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° The Genius, Art and Calligraphy of the Jews ° The Hoopoe Bird

The Genius, Art and Calligraphy of the Jews

In the first centuries C.E., Jewish communities could be found in every corner of the Roman empire, from Sardis (Turkey) to Ostia (Italy), from Hamman Lif (Tunisia) to Intercisa (Hungary).

Sardis, Turkey. Meyer. 1837.

The archaeological remnants and literary attestations of more than 150 synagogues throughout the empire make clear that Jews were integral to the urban landscape of late antiquity, well beyond the borders of Roman Palestine.

Asia Minor, in particular, boasted numerous, and often prosperous, Jewish communities. Splendid murals with narrative scenes from the Bible covered synagogue walls; painted tiles of zodiacal symbols ornamented its ceiling. Jews placed gold glass disks representing the menorah and Torah arks at their tombs, as well as symbols of the festival of Sukkot.

Menorahs at a Market Stall, Jerusalem

In early Byzantine synagogues such as Hamman Lif in North Africa and Beth Alpha, Hammath Tiberias, and Sepphoris in Israel, specifically Jewish symbols shofarot (ram's horns), menorot (branched lamps), and Torah shrines might appear alongside pomegranates, birds, lions and fountains. Zodiac wheels with human figures also find a prominent place in the pavements of several synagogues, dated from the fourth to the sixth centuries, as do scenes drawn from the Bible or allegorized images of the River Nile.

Clerical and Political Relationships

Deportation Of Jews Jean Fouquet

From the First Century C. E. to 1948, Jewish spiritual leaders expressed various interpretations regarding the alleged restrictions included in the biblical Second Commandment concerning the making of “graven images." During certain historical periods, Jewish spiritual leaders granted permission and even supported the creation of visual images; in other periods and circumstances, they opposed them. Even though the Israeli political establishment took it upon itself (in sporadic cases) to turn to Jewish clerics and ask for their expertise in matters concerning the proper use of certain visual images, in most cases, it ruled against their public exhibition. While Jewish spiritual leaders in the Diaspora imposed their views only on Jewish public institutions in local Jewish communities (synagogues, cemeteries, public ritual baths and the like), Israeli Jewish clerics in Palestine, and later in Israel, were often allowed to place restrictions on the display of artworks in secular public institutions and public spaces.

Israeli artists commision by the government face limitations on their subject matter as well as the visual images they purport to use in their works. The history of the visual arts in Palestine and Israel is suffused with repeated clashes between two polar approaches to the visual arts: the one held by artists and theoreticians striving for a modern, secular Jewish art, and that taken by the Jewish-Israeli establishment's constant fear of potential transgressions of the traditional Jewish restrictions concerning the visual arts.

Israeli art is usually said to have originated in 1906, the year Boris Schatz, a Jewish sculptor of Eastern European origin, and a fervent Zionist, founded the “Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts” in Jerusalem. After 23 years of existence (1906-1929) the school was closed for lack of funds and then re-opened in 1935 and called “The New Bezalel.”

February 20, 1891, Jewish Standard, London, Middlesex, United Kingdom

JEWISH SYMBOLS.

An Extract from the Outlines of a Jewish Symbolic
by Samson R. Hirsch.
(Translated from the German.)

God's miraculous power was once more to be made manifest through Israel. His holy establishment on Zion should once more be made illustrious as the rock against which the mightiest of the mighty were powerless.

Jerusalem from Mount Zion.
Nathaniel Everett Green.

The Assyrian Power overwhelms like roaring floods all countries. It tramples under victorious foot the mightiest states of that time. Intoxicated by many triumphs it wishes also to conquer the small, insignificant Mount Zion. But touched by God's finger it was utterly to perish suddenly, and in view of the object of its longing. Almost the whole of Judea has already become the prey of the Assyrians. Five-sixths of the people of God are already fallen before the Assyrian Power, because it had ceased to be the people of God it had fallen in spite of all policy and international amalgamation. Clad in sackcloth the prophet mourns for his brethren that were exiled into foreign parts. The Assyrian army presses closer and closer. Ashod, in the neighbouring land of the Philistines, was already in the hands of the enemy. Judah awaits trembling the mortal blow. It still clings to the hope not in God, Whose miraculous power had so often proved effective on behalf of Israel but in the courage and bravery of two States, who alone still stand erect before the gigantic power.

Encampment of the Pilgrims at Jericho.

Image: April 1, 1839. Volume II of "The Holy Land." Engraved by Louis Haghe (1806-85).
Published in London, 1842

Ethiopia and Egypt still seem to brave the enemy. Judah boasted of a political alliance with the latter. Then, in the year when the Assyrian general conquered Ashdod, God spoke a Word to Isaiah, the son of Amos, and said to him," Go, loosen the sackcloth from thy loins but also take off the shoe from thy foot." He did so and went naked and barefooted. And God spoke: "As My servant Isaiah has gone "naked and barefooted, this shall be a symbol and a token over Egypt and Ethiopia. Thus shall Assur's king bring up the prisoners of Egypt and the exiles of Ethiopia, young and old, bare and naked, to the disgrace of Egypt. Then they will be ashamed of Ethiopia, towards which they look forward; of Egypt, of which they boast. Then the inhabitants of this land will say, this befalls those to whom we have looked forward, to whom we have fled for help, to save us from the King of Assyria! How shall we escape now?

Have we not here a symbolical act commanded the prophet by God, in order to arouse and keep awake within the people a certain series of thoughts, to prepare them for years for the catastrophe by which God intended to exalt them. If we understand it rightly, it was meant that Isaiah should awaken hopes for the future by divesting himself from the sackcloth hitherto worn by him for the lost empire of Israel. At the same time he was to walk naked and barefoot as a token of the fall of Ethiopia and Egypt. This exhorted the people not to despair, but rather to conceive hopes that Were well-founded. Their hope cannot come whence they expect it. Their last supports are being destroyed. Nothing is left them except the hope of Him, who remains when everything else has perished. The prophet puts off his sackcloth at the same time that he bares his foot; he commences to hope when the hopes of others vanish.

November 27, 1893, San Francisco Call, San Francisco, California, U.S.A.

JEWISH GENIUS.
It Has Been Shown in Modern Politics and Science
Naturen og Mennesket, Copenhagen

Is there a Jewish national spirit? Is there anything peculiar, psyciiologlcally and physiologically, in the Semitic race which gives it a decided advantage over the Aryan? For flfteen years these problems have excited my curiosity. As a subject of comparative national psychology, it has its interest. Here are some of the data I have collected:

The Banks of the Jordan

April 2nd 1839, plate 48 from Volume II of "The Holy Land," engraved by Louis Haghe (1806-85). Pub. 1843.

The Jews of old were as remaikable as the Greeks and Romans. The Bible is an evidence of this. Genesis is a piece of poetry as weighty as Homer. Isiah is as original as Pindar. The Hebrew spirit is as Intense as the Greek, though less apt to enlarge in breadth. However, I will not talk about the "Lion of the Tribe of Judah," but of the Jew of the Talmud and as found in the Ghetto.

It lias been charged against the Jews that they are Orientals. But how is it that they have so thoroughly acquired the spirit of the Occident, that everywhere they dispute every inch of ground with the Aryans? This is certainly a phenomenon. Let us remember that ttiey have conquered their place as Jews, and not as those unfaithful to their paternal traditions.

An English Jew, Joseph Jacobs, has compared Jewish genius to that of non-Jewish Englishmen, and collected facts to prove in the last century the 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 of Jews in Europe have produced proportionally more eminent men than me 300,000,000 Christians. He has not counted the Jews of Turkey or Russia, because they are not free. The case would be still more in favor of Jewish supremacy if he would count all half-Jews, viz the outcomes of marriages: between poor noblemen and rich bankers' daughters; marriages which are quite common.

According to Joseph Jacobs the Jews have excelled In music, dramatic art, poetry, medicine, mathematics and philology. The Jewish musicians are well known, so we pass by them. Among philologists and archaeologists we mention the allies of Muns, Oppert, Brael, Well,, Desembourg, Halevy, Loeb, Reinach. These names are those of the most prominent savants of our day. For a long time it has been said that painting and music were foreign to the Jews.

But nowadays Jewish artists appear everywhere. The Frenchmen, Levy and Worms, have made names for themselves: and also the German Llebermann and the American Mosier. Dutch painter Joseph Israel has gained European fame, and so has Russia's test sculptor, Anatolsky. What a magnificent anthology of Jewish poetry could be collected from Jehuda Halevy, Heine, Minsky and Natson! How strange that tins commercial people possesses so marked a lyric vein. And what have not the Jewish women done on the stage? Was it not a girl from the despised people who gave the most noble representations of the tragic master works? The Jew is master of passionate scenic representation. Even though his enemy says that he is a born comedian, used to wearing any mask that circumstances demand.

That the Jew is a natural accountant nobody will dispute. The sciences of mathematics and astronomy show many prominent Jewish names from Herschel to Meyerbeer's brother. Several of the best chess-players of the world were Jewish. M. C. Lombroso, himself a Jew, has in "Gento e Follia" given a list of those Jews who have gained a name in medicine and physiology. Others have become prominent in jurisprudence, and no wonder, for a rabbi is a lawyer and the Talmud is Corpus juris. Though excluded from polities lor centuries, the last century has produced Benjamin Disraeli, Ferdinand Lasselie aud Leon Gambetta, the first an English Tory, the second a German socialist, and the last a French Republican. The three most civilized nations of Europe have bowed down before a Semite! These three have shown the Jew in new aspects the royal word, the master of parliaments and the idol of the masses. Wagner may sneeringly say that Mendelssohn. Meyerbeer and Halevy could produce a German symphony or a French opera, but never a new form of art. The Jews have shown originality in all the sciences and arts we have enumerated. And can we not add Spinoza to the original men? Is George Brandes as a critic not original and unique?

1899. World's Fleet. Boston Daily Globe

Lloyds Register of Shipping gives the entire fleet of the world as 28,180 steamers and sailing vessels, with a total tonnage of 27,673,628, of which 39 perent are British.

For Historical Comparison
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