«The lingering idea of Jewish aniconism still haunts our modern minds.»
Jacques Picard on Judaism and the Visual Arts
In his new book, Jacques Picard, professor emeritus at the University of Basel, takes on Jewish aniconism, the production of images prohibited by the Second Commandment. His new book, Triumph and Trauma of Images, A Journey into Art History, Iconoclasm, Cult Controversy and Remembrance Culture (2024) sheds light on the Jewish relationship to the visual arts from antiquity to the present day. Museum director Naomi Lubrich spoke to Jacques Picard about misunderstandings, contradictions and customs that have characterised Jewish art and craftsmanship over the centuries.
Naomi Lubrich: Dear Jacques, the Second Commandment states «Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image». What exactly does «image» mean here?
Jacques Picard: In Hebrew, the thing to be forbidden is described by the word pesel, which isn’t so much a graven image as it is a cultic figurative object. Additional key terms are figure (temunah) and face (pnei). Taken together, what was to be banned is best described as a «cult image» in the sense of a sculpture for worship. Cult images in antiquity are always a three-dimensional. They are not «images» in the sense of a painted representation.
NL: How does the Second Commandment relate to other passages?
JP: The Hebrew Bible is at times contradictory. The Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4 as well as in Deuteronomy and again in Deuteronomy 5:8 and 4:1618) prohibits carved or chiselled representations of God as well as images of living things, when the intention is to imitate God’s act of creation. Contrasting this are instructions to artistically design the tabernacle, the dwelling place, and decorate it with figurative as well as symbolic works of art, including winged cherub angels on the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:1–28 and 31:1). Later interpretations of these figures consider that God is present in the empty space between their wings. Art has the purpose of marking emptiness, untouchable and invisible as it is, and this delineating the powerful presence of God.
NL: How do you explain these contradictions?
JP: Viewed historically, aniconism was probably a late addition to the Biblical text. Its purpose would have been to distinguish Jewish from Babylonian and Hellenic rites. In a Biblical scene, Abraham smashes the idols in his father’s shop, and in a moment of fictional mockery, the carved bodies are truly alive. Greek tradition also includes similar episodes. Biblical and rabbinical critique of false cult objects is part of cultural history.
NL: What does this mean for the artistic work of Jews?
JP: It is indeed astonishing how aniconism still stubbornly persists in references to Jewish art from the 19th century to the present day, in many descriptions generalized as being a full ban on art and images. An example is the reception of the circle of Jewish artists working in Paris between 1905 and 1940, which included Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Emmanuel Mané-Katz, Michel Kikoïne and many others. They are often described as forming a specifically a «Jewish enclave» and newly developing formal and technical means to overcome Judaism’s hostility towards images. The reception of the Swiss-Jewish artist Alis Guggenheim, too, often emphasises the artist’s pictorial ideas as being in dialectical opposition to her tradition of abstinence from images. I ask myself why the insistence on an idea which does not correspond to Jewish visual and text sources is so widespread.
NL: What explains it?
JP: One explanation is the legacy of the philosophical idealism of the 19th century, i.e. Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel. The latter constructed a historical-philosophical model of progress which opposes Judaism and Christianity. In this model, the Israelites embody poetry, while Christians master visual arts. In the optimistic German idealism, both come to a conclusion. But this historical model ignores Jewish artistic creation, both religious and secular, throughout the centuries. And it forgets the ferocious rejection of images by the ancient church fathers, Byzantine iconoclasts in Eastern churches and the removal of cultic decorations from church interiors by reformers in the West.
NL: And today?
JP: The requiem of Jewish aniconism still haunts the minds of many of us moderns, be they Jewish, Christian or others. In recent history, antisemites such as Richard Wagner and National Socialists drew on Jews’ alleged hostility to images and art to label them as «culturally incapable,» to exclude them from the «Volksgemeinschaft» (national community) and rob them of their artworks and art collections.
NL: Many Jews, too, believed art to be ‹un-Jewish›. You write that archaeological and cultural-historical discoveries led to a change in outlook.
JP: The discovery of frescoes with Biblical motifs in the 1920s in Damascus’s Dura Europos synagogue was shocking. But already before 1900, illustrations in illuminated versions of the Bible, the Haggadah, the prayer book and other Jewish texts had been shown at exhibitions in Paris and London. Jewish love of books is a tradition that goes back many centuries. Other pictorial testimonies from the early Middle Ages to modern times can be found in synagogues, on home murals, gravestones, marriage certificates and everyday objects. In Israel, the discovery of mosaic floors in ancient synagogues, among them figurative depictions of the hand of God intervening in the sacrificial scene with Isaac, was significant. The walls of synagogues had been painted from the second century onwards, and according to Talmudic tradition, Rabbi Jochanan ben Nappacha didn’t oppose them. Considering these findings, it is clear that Judaism has had periods of artistic and pictorial affinity which alternate with phases of scepticism and rejection.
NL: How did rabbis interpret the prohibition of images in the Talmud and later literature?
JP: The rabbinic literature, as controversial as it is, does not apply the second commandment to figurative art. Rabbi Schlomo Ben Izchak (Rashi), the great 11th century authority, did not object to painting synagogue walls, even though he recommended avoiding distraction during prayer. The Talmudic discussions of the ban on cult images revolved around moral behaviour, social inequality, dependence on power and wealth, which are linked to the offence of idolatry. Seduction through idolatry is obvious when rulers, be they emperors or priests, use idols to increase their power and amass wealth with silver and gold as reprehensible works of human hands, as can be read in Jeremiah and in one of the psalms. Those who follow other gods do so to their own harm, morally and economically, as social criticism portends (Jeremiah 7:4–11). The sole matter is that painting and sculpture not be worshipped as a false truth. The difference is in effect a question of the relationship between image and cult, between objects and their worship, making people dependent on images like a fetish.
NL: There were times when Jewish artistic creation was particularly pronounced. You mention the context of the founding of the State of Israel. What explains the surge of interest in imagery?
JP: A wave of artistic production began already in 1900, in the context of emancipation, acculturation and Zionism before the founding of the State of Israel. Here too, Jewish aniconism was voiced as a concern in the sense that it be a hindrance to artistic creation, but Zionism also brought up a new question, namely what «Jewish art» or «Jewish style» might be, if it even existed. On the founding of the State of Israel, the creation of art became a national agenda, and later a product for participation in the international art market. Art museums, galleries and cultural centres in Israel continued the work that many Jews had been involved with during the previous two centuries in Europe and North America, as art lovers, dealers, gallery owners, publishers, critics, curators and museum founders – up to the present day. Ultimately, Jewish art should be considered from the longue durée, i.e. the existence of Jewish artistic creation and the love of art by Jews from antiquity to modern times, for instance in the founding of art academies in modern times, in courtly and urban patronage in the 18th century and in the emergence of museums and private galleries in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Bezalel Academy, the art academy in Jerusalem, was founded in 1906, the Basel Art Academy in 1661. In their own times and cultures, both were comparable examples of how art establishes and institutionalises itself within the bourgeois claim to autonomy.
NL: The collection of the Jewish Museum contains numerous portraits of rabbis. Were they not considered problematic? What was the historical context of their dissemination in the 18th and 19th centuries?
JP: The rabbi portraits are wonderful examples of Jewish pictorial art from the Renaissance and early modern period. Oil paintings and prints depicting rabbinical personalities, drew high prices at art auctions in London, as Jacob Emden reports in his autobiography, Megillat Sefer. Portraits are not limited to the early modern period; we know from Flavius Josephus that the daughter of the high priest Hyrcanus II. had her children portrayed around the middle of the first century BCE. In the case of the rabbi portraits, we’re really looking at hagiographies. The very fact that a rabbi sat down in front of an artist and had himself painted in his studio presupposes a permitting interpretation of the second commandment, especially considering that a rabbi’s portrait could serve after his death as a tomb-like image, which touches on the biblical prohibition of idolatry and cult images. The rabbis are frequently depicted pointing to a text passage, such as the first and second commandments, in order to make their understanding clear that God is «one». In the background, the Ten Commandments or a bookshelf convey that the rabbi is learned. The painting is discursive: It subordinates itself, giving precedence to the word, all within the painted gesture. Widely distributed through art prints, these hagiographies served as a personal and programmatic memento to strengthen the rabbi’s relationship with his followers, who often lived in remote settlements or were increasingly scattered due to migration. Medallions and medals depicting rabbis also fulfilled this function, and rabbis also appeared in miniatures, silhouettes, lithographs and even on pipe bowls. These are all clear indications of the changing role of rabbis in the minds of their followers in the early modern period, which went hand in hand with the idealisation and glorification of rabbinical biographies. The lives of many Jews had meanwhile become more mobile, and the living environments in which Jewish families moved widened spatially and was increasingly heterogeneous, which explains the need for a special tie to rabbinical authorities, the distribution of their image and the formation of legends. This functional iconography has long since been continued on the internet, in the visual formats of Instagram and YouTube, which disseminate homiletic and counselling messages from progressive, orthodox and neo-Chassidic rabbis.
NL: Dear Jacques, thank you very much for your insights into a controversial issue that plays a major role in Jewish museology. I gladly refer to your book:
Jacques Picard, Macht und Makel der Bilder, Gedächtnisrufe zu Kunst, Bilderstreit, Kultverbot und Erinnerungskultur, Berlin 2024 (DKV de Gruyter);
in English: Triumph and Trauma of Images, A Journey into Art History, Iconoclasm, Cult Controversy and Remembrance Culture, Boston 2025.
verfasst am 21.01.2025
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