Louis XIII, Richard I, and the Duchess of Devonshire: Nineteenth-Century Jews in Fancy Dress Costume

In the nineteenth century, fancy dress activities and their material record formed part of the mise-en-scène of the Jewish elite’s self-fashioning. Family photographs and press reports of Jews in costume cast new light on the visualization of wealthy Jews. These Jews actively participated in the fancy dress culture of the elites, a popular form of cultural expression that was deemed a powerful way to convey social messages. In the British Empire, Europe, and North America, affluent Jews negotiated their feelings of solidarity and difference among non-Jews. They explored and articulated their self-image and group identity by appropriating others’ history and culture in public and private dressing-up amusements. Fancy dress, this article argues, enabled Jews to question who they wanted to be and communicate their desires to their Jewish and non-Jewish peers.

¿Dónde están los Judíos en la “Vida Americana?”: Art, Politics, and Identity on Exhibit

Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945, an exhibition that opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in February, 2020, proposed to remake art history by demonstrating the profound impact Mexican painters had on their counterparts in the United States, inspiring American artists “to use their art to protest economic, social, and racial injustices.” An unexamined part of this chapter of art history concerns the role of radical Jews, who constitute almost one half of the American artists whose work appears in the exhibition. Rooted in a distinct experience, as either immigrants or their American-born children, these Jewish artists had been making politically charged artworks well before the Mexican muralists’ arrival in the United States. Considering the role of left-wing Jews in this period of art-making would complicate the curatorial thesis of Vida Americana. Moreover, the exhibition’s lack of attention to Jews in creating and promoting this body of work raises questions about how the present cultural politics of race may have informed the analysis of this chapter of art history.

Leviathan: The Metamorphosis of a Medieval Image

The image of Leviathan held a special fascination for artists who decorated wooden synagogues and illustrated manuscripts from the eighteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century in Eastern Europe. They usually depicted this biblical and Talmudic creature as a giant fish coiled round in a circle. A leviathan of the same shape appears at first in Jewish manuscripts produced in Germany and regions under the cultural influence of German Jews in the thirteenth century. The appearance of this image was inspired, probably, by piyutim (liturgical songs) written in this time in the same region. The Jewish commentary tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrates a renewed surge of interest in this particular creature. It can be assumed that the special interest in Leviathan, both in the verbal and in the visual tradition, was correlated with the expectation of messianic times. The Leviathan represents the only image in the vault paintings of wooden synagogues that possesses a direct connection to traditional texts and manifests continuity with the Middle Ages visual traditions. In light of this, investigation into the Leviathan image in synagogue paintings is of special significance. The use of this image by Jewish artists may also shed indirect light on the meaning of other depictions that are compositionally related, and thus furnish a partial answer to the intriguing questions of the character and significance of those paintings. The present article is devoted to precisely these aspects of the Leviathan image; i.e., the genesis of its form and its semantics in synagogue paintings.

Diagramming Sabbateanism

Scholars have only recently started to study ilanot (lit., “trees”), the cosmographic genre constituted by the wedding of kabbalistic diagrams—the trees of the metonymic name—and large parchment sheets. Differences of kabbalistic opinion naturally found expression in these “maps of God.” The Sabbatean messianic movement of the 1660s and its prolonged and impactful afterlife produced, among other things, a number of distinctive kabbalistic opinions. For the most part, these innovations were tightly integrated with the speculations associated with “Lurianic” Kabbalah based on the teachings of R. Isaac Luria (1534–1572). The great Lurianic ilanot were designed and circulated in the second third of the seventeenth century, not long before the emergence of Sabbateanism, but their golden age was “the long eighteenth century”—a British coinage for roughly 1660–1830—and thus coincided with the profound and pervasive absorption of Sabbatean elements in precisely those sectors that produced and consumed these artifacts, including nascent Hasidism. The deceptively simple question at the heart of this article is this: What would it mean to diagram Sabbateanism? Or to put it another way, what would constitute a Sabbatean ilan? How might distinctive Sabbatean ideas have found diagrammatic expression in this genre? Once identified as such, what do Sabbatean ilanot tell us about the meanings of Sabbateanism in the contexts within which they were produced?