The Academic Case for Jewish Art
Renoir, The Jewish Wedding in Morocco, 1875
In a community like Havurah’s, the existence of “Jewish Art” (capital J, capital A), is a given. We utilize this space to further an artistic practice to which countless artists already identify. In academia, however, the existence of Jewish Art as a stand-alone category is a bit more complicated.
Fortunately, it is now well recognized that Jews have been engaging with a material culture long before gaining access to formal art guilds and academies in the late 1800s. These works of art – ancient and modern, religious and non-religious – are exhibited and written about, always in intentionally Jewish spaces (such as synagogues, Jewish Museums, or Judaica sales at auction houses), and sometimes at small galleries or prominent museums. But think about the last time you saw a work of art related to a Jewish community outside of an intentionally Jewish space, or in any major museum for that matter. Was it exhibited in a way that contextualized the complexity of what it means for a work of art to be connected to Jewish community? Did it engage with the object as a form of a distinctly “Jewish Art” tradition? Unfortunately, the answer is probably not.
“Though I believe that Jewish Art is neither stagnant or singular, it is imperative that it becomes commonplace in not just contemporary collectives, but powerful academic institutions, to motivate and continue these kinds of conversations.”
The good news is that there are scholars and institutions out there who are working to resolve this issue in real time, for Jews and other marginalized communities alike. Last year, I wrote my undergraduate art history thesis on one such institution, The Jewish Museum here in New York. Though yes, The Jewish Museum is an intentionally Jewish space, it also stands as a prominent American cultural institution that welcomes thousands of visitors from non-Jewish backgrounds. Sometimes, it even puts on exhibitions that are criticized for having very little to do with Jewish history. An analysis of The Jewish Museum and its exhibitions are thus important to discussing the stakes of categorizing complex communities and artistic traditions, particularly Jewish artmaking and how it is defined by diaspora.
Moroccan Jewish Family, year unkown
In the early 2000s, The Jewish Museum in New York held an exhibition titled “Morocco: Jews and Art in a Muslim Land.” Like many contemporary ethnography or world museums, this museum’s exhibition presented the uniqueness and importance of the Moroccan Jewish community and its visual culture to audiences but grounded its framework in the disciplinary norms of anthropology and art history. Though it succeeded in centering a marginalized community within a traditional museum, the exhibition produced reductive narratives incapable of doing justice to the historical complexity of Moroccan Jews. This complexity involves hundreds of years of intercultural entanglements within the modern-day borders of Morocco and the diaspora, movement, and migration that made this Jewish identity, as well as all Jewish identities, so complex. While the people who viewed the exhibition left with an awareness of the beauty of the striking array of objects, which were (unfortunately) either objects related to Jewish rituals or Orientalist paintings and photographs of Moroccan Jews by non-Jewish artists, they had no context for the fact that the exhibition primarily derived its foundational definitions of Moroccan Jewish identity and culture from Morocco’s colonial period, the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.
A significant part of Morocco’s Jewish history does relate to its colonial period and its isolation from non-Jewish Moroccan residents through its religious practices. There are, however, thousands of years of important and relatively tolerant intercultural engagements between the various communities in Morocco before European colonialism, as well as decades of diasporic history relating to contemporary Moroccan Jews.
Though my thesis dealt more with the relations between Jews and non-Jews living in Morocco at the same time as one another, I think the contemporary diasporic Moroccan Jewish identity is more relevant to the artmaking that occurs at Havurah today.
A Jewish shoemaker in Morocco, 1953 via Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People
The Jewish Museum’s Morocco exhibition presented the identity of being Moroccan Jewish as both originating and disappearing due to the French colonial structures that distinguished it from both its Muslim neighbors in Morocco and global Jewry. What this identity, which was made distinct by a colonial empire and defined by an art institution, particularly does not leave room for is the contemporary Moroccan Jewish identity that very much exists in diasporic communities outside of Morocco, particularly in Israel and the United States, as well as France and Canada. Though artists living and practicing in these communities may not have been as recognized in 2000 at the time of “Morocco: Jews and Art in a Muslim Land” as they are today, it is important to mention them to illustrate how The Jewish Museum’s definition of Moroccan Jewish Art is not useful to contemporary Moroccan Jewish artists.
Though there are many who could and should be highlighted, one example of a Moroccan Jewish artist who is creating art to showcase the complexity of the diasporic Moroccan Jewish experience is Amit Hai Cohen. Cohen, a Moroccan Jew living in Israel, curated an impactful exhibition titled “Ziara: Moroccan Common Wisdom” for the fourth Jerusalem Biennale in 2019. The Haaretz article that reviewed the exhibition outlines contemporary Moroccan Jewish art as a defiant genre, and one that calls out and responds to traditional narratives about Moroccan Jews in Israel. Rather than continue the narrative highlighted by The Jewish Museum exhibition that Moroccan Jewish Art is a historical object of the past, Cohen sought to utilize his exhibition and the multitude of diverse artists displaying their work in it, to show that Moroccan Jewish Art is fundamentally both contemporary and constantly evolving.
Artists in the exhibition included painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, and fashion designers, and all of them, whether Jewish or Muslim, Moroccan or Israeli, or another identity, use their art to show the complexity of what it means to engage with Moroccan-ness today. While Cohen’s work and my thesis concentrate on Moroccan Jews, one can see how these questions can relate to Jewish artists from around the globe, in the past and present, whose traditions, experiences, and artmaking are all connected to diaspora.
Jewish Artisans in Morocco, 1953 via Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People
Interestingly, instead of labeling themselves within a category called “Moroccan Jewish Art,” Cohen defined his category as “Moroccan Wisdom.” He stated his hope for the exhibition to contribute to dismantling reductive narratives about Moroccan identity, in Israel and other Middle Eastern countries, that fail to recognize the complexity and uniqueness of Moroccan Jews. The work of Amit Hai Cohen and his participating artists reveals that art created by those who embrace both Moroccan and Jewish identity in their current forms is very much alive today and undefinable by traditional art historical or anthropological categories, which do not allow for complexity in singular categories. Contemporary Moroccan Jewish artists, however, understand their work as inherently interwoven with the nations they inhabit and consequent cultural characteristics they adopt. Ultimately, Moroccan Jewish art cannot be seen as one fixed entity, and it certainly cannot be assigned to artists without their active participation in finding meaning with that identification. What does this mean for contemporary artists represented by the overarching category of Jewish Art, and what can it mean for the complexity of artmaking happening all throughout the Jewish diaspora? And further, how do we get our Jewish artists to be better represented in powerful, traditional museums with a category such as Jewish Art but ensure the category does not become reductive, stagnant, or singular?
As we all know, Jewishness is ever-evading a clear definition. And as many art historians know, the definition of “art” is also always evolving. While language, by Jews and non-Jews alike, can refer to Jews as a singular ethnicity or peoplehood across the world, Jewish communities in varying geographic and temporal locations still possess distinct experiences from one another that should be recognized alongside what they share.
Throughout Jewish history, individuals recognized as ancestors of the Jewish people have been referred to as “Israelites,” “Judeans,” or “Hebrews.” Even today, the words “Jewish,” “Judaism,” and “Jew” do not refer to ethnicity, culture, and religion in the same way.
Though there has been art made by and for Jews for thousands of years, it is extremely difficult to articulate the parameters for an exhibitable tradition of Jewish Art because “Jewish” and “Art” are difficult to define as well.
Moreover, if a work of art is defined as Jewish not just because of its symbols or religious nature, but by the identity of the artist who created it, then the conversation becomes even more complicated. In nations like Morocco, there have been histories of non-Jewish artisans creating objects for Jewish ritual and prayer practices, which have traditionally been categorized as Judaica. If Judaica created by non-Jews is still exhibited and sold as Judaica (and these objects can often be so old that there is no way of proving it was produced by a Jew or non-Jew), then it is not necessarily a prerequisite for Jewish Art to be created by Jewish hands. Similarly, there are many objects created by Jewish hands that have nothing explicitly to do with Judaism, such as modern paintings created by Jews in the mid-twentieth century who sought to distance themselves from the Jewish identity that caused their tragic displacement.
Yet still, contemporary Jewish artists and art historians are begging for a Jewish Art tradition that can include both the complexity of their artmaking and those of their ancestors, no matter how distinct their diasporic experiences may be from one another.
My thesis suggested that a succinct definition of Jewish Art may just never exist, but its very existence is what is important. This might frighten art historians and anthropologists and their respective institutions that have the responsibility to create exhibitions representative of particular aesthetic traditions and social identity. In my opinion, the idea that asking questions about the nature of art historical categories such as Jewish Art could be more important than finding answers to them is remarkable and important. It illustrates that complexity should be welcome, not avoided, in discussions around artmaking and when constructing academic presentations of art history.
Although I am critical of the Jewish Museum’s Morocco exhibition here and in my thesis, it is important to emphasize that its work, albeit flawed, is extremely important. Without a museum or scholar taking the initial step to center an underrepresented minority and its visual culture, no second step could ever be taken. Though its category of a Moroccan Jewish aesthetic tradition is flawed, failing to identify this group of people as both distinct and ever evolving would negate the lived experiences of communities who were fundamentally shaped by the nation-state building of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even if the parameters defining what Jewish Art can be remain loose, an exhibition such as The Jewish Museum’s Morocco one, illustrates the need for those that can motivate scholarly conversations towards better representation of the complexity of material culture and Jewish communities. Though I believe that Jewish Art is neither stagnant or singular, it is imperative that it becomes commonplace in not just contemporary collectives, but powerful academic institutions, to motivate and continue these kinds of conversations.
