{"id":6892,"date":"2021-02-22T18:35:51","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T17:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moked.it\/international\/?p=6892"},"modified":"2021-03-08T20:24:25","modified_gmt":"2021-03-08T19:24:25","slug":"jewish-identity-and-universal-messages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2021\/02\/22\/jewish-identity-and-universal-messages\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition – Marc Chagall <\/br>Jewish identity and universal messages"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rav Scialom Bahbout<\/strong><\/p>\n

Marc Chagall’s artworks were multifarious. Many traces from various sources of inspiration can be found in his paintings. It is worth remembering that Chagall was born in Eastern Europe, where different cultural and spiritual tendencies coexisted with the traditional community represented by the rabbinate: Hasidism and Haskalah. Hasidism was opposed to the rationalist tendency represented by the rabbinic group and it focused on the importance of observing precepts with joy and enthusiasm. Haskalah, also known as the Jewish Enlightenment movement, was influenced by the cultural changes brought by Enlightenment and Positivism that significantly affected the whole Europe, especially with regard to the development of science.
\nThe Jews of Vitebsk were obviously divided into various communities and Marc Chagall\u2019s family (originally Shagal) belonged to the Hasidic community: Vitebsk\u2019s Rabbi Menachem Mendel was introduced and initiated to Hasidism by the Maggid of Mezerich, pupil of Ba\u2019al shem tov. The strength of Jewish tradition and customs were highly valued by Marc Chagall\u2019s family members. In fact, they led a life deeply immersed in the Jewish world: the mark of Jewish culture and of the distinctive joy of Hasidism can be found in many of Chagall’s paintings. <\/p>\n

Youth spent in the Hasidic community in Vitebsk influenced and left its traces even in the life of people who lost familiarity with traditions and active Jewish life, and Marc Chagall was certainly among them. It must also be considered that the Hasidic and Ashkenazi communities were subject to a form of isolation at the hands of the Christian population. Events such as pogroms were frequent in territories under Tsar domination and in Eastern Europe.
\nMarc Chagall certainly absorbed the interpretative method used in the Talmud – where every word has a thousand facets \u2013 because since childhood the study of the Talmud was taught in shtetl\u2019s schools. In his memoirs Chagall mentions the fourth dimension. The Talmud sets forth the seventy methods in which each single word can be interpreted and the four techniques to interpret a text. Apart from the first three techniques (literal, allusive and interpretative) the last one is the SOD, the secret, the mystery, as if to say that something mysterious is hidden inside and behind every event. Chagall’s paintings are full of mysteries and secrets. They are like a transposition of dreams and as the Talmud says, a dream is a letter that has not yet been opened.
\nMany of Chagall’s paintings are directly inspired by Jewish subjects. Among these, it is worth mentioning the stained-glass windows of the Synagogue of the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, which represent the 12 tribes, and Parliament of Israel\u2019s tapestries, inspired by events of Jewish history. However, very many of his artworks echo universal concepts related in different ways to Jewish culture.
\nIn his paintings people and animals fly, are upside down, or in absolutely unlikely positions. People have no feet on the ground and Chagall himself experiences this situation: the perception of exile is very strong for a Jew who is forced to migrate from one country to another and is always considered a foreigner in the land where he was born or where he managed to move to.
\nChagall – forced to move to France \u2013 feels like living in an exile of the exile: he knows that as soon as possible he will return to Vitebsk. Chagall continues thinking of Vitebsk, and Russia as his land, because it is the land that gave him birth and that he loves.
\nThe idea of \u200b\u200bimminent exile is particularly highlighted by the painting of the man in red. Behind the man you can read the verses of the passage where Abraham is ordered to abandon his land, his homeland, his father’s house. But you have the same perception by seeing the painting of Vitebsk and the Jew with a bundle floating in the air on (image above): where is he going without knowing where to go?<\/p>\n

The musical instrument that the Jew carries with him in every exile is the violin and Chagall depicts it in many of his paintings. A tale says: Why the violin? Try to escape and carry a piano on your shoulders! Instead, in every place, even where there is no orchestra, it is always possible to bring a violin that you can always find in every village.
\nIt will take long for Chagall to find a way toward reconciliation with the external world and the Christian world in particular. That is due to persecutions and discriminations imposed by both population and the power. The Bolshevik revolution instilled hope in many Jews. However, those hopes were vain, and they soon had to change their mind. Thus, it is no coincidence that Chagall portrays Lenin with his head down in the painting dedicated to the revolution.
\nPromises were unkept, and even those who took a stand in favour of the revolution because they recognized the values \u200b\u200bexpressed by the majority had to change their mind.
\nFor instance, in the painting \u201cWhite Crucifixion\u201d, featuring a cross suspended high above the crowd, we see a burnt sacred scroll and other images referring to a perpetual exodus. Here, Jesus is a son of Israel, with a shawl covering part of his body, suffering exactly as others are.
\nWith his presence he admonishes those torturers who forgot the teaching \u201cThou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.\u201d (already preached by Moses in the Leviticus and actually erased by centuries of Christian persecutions of Jews).
\nOther Jewish artists as well had to change their view, being them initially open towards Christian society yet taking their distance after seeing a neglect of Jesus and a betrayal of his message by the Church of Jesus. To Chagall, Jesus was a Jew until his death, as the Tallit, the prayer shawl he portrayed him with, shows.
\nIn the painting \u201cSelf Portrait with a Clock In front of Crucifixion\u201d, the red goat could be representing the Jewish people. Anyway, the atmosphere seems to be more serene, maybe because it is 1950 and the Shoah and the persecutions are over.
\nMaybe even in the painting \u201cChrist with clock\u201d there is a sense of reconciliation. Time can heal wounds and get people closer. Marking the passing of time is one of the fundamental aspects of Jewish culture and liturgy. It was essential having a pendulum clock in every home: it established the time of prayer, the waiting period between eating meat and dairy and, most importantly, the starting and ending time of Shabbat and other festivities. In a country where the sky is often cloudy, it is necessary to own a clock to know at which time the celebration ends.
\nJudaism is a time religion rather than a space religion, that is why representing places and producing sculpture is not very well liked. Depicting a pendulum clock with a blue wing and a couple (maybe Chagall himself and his wife) shows that, with time passing, the one truly important thing is a couple\u2019s relationship and the family it creates: we know what a crucial institution family is, for the survival of the Jewish community and society in general.
\nWho has seen Roman Vishniac\u2019s photo collection \u201cA Vanished World\u201d, knows animals are often present in shtetls \u2013 villages where Jews used to do even the humblest work. Seeing the number of Chagall\u2019s paintings featuring a rooster and a goat, the exhibit\u2019s curators chose \u201cThe rooster\u201d for the catalogue\u2019s cover and \u201cThe Green Night\u201d, where a green goat is featured, for the second cover. Chagall illustrated the fable \u201cThe rooster, the goat, and the kid\u201d. It is no accident that he decided to do it and to include the two animals.
\nThe first animal is the rooster that crows in the morning and wakes you, as it is reminded in the morning prayer: the rooster knows that the day is starting, it has its own intelligence and knows it needs to pray as a rooster can\u2026 even more so man has to.
\nIn the painting illustrating the catalogue\u2019s cover, the man straddling the rooster, leaning his head on it, shows both of them have wits and they instinctively ought to know when to leave, when to pray. Not to forget roosters\u2019 role in kapparoth on the eve of Yom Kippur. Butchering a rooster symbolizes man\u2019s fate if he had to pay for all his sins. Today, the controversial tradition has been replaced with donations for the disadvantaged.
\nThe goat, the other ever-present animal in Chagall\u2019s works, is compared to the Jewish people often suffering from persecutions, like in Eastern European Jewish narrators\u2019 stories. Here in a poem from Umberto Saba, Jew from Trieste, \u201cThe Goat\u201d:<\/p>\n

I talked to a goat,
\nAlone in the field, tied to a post,
\nFull up with grass, soaked
\nThrough with rain, bleating.<\/p>\n

That monotone was brother
\nTo my grief. I answered back: first
\nFor fun, but then because sorrow’s
\nForever, and is monotonous.
\nI heard its voice
\nSounding in a solitary goat.<\/p>\n

From a goat with a semitic face
\nI heard all ills, all lives,
\nLamenting.
\n(Tr. By Martin Seymour Smith)<\/p>\n

By choosing a humble animal as the subject for his poem, the poet creates an absolute symbol of sorrow. Even those we deem unable to suffer \u2013 a goat, in this case \u2013 are wounded and afflicted. The poet\u2019s and the goat\u2019s pain become a symbol for sharing universal pain: identifying with \u201ca goat with a semitic face\u201d is the first step to shed self-centeredness. The sorrow of the persecuted and exiled Jew, is recognized as universal and \u201ceternal\u201d.
\nIt should not be forgotten that the Jewish people has been used as a scapegoat for every calamity or pandemic: the various pogroms in Eastern Europe caused huge suffering, tragic events that Chagall witnessed and somehow represented with his art. Many of Chagall\u2019s paintings feature goats, each of them deserving of a thoughtful analysis. Among them, \u201cI and the Village\u201d, \u201cStudy for the Painting Rain\u201d, \u201cTo Russia, with Asses and Others\u201d, \u201cSelf-Portrait with Seven Digits\u201d.
\nThough departing from his specifically Jewish experience, with his paintings Chagall can convey a universal message that can reach everyone: exile, time, joy and sorrow are experienced by every man. Nothing to do but stay in front of one of his paintings then, admire and think.<\/p>\n

Translated and revised by Silvia Bozzo and Antonella Losavio, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rav Scialom Bahbout Marc Chagall’s artworks were multifarious. Many traces from various sources of inspiration can be found in his paintings. It is worth remembering that Chagall was born in Eastern Europe, where different cultural and spiritual tendencies coexisted with the traditional community represented by the rabbinate: Hasidism and Haskalah. Hasidism was opposed to… leggi <\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1871,"featured_media":6898,"menu_order":840,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9316],"tags":[],"position":[],"class_list":["post-6892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nExhibition - Marc Chagall Jewish identity and universal messages - Pagine Ebraiche International<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2021\/02\/22\/jewish-identity-and-universal-messages\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Exhibition - Marc Chagall Jewish identity and universal messages - Pagine Ebraiche International\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Rav Scialom Bahbout Marc Chagall’s artworks were multifarious. 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