ABSTRACT
The figure of Jesus has appeared in Jewish art 1 since the mid-nineteenth century and reflected the critical place that his image occupied in the history and contemporary life of the Jewish people. The depiction of Jesus in works by Jewish artists had its roots in changes that occurred in the relationship between Jews and Christians during the Enlightenment in Central and Eastern Europe. Jewish thinkers saw the figure of the historic, Jewish Jesus as one to which they could relate not as a Messiah, but as a moral guide who preached Jewish-universal values in the spirit of the prophets. They considered Christian anti-Semitic preaching to be opposed to Jesus’ tolerant message and made a critical differentiation between the historic Jesus – the pious Jew who suffered for his radical and moral ideas – and the Christian Son of God, whose death was blamed on the Jews, and in whose name they were persecuted. If Jesus was in fact a Jew who never dreamed of abandoning Judaism, then anti-Semitism was against his own teachings and in a sense absurd. Therefore, for some Jewish thinkers living in nineteenth-century Europe, the figure of the Jewish Jesus was important in the struggle against anti-Semitism. 2 Moreover, in the art world, Christian imagery was an essential part of every artist’s vocabulary, and Jewish artists were no exception. To qualify fully as “European” or “Western,” artists felt that they must also depict the hero of Christianity, but as a Jew, not as a Christian.
