Anti-Semitism, Ideology, and Christian Art

Early Christian art contains frequent depictions of Jews but rarely gives them any distinctive Jewish features. Then, around the year 1000, Jews begin to appear in European art with pointy hats, beards, and (later) big noses. In Dark Mirror, Sara Lipton argues that the shifting portrayal of Jews reflected changes in Christian attitudes, as Bernard Starr writes in a review:

Jews were included in [early] Christian art “as witnesses” to show their blindness to the divinity of Jesus. The appearance of these Jewish witnesses also confirmed the superiority of Christianity by displaying the defeated lowly status of the scattered and “pathetic” Diaspora Jews—who were forced to scatter as God’s punishment for their blindness. . . .

Both the pointed hat and the beard were artistic inventions for identifying Jews in artworks. Lipton informs us that headwear was commonly used in medieval paintings to indicate rank or station in life. Popes were pictured with tiaras, kings with crowns, and soldiers with helmets. Since Jews had no distinctive headwear to identify them, artists invented the Jewish hat.

[Yet] apart from Jews “witnessing” in these paintings, there was no anti-Semitism or demonization of Jews in 11th- and early-12th-century medieval Christian artworks, Lipton confirms. That took a sharp turn by the mid-12th century, when Jews began to be demonized as enemies of Christianity. That was the beginning of Jews becoming, in Lipton’s words, “the most powerful and poisonous symbol in all of Christian art.”

Read more at Algemeiner

More about: Anti-Semitism, Art, Christianity, History & Ideas, Jewish nose, Middle Ages

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society