The Wanderings of Hermann Struck's Ahasver: The Rediscovery of a Forgotten Painting and Its Evocative Transformation

Since the late 1970s, generations of Israeli students and lecturers at Bar-Ilan University's Faculty of Jewish Studies have frequently passed a monumental canvas that depicts an old, traditionally dressed Jew sitting with his hands passively folded in front of a closed door, and staring melancholically into the world. Juxtaposed with a modernist, nearly abstract relief composed of Hebrew letters that hangs on the opposite wall, the old Jew is meant to recall galut, Jewish Diaspora, positioned in stark contrast against the rebirth of the Hebrew language and nation. This contrast is an essential element of the foundational myth that accompanied the development of the local visual culture as early as in pre-State Israel, when the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, which was established in Jerusalem in 1906, began symbolically facilitating the transition from the old to the new.¹ During this often revisited and nowadays criticized process, the old remained in the past, serving only as a reminder of bygone days and a backdrop for the rise of the new.² It seems that as a result of this attitude, the Bar-Ilan painting of the old Jew, which originally appeared in two publications – the German Jewish cultural journal Ost und West in 1912 and its Hungarian Jewish counterpart Múlt és Jövő (Past and Future) in 1914 – remained unknown even to the experts.³ Ars Judaica, the art journal of Bar-Ilan University, thus seems to be a fitting venue for the rediscovery of this valuable painting (fig. 1).

Old Jew is a large-sized oil painting (205.5 × 128 cm) created by the well-known German Jewish artist Hermann Struck (1876–1944) in his hometown, Berlin, in 1911. Struck, who immigrated to Palestine at the end of 1922, after acquiring fame in numerous Western countries, remained largely on the margins of the art world in his new homeland. Nevertheless, although he is known primarily for teaching and for his graphic art, notably etchings, his work has been shown in several important exhibitions in Israel, especially in the wake of the recent rise of interest

Fig. 1.

Hermann Struck, Old Jew, 1911, oil on canvas, 205.5 x 128 cm. Ramat Gan, Bar-Ilan University. Photograph: Liat Elbling

in Jewish aspects of Israeli art.⁴ However, his oil paintings, which number far fewer than his etchings, as he was indeed primarily a graphic artist, still remain largely unnoticed. Among these is his Old Jew (1911).⁵

Researchers of paintings created by Jews in the modern period cannot but instantly notice a striking similarity between Struck's 1911 Old Jew and Jozef Israëls's A Son of the Ancient Race, which was painted around 1889 and now in the Jewish Museum in New York.⁶ This seminal work, in the tradition of The Hague School of Painting of which Israëls was a founder, compassionately depicts a downtrodden second-hand clothes peddler in front of his store in Amsterdam's Jewish Quarter.⁷ Resignation, acceptance of one's fate, sorrow, and old age are central themes of a number of Israëls's canvases (and of those of other contemporary Dutch artists, including the young Van Gogh) that depict the scenes from the lives of poor peasants and fishermen. Israëls, influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch painting and a follower of the Barbizon School, painted numerous such scenes while living in the village of Zandvoort. In a typical mixture of realism and romanticism, these works portrayed the hardships of the Dutch fishermen and their families. In his Son of the Ancient Race, Israëls reflected similar humanistic concern toward a member of his own people, seeing in his sad condition a symbol of universal suffering.

Fig. 2.

Hermann Struck, A Son of the Ancient Race (after Jozef Israëls), 1907, etching, 79 x 59.5 cm. Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, n. B09526. Photograph: © Jerusalem, The Israel Museum

Israëls was...