Visions of Jewish Modernism

Visions of Jewish Modernism

The relation between text and image is one of the abiding tensions within modernism. It has found expression in myriad forms, from individual works of art, such as Pablo Picasso's cubist collages, to the more general interplay between literature and the fine arts, as well as that between writers and painters, such as Gertrude Stein and Picasso, to cite one well-known example. Furthermore, modernist literature often mimicked contemporaneous artistic modes in an attempt to produce the concrete materiality of painting in language, something that is conventionally considered a temporal medium. Indeed, modernism's interplay between literature and the fine arts may be understood as simply a continuation of the rivalry between the "sister arts," wherein the expressive effects of poetry and painting "competed" for aesthetic supremacy.¹ G. E. Lessing's "Laöcoon: An Essay on the Limits of Poetry and Painting" (1766) remains the most influential and systematic division of literature and painting in temporal and spatial terms. Poetry for Lessing was the genre that most closely approximated painting's material ability to represent the world in all its sensual detail. By contrast, neoclassical formulations of ut pictura poesis, a phrase originating with Horace, compared poetry to painting by way of the concept of voice, referring to them as "speaking picture" and "mute poetry."² Whether or not these critical judgments adequately define the full gamut of painterly and literary production, historically they have had enormous interpretive agency.

Modernism's insistent and often complementary deployment of images and text seems, however, to be more than just the latest iteration of one of Western culture's essential divisions. The expressive efficacy of image as opposed to word, of body as opposed to spirit, is at the very core of modernism's extended testing of the limits of representation. In this article, I contend that Jewish writers and artists had a special relation to this central tension within modernism, given the history of European Jewish culture and its normative prohibition on visual representation. This aniconic sensibility, deriving from the Second Commandment, "You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image," has been felt in various ways at different junctures in history across Jewish cultures.³ Historically, a resistance toward visual or "pagan" representation has often been a barometer of Jewish-gentile relations, a way for Jews to set themselves apart from the larger, surrounding non-Jewish populations.⁴ Broadly speaking, it has engendered a cultural tradition that is wholly bound up with the text, both in practical and in more esoteric senses. These traditional parameters had a profound influence on emergent forms of modern Jewish culture, be they secular literary genres, such as lyric poetry and novels, or the newly available realm of the fine arts. Indeed, since the Haskalah [Jewish enlightenment], attitudes toward the visual, both for and against, have underscored the general passage of traditional Jewish societies into secularism and modernity.

Recent studies such as Richard Cohen's Jewish Icons5 and the critical collection, Jewish Identity in Modern Art History,⁶ have sought to overturn, and even displace, the normative view regarding the role, or lack thereof, of aesthetics within modern Jewish society and thought; these works describe with impressive intellectual rigor both the intensity with which Jewish cultures have produced visual artifacts and the tendentiousness of claims to the contrary. Scholars of religion such as Leora Batnitzky and Kalman Bland have contextualized normative assumptions regarding Judaism's antipathy to art within the ideological and philosophical interrogations of nineteenth century German Jewish intellectuals.⁷ Bland sums up the field thus:

Aniconism was either a vice to be condemned or a virtue worthy of praise. Condemnation served the ideological needs of those who hoped to rid Europe of Judaism. Praise served the ideological needs of those who struggled to perpetuate assimilated Jewish life in the Diaspora. Regardless of their ideological motive, they agreed that Judaism was fundamentally aniconic.⁸

Though the assumption "that Judaism was fundamentally aniconic" has now been conclusively...