Richard I. Cohen and Mirjam Rajner, “The Return of the Wandering Jew (s) in Samuel Hirszenberg’s Art,” Ars Judaica, vol. 7 (2011): 1-24 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Invoking Samuel Hirszenberg’s Artistic Legacy—Encountering Exile*
IMAGES, 2014
Samuel Hirszenberg (1865–1908), the Łódź-born artist, created several signature works of art that would emerge as emblematic of the Jewish historical experience of the twentieth century. Exile (1904) is one of these works that came to evoke the trials and tribulations of Jewish fate in the decades following its creation. After placing Exile in the context of Hirszenberg’s oeuvre, this essay charts its cultural and artistic reception over close to a century in diverse media. Exile evoked instinctive, negative responses alongside a deep sense of identification and appropriation. The essay illuminates the ways in which a seminal work of art can engender intense interaction over decades, allowing a wide range of interpretations, references, and quotations.
Through legends, the Jewish collective memory awards a significant place to the builders of synagogues, as it does to the painters of synagogue murals and the carvers of Torah arks. These narratives played an important role in the Jewish community's perception of and its self-identification in the townscape. Tales about masters, both Jewish and Christian, full of oddities, didactics, and miracles, believably circulated in Jewish traditional society, although they were not recorded until the early twentieth century. Sometimes a tale echoes an inscription left by a master on his work, but most often it is an independent form of collective memory. The legends live according to the rules of their genre, often making use of universal subjects, so that their understanding is difficult without the context of non-Jewish folklore. The Israeli School of Folklore Studies is deeply involved in the study of the international tale types and their adaptation to Jewish religious texts and daily life, to the Jewish addressers and addressees in their historical mutations and geographical variety. Such adaptation leads to the production of new narratives, called oicotypes in accordance with the theory and terminology transferred by Carl von Sydow from biology to ethnography. The present paper is dedicated to the adaptation of the Tale of a Giant as a Master Builder (AT 1099), which is popular in Jewish folklore and belles-lettres. The paper deals with the main components of this tale as rendered in a traditional society, its transformations in the writings of European acculturated interpreters, Jewish national romanticists, and those who abandoned this latter trend to embrace the artistic avant-garde.