Language:
English
Year of publication:
1999
Titel der Quelle:
Jewish Identity in Modern Art History
Angaben zur Quelle:
(1999) 41-66
Keywords:
Antisemitism History 1800-2000
;
Jewish art
Abstract:
German Jewish intellectuals of the 19th century, following Kant, accepted the fact that Judaism was fundamentally aniconic (i.e. that the Jews had no visual art) with pride: it served to demonstrate the higher spirituality of Judaism and its supremacy over "licentious Greek visuality". In the writings of Young Hegelians (Feuerbach, Marx), and later of Wagner, this fact, however, was used as an argument for Jewish inferiority. Fin-de-siècle Jewish authors needed a new discourse, which could neutralize charges of Jewish racial inferiority without sacrificing altogether the principle of spiritually-driven aniconism. Martin Buber in the 1900s and Kurt Freyer in the 1920s, using various arguments, coped with the task. The former, accepting some of Wagner’s arguments, used evolutionary and historical considerations, biblical poetry, and Hasidism in order to refute Wagner’s claim that the Jews lacked a sense of beauty. Freyer stated that it was possible to speak of the "art of Jews" or "art for Jews" but not of "Jewish art". The growth of Jewish nationalism also made Jewish intellectuals revise, somewhat, their stance toward Jewish visual art as part of the Jewish cultural heritage.
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