ABSTRACT
The birth date of Jewish national art can be quite precisely specified: December 26, 1901. It is on this date that the Fifth Zionist Congress began in Basel, and Max Nordau announced the opening of an unprecedented Jewish art exhibition in the congress hall. Consisting of 48 works of art by 11 Jewish artists, the exhibition, which officially opened the following day, included etchings, feather-pen drawings, lithographs, tempera and oil paintings, and even two sculptures. The works were created by an international group of Jewish artists, among them Jehuda Epstein (Vienna), Jozef Israels (The Hague), Alfred Lakos (Budapest), E. M. Lilien (Berlin), Oscar Marmorek (Vienna), Alfred Nossig (Berlin), Hermann Struck (Berlin), and Lesser Ury (Berlin).1 Martin Buber, together with Lilien and Berthold Feiwel, curated the exhibit, with an expressed purpose of highlighting the need for the cultural regeneration of the Jews.2 By and large, the works of art depicted Jewish themes along one of two trajectories: the authentic, heroic tradition of Jews in antiquity and the contemporary situation of Jews in exile. The former were fairly traditional figurative renditions of Jewish kings such as Saul and David, the heroic resistance of the Maccabees, and the integrity of Jewish prophets such as Jeremiah; for the latter, the artists produced a number of portraits of present-day Jews, often downcast and displaced, embodying a sense of longing for a lost greatness.
