Secularizing the Sacred: Aspects of Israeli Visual Culture by Alec Mishory (review)

In this richly illustrated volume, Alec Mishory has compiled a selection of his studies in visual culture in Israel from the pre-State period to recent decades, the fruit of over two decades of his research in this field. The topics discussed vary. Some chapters concentrate on individual artists, Israeli and non-Israeli, who have left their mark on Israel’s visual space; some discuss memorial monuments, illustrations, typography, graphic design, the design of emblems and state symbols, banknotes, stamps, and medals. Many of the works discussed in the book are the products of public commissions as a means to convey a specific message, while others by contemporary Israeli artists, scattered throughout the book but mainly in the final chapter, are the result of independent creative initiatives of individuals. No hierarchy or distinction between the different art genres is offered; all receive equal treatment in research methods and interpretation. This approach is well rooted in “visual culture,” the field of studies widely spread in academia nowadays, which sometimes replaces traditional disciplines such as art history. This large umbrella blurs not only status within art practices (e.g. between fine art and applied or commercial art) but also intentions, processes of execution, and reception. To an extent, the concept of visual culture shares some characteristics with another difficult concept – Jewish art, which since its early days has encompassed both fine art and handicrafts of Judaica and ritual objects. Perhaps this connection led the author to mention briefly the debate held among some well-known American (Jewish) art critics in the 1960s and 1970s, notably Harold Rosenberg and Robert Pincus-Witten, on the definition of Jewish art (pp. 6–7). Little is said about this debate afterward until the very last phrase, when Mishory brings it back, to end his book with a question mark, the inevitable question mark that accompanies the term Jewish art.

Mishory takes a rather functional approach to the question of Jewish art, namely, how certain traditions, conceptions, visual images, and various textual sources have been reinterpreted and reshaped in the making of Israel’s visual culture in its different variations. The book’s title suggests a process of separation from the religious domain to the non-religious or secular one. Although the term “secular” appears frequently in the book, it receives no theoretical discussion or clarification of its meaning. Even in the early Zionism, pre-State, and early statehood periods discussed in the book, there was never a clear-cut distinction between secular Zionist culture and its religious roots. All the more so in present-day Israel, where the term secular has become a sociological or even political category, and is often analyzed in relation to other concepts such as religion, tradition, or nationalism.¹ Several books dedicated to secularism that were published recently in Israel demonstrate how the debate around this concept – be it a form of identity, a worldview, or a matter of lifestyle – is very relevant to Israel’s culture today.²

The relationship between Jewish culture and Israeli culture is often understood in genealogical terms: the latter is the modern offspring of the former. We might thus expect visualization of these relations, parallel, for instance, to the textual borrowings from ancient sources that we find in modern Hebrew literature. It is quite surprising – and Mishory puts it on the table early on – that artists adopted other cultures, consciously and intentionally, when aspiring to create the new Zionist visual world.

First is the most famous Zionist artist, Ephraim Mose Lilien (1874–1925), in chapter 1. Born in Drohobycz (then Galicia), he worked mainly in Germany as illustrator, printmaker, and photographer. He was an active Zionist, a member of the Democratic Fraction in the Zionist movement (1901–1904), which founded the Jüdischer Verlag (Jewish publishing house) in Berlin, and was involved in the founding of Bezalel School of arts and crafts in Jerusalem...