was a means to the forgiveness of sins. The abuse of devout beholding as
a means of earning pardon for sin led to the practice dying out in Protestant circles
after the Reformation (Rhodes)
20. See e.g., Schwarzschild (209), citing Maimonides: “[T]he Messiah will always not yet
have come, into all historical eternity. It is his coming, or rather the expectation of his
coming, not his arrival, his ‘advent,’ that is obligatory Jewish faith.”
21. After immigrating to Palestine in 1923, Reuven Rubin’s diaspora images of Jewish
suffering were replaced by joyous images that included paintings of Orthodox Jews
engaged in devotional dance. One of the best known of these is his Dancers of Meron
(1926), which conveys an eschatological vision of Jewish unity through the dynamic
embrace of dance (here at the festival of Lag B’Omer, celebrated in the town of Safed)
(see Manor 82).
22. Marc Chagall’s painting Dead Man (1908) offers a less sanguine representation of
the “fiddler on the roof” than that of the eponymous film directed by Norman Jewison
in 1971.

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Melissa Raphael is Professor of Jewish Theology at the University of Gloucestershire.

She has published widely in the area of religion, theology and gender. Her books include
Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (1997, 2004); Thealogy [sic] and Embodiment (1996)
and The Female Face of God in Auschwitz (2003). She is currently working on a study of
Jewish theological aesthetics. Address: Melissa Raphael, Department of Humanities,
University of Gloucestershire, Francis Close Hall, Cheltenham GL50 4AZ, UK. [e-mail:
mraphael@glos.ac.uk]