A Cross to Bear: On Crucifixion Imagery in Modern Jewish Art

What does it mean when a Jewish artist uses crucifixion imagery? Why do some Jewish artists appropriate the quintessential symbol of Christianity, a religion that has marginalized, terrorized, and murdered Jews throughout history? From the early nineteenth century onward, a number of notable Jewish thinkers began to reevaluate the role of Jesus in Jewish thought. Some suggested acknowledging Jesus as “a Jew working entirely in the Jewish context of his period.”^[1] As a fundamentally Jewish figure, Jesus could provide a common ground for Jews attempting to integrate into the larger Christian cultures of Europe. Twentieth-century Jewish artists and writers continued to explore the meaning of Jesus in a contemporary context. Some incorporated crucifixion imagery into their work as an explicit response to the horror and tragedy of the Holocaust. Others used it as a more general symbol to address the universality of human suffering. Painters Marc Chagall and Barnett Newman as well as novelist Chaim Potok, who wrote about a Jewish artist using the crucifixion in his paintings, are among the more acclaimed twentieth-century Jewish artists to integrate crucifixions and Christ figures into major works. By transgressing the conventional boundaries between religions, these artists intentionally provoked confrontation as well as introspection regarding the plight and challenges of twentieth-century Jews. Taken together, this confrontation and introspection effectively subverts hegemonic typologies of suffering while expressing the necessity of interreligious dialogue.

Ukrainian-born artist Marc Chagall was a prolific twentieth-century painter whose large body of work spans from the turn of the century into the 1980s. Although he was influenced by expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and other significant schools of modern painting, Chagall’s rich color palette and dreamlike compositional structure gives his work an immediately identifiable aesthetic approach. In addition, his overt depiction of Jewish themes distinguishes his art from that of his contemporaries. Chagall’s incorporation of crucifixions into his work creates a startling juxtaposition with the Jewish motifs which otherwise define his paintings. Chagall was fascinated by crucifixion imagery and included crosses and Christ figures in several major paintings.

The White Crucifixion, one of Chagall’s most widely recognized crucifixion paintings, typifies his fusion of Christian and Jewish iconography (see figure 1). Finished in 1938, when the Nazis were in full control of Germany, The White Crucifixion may have been a direct response to the destruction of synagogues in Munich and Nuremberg that year.^[2] The painting is largely devoid of Chagall’s usual vibrant color palette. Blacks and whites and shades of gray dominate the piece. In the center, a Semitic-looking Christ figure hangs from the cross, and “the chaos of the world swirls around the central, almost serene, image of Jesus.”^[3] He wears a head covering and his loins are swaddled in a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl. He is surrounded by a roiling tumult of Jewish figures who flail about in anguish and flee the violence of angry mobs. Soldier-like figures brandish weaponry and flags as they advance upon a burning village. A synagogue is on fire. A smoldering Torah scroll has been cast upon the ground. Writhing bodies struggle to stay afloat in an overcrowded boat. An elderly man covers his eyes at these horrific reminders of the terrors of recent pogroms and the escalating violence of the Nazis.

Figure 1.The White Crucifixion. Oil on canvas by Marc Chagall, 1938. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/59426/white-crucifixion.

The White Crucifixion presents a Jesus who has been “completely reassimilated into Judaism.”^[4] Chagall takes the crucifixion out of the realm of abstract symbolism (as a representation of Christian theodicy) and re-historicizes Jesus by making him Jewish. By reintroducing the Jewishness of Jesus, Chagall is engaged in a form of interreligious dialogue with Christianity because his imagery “changes the meaning of the cross.”^[5] Chagall is equating the suffering of Jesus and the suffering of the Jews, but this gesture is not simply a co-opting of Christian symbolism to convey a forceful message. It is also an invitation for Christians and Jews to engage in a common iconography.

Jewish American artist Barnett Newman was a mid-twentieth-century Abstract Expressionist painter from New York whose paintings are distinguished by their extreme minimalism and by the signature vertical line, or zip, that bisects many of his pieces. Abstract Expressionism, according to Newman, is “a religious art which through symbols will catch the basic truth of life which is its sense of tragedy.”^[6] Newman’s haunting opus Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani is a series of fourteen large oil paintings on canvas that utilize starkness and near-complete abstraction to explore profound suffering. Begun in 1958, the series was installed in the Guggenheim Museum upon its completion in 1966. Each individual piece is 144 centimeters by 187 centimeters, and the exhibition covered three walls in a site-specific construction. First Station typifies the scope and focus of the series (see figure 2). The piece is covered with a semi-transparent wash of bone-white paint that does not attempt to conceal the blank canvas behind it. One-quarter of the length from the right edge of the canvas and extending from the bottom to the top, a sharp vertical line bisects the painting. The line, Newman’s zip technique, is surrounded by gestural waves of undulating black paint. This line creates a negative space, the staff of a cross. An unwavering black bar anchors the left edge of the piece and acts as a foil to the undulations surrounding the zip. Though they vary in the predominance of black or white, subsequent images in the series follow the same basic formula. Rigid vertical zip lines intersect nearly blank canvases, and Newman limits his palette to blacks and whites for the entire series.

Figure 2.First Station. Acrylic on canvas by Barnett Newman, 1958, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, US. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.69371.html

The abstract nature of the paintings might suggest that there is no definitive interpretation of Newman’s visual proposal, but his title expressly invites the audience to meditate on Jesus’s most harrowing moment of suffering. “Lema Sabachthani” are the well-known words attributed to Jesus while he was dying, and the phrase translates as “why have you forsaken me?”^[7] In his artist’s statement for the original exhibition, Newman describes his own interaction with these words, “Why forsake me? To what purpose? Why? This is the passion. This outcry of Jesus […] the question that has no answer.”^[8] Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani has been described as a “monumental, yet profoundly aniconic, painterly project, which asks unanswerable questions about the human suffering and the loss of God.”^[9] For Newman, Jesus’s question is not a privileged question reserved for Christians. It is an interreligious or even post-religious endeavor that acknowledges the cry of Jesus upon the cross as a universal cry in the face of endless human suffering.

A dedicated painter, Rabbi Chaim Potok is more widely known for his writing. His novel My Name is Asher Lev portrays a young Hasidic painter who discovers his artistic voice when he incorporates crucifixions into his paintings. First published in 1972, the memory of the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews under the Soviet Union figure prominently in the minds of the characters of My Name is Asher Lev. Asher Lev is a precocious artist who is compelled to paint despite the concerns of his religiously conservative family. At the behest of his rabbi, Asher Lev is mentored by a secular Jew named Jacob Kahn. Kahn insists that Asher Lev needs to “understand what a crucifixion is in art […] The crucifixion must be available to you as a form.”^[10] As he matures, Asher Lev must contend with the historic suffering of the Jews. He begins to see his mother as a paragon of suffering:

For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. […] For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting — an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.^[11]

Although Asher Lev’s decision to depict his mother upon a cross in his painting Brooklyn Crucifixion is a conscious subversion of the Christian typology of suffering, Potok is fundamentally asserting an aesthetic defense of the incorporation of crucifixion imagery into Jewish art.

Potok’s proposition may seem uncontroversial to a secular audience. After all, My Name is Asher Lev was published nearly forty years after Chagall confronted the art world with his myriad of crucifixion paintings. But Potok was a well-established Conservative Rabbi and the head of a large Jewish publishing company, “and this made his offense seem all the more outrageous to the offended.”^[12] Like his protagonist, Potok himself presents the cross as “an archetype of absolute suffering.”^[13] Potok’s novel suggests that the crucifixion is a universally powerful motif with which all artists must reckon regardless of their religious allegiances, whether personal or cultural.

The symbolic power of the crucifixion is many-layered and ambiguous. Its reach covers a multitude of meanings. It represents Christ’s passion and the quiet devotion of the humble believer. It proclaims victory over death. It galvanizes both the militants and the masses against perceived enemies. It oppresses those who would reject its premise. It pleads. It prays. It asks unanswerable questions. Jewish artists who incorporate this religiously potent and historically charged Christian symbol into their works are deliberately transgressing Jewish and Christian religious norms. For twentieth-century artists such as Chagall, Newman, and Potok, “this appropriation and subsequent inversion of Christianity’s central symbol became a polemical vehicle” by which to engage the dominant culture.^[14] Undoubtedly, the social and political context of the era must be taken into account when examining these works. Rising anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Jewish mass migration, and questions of assimilation and integration into the larger body politic of pluralistic twentieth-century societies are all factors that must be considered. Appropriating the crucifixion, however, is not simply a form of contentious pleading with the very Christians who have oppressed or ignored the plight of the Jews. It is a profound “theological critique” because “it is one of the most powerful and ironic symbols a Jew could use to express outrage at God.”^[15] The works of Chagall, Newman, and Potok are provocative and critical, yet they remain ambiguous. Regardless of the artists’ motives, the audience’s religious affiliation, or the historical context in which the art was created, the inclusion of crucifixion imagery in Jewish art remains problematic, forcing audiences to pause and assess. Perhaps the value of these pieces, ultimately, is that they do not have wholly satisfactory explanations. Instead of offering a succinct interpretation, maybe they are simply a confrontation- a confrontation intended to remind us all that division and its consequences, that hatred and violence are all our cross to bear.