20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Aesthetics

Aesthetics Steven S. Schwarzschild A t first consideration the notion of Jewish aesthetics seems ludicrous. If something is beautiful, what does its putative Jewishness have to do with its beauty? Furthermore, what would make an art object Jewish: its so-called subject matter? But, if that is the case, what about a menorah made by a gentile craftsman? Or the religion of the artist? If so, what about a crucifixion scene painted by a Jew? Finally, it has been noted that, however creative Jews have been in such fields as religion, law, literature, science, and economics, until recent times-that is, until large numbers of Jews, and with them their artistic traditions, were assimilated into non-Jewish cultures-no Jewish art was produced, nor were there Jewish artists of any great significance. There can thus be no surprise that there has never been any body of Jewish literature on art or aesthetics. How then Jewish aesthetics-that is, a Jewish theory of art? Nevertheless, the public and private collection of Jewish art began in the second half of the last century and has been rapidly increasing since then. A body of literature, though limited and almost invariably of a historical 2 AESTHETICS rather than of a theoretical, aesthetic character, has been produced. And art continues to be created that calls itself, and sometimes is indeed, jewish. Extant jewish art consists almost totally of religious artifacts, such as spice boxes for the ceremony concluding the Sabbath, illuminations in Passover Haggadot, and synagogal architecture. All of these follow the rabbinic injunction to "beautify the service of God" (BT Shabo 133b, on Ex. 15:2). For the rest, what is generally accepted as jewish art concerns itself with descriptions of one sort or another of the life of jews, but this is not, as we have seen, necessarily jewish art any more than, say, a Portuguese picture of a fourteenth-century Mexican Indian is Mayan art. There has always been a considerable amount of jewish nongraphic art: certainly literature, including poetry of all sorts, as well as synagogal and other music (whose prehistory in classical as well as modern times is much debated). Taken together, the bulk of jewish art is, thus, to this day in the realm of "arts and crafts," utilitarian rather than absolute-"l'art pour l'art." Utilitarian jewish art would then be the first class of objects with which jewish aesthetics deals. This immediately raises the question of whether there are any implicit principles that can be shown to underlie such actual as well as acceptable jewish art, and, if so, what they are. Thereupon other questions arise: for example, how do such jewish aesthetic principles, if any, accord with other principles of judaism (which are, in turn, always much controverted)? What one would obtain, though, if one were able to answer these questions would be a theory, an aesthetic, of jewish art, but not yet by any means a jewish aesthetic of art in general. There are, nonetheless, compelling reasons for stipulating a universal jewish aesthetic, and some basic specifications can be adduced with which to enflesh them. To begin with, judaism, and even jewish law, has from the outset and to this day said a few but fundamental things about art in general, and not only about art by or for jews. The best-known such statement is, of course, the so-called Second Commandment (Ex. 20:4, Deut. 4:16-18, 5:8), which prohibits making an "image" of everything on, above, or below the earth, most especially of God. This broad prohibition of idolatry is, in the j ewish-view , enjoined on all human beings. It would seem, if taken literally, to leave little or no room for "images" and "representations." And this is, indeed, generally asserted to be the reason for the striking poverty of plastic and graphic arts in jewish history. In the development of rabbinic judaism this negativum, the normative absence of representations or of attempted representations of the divine, was rightly taken to entail the perennial and important principle that, AESTHETICS 3 unlike physical nature, which is both capable of and allowed to be "imaged," spirit, however conceived-whether as metaphysical realities, or reason, or morality-is unsusceptible to representation. Hermann Cohen read the Second Commandment, therefore, as saying: "Thou shalt not make an image of the moral subject.,,1 (Some contemporary scholars dispute at least the historical...