Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme by Asher D. Biemann (review)

How can religion tolerate art? What is the value of art compared to the simple truth, to the justice of plain religion?

It is customary to regard the European Jewish enthusiasm for art as Bildung: the cultural and intellectual education through which Jews became citizens of the world. What if this intense connection with art—expressed through collecting, scholarship, travel, and all forms of cultural production—was not just a way into secular culture, a distraction from Jewishness, but an empowering and ennobling form of religiosity? The premise of Asher D. Biemann's study is that "cultural eroticism" has something essential in common with the religious experience. Religion not only "tolerates" art; it is, as Hermann Cohen wrote, "always nurtured by art." But can modern Judaism, undergirded by the second commandment and the prophets' rebukes, embrace something called "statue-love"? It ultimately depends on what is meant by "love."

The widespread Jewish fascination with Michelangelo's Moses in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome forms the heart of this imaginatively composed inquiry. The primal scene is of course Sigmund Freud's experience visiting and writing about this statue between 1901-1914 ("The Moses of Michelangelo," 1914), which has spawned volumes of commentary. Yet Freud's obsession was not sui generis. From the nineteenth century on, pictures, replicas, and literary impressions of the seated Hebrew lawgiver with his ominous gaze and horned head were omnipresent in Jewish society; Moses figured in belles lettres, in journalism, in Jewish living rooms. In effect, by the time Freud wrote his essay, and even earlier, when Tchernichovski wrote the famous Hebrew poem "Before a Statue of Apollo" (1899), "confronting a statue [had become] a modern Jewish genre."

But what was the nature of this fascination? Freud was not alone in finding Michelangelo's Moses to be more awesome, complex, and genuine, than his scriptural counterpart. Biemann discusses in detail the responses of Guiseppe Revere, a Triestene Jewish poet, and the writer Salomon Steinheim, who moved to Rome in 1849. Most unforgettable is Steinheim's dramatic sketch, in which the prophet Moses actually takes the artist to task for his decisions ("what evil demon, what buffoon . . . gave you the idea of these horns?") before shattering the statue with a lightening bolt: ("'You shall not make a graven image' . . . 'and yet you have sculpted one of me!'") Biemann argues, however, that Freud, Steinheim, and others were not aesthetic idolaters but Jewish Pygmalians: they beheld the statue as an uncanny Other and dreamed of its awakening. The statue was ambiguously alive, revelatory, at once a symbol of origins and of mortality; it returned their gaze and created them. Jews did not love the statue as much as they wanted it to love them back. The Jewish "dream of a moving Moses" was of a kind with the plastic aesthetics of Winckelmann, Lessing, Heine and others, but Biemann identifies something more: a type of statue-love that was unchristian, unromantic, unmodern, unrequited—a love known first-hand by the people whose God commands them, "Love me!" (Rosenzweig).

The theater of Jewish statue love is, of course, Italy. Biemann's first chapter gives account of modern Jewish Italophilia as expressed in the works of numerous Jewish German thinkers and poets. Reading the chapter, one has the sensation of paging through travel diaries of Heinrich Heine, Dorothea Schlegel, Arnold Zweig, Rachel Katzenelson, Henriette Herz, Fanny Lewald, Heinrich Graetz, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Georg Simmel, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and others. In the impressions and declarations of so many Jewish pilgrims, one discovers that Jews did indeed partake in the "tradition of German Rome neurosis," and were deeply attracted to the sensuous South, the cult of art, and Catholicism. But here too, Biemann finds something more than Fernliebe, love of that which is far: rebellion, defiance, agency—an escape from pariah-hood, a homecoming. One of this author's most powerful insights regards...