E. M. Lilien, 1902, Photograph at his drafting table, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.
Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation. Women in the Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien at the German Fin de Siècle.
At the end of January this year, before COVID-19 was on anyone’s agenda, Bloomsbury Academic Press published my first book. Encompassing my passion for intellectual intersections: modern European history, Jewish history, gender studies and visual culture. Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation is about one of the important (but overlooked) Jewish artists of modern times, Ephraim Moses (E. M.) Lilien.
E. M. Lilien has often been romanticised or demonised, depending on your view, as the ‘first major Zionist’ artist. Surprisingly there has been little in-depth scholarly research and analysis of Lilien's work available in English, and my research makes an important contribution to historical scholarship. Indeed, most of the historiography on Lilien so far has concentrated on his groundbreaking iconography of the muscular (male) Jewish body, much discussed among scholars of Israeli and Zionist art historiography. There has been very little debate on his images of the modern Jewish women.
Lilien was a superb illustrator, master printer, photographer and film maker. Born in Drohobycz, at the base of the Carpathian Mountains in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburg’s in 1874, Lilien went to art school in Krakow before eventually moving to Munich. Arriving in 1896, he worked for the fledgling Jugend art magazine as an illustrator and photographer. This was the year the journal was first published, and the style Jugendstil, (named after the rebellious style it showcased) became a household name. With the same ability to sense the new moments in history, he moved to Berlin in 1899, just as the city was taking over from Munich as the centre of the German art world.
It was during his first year in Berlin that Lilien collaborated with Börries von Münchhausen (1874–1945) on a book titled Juda (c.1900). The book became an overnight sensation. Von Münchhausen, fascinated by German Romantic poetry, composed a series of Hebrew Ballads that Lilien illustrated. In perhaps the most well-known illustration from these ballads, Das stille Lied (Fig. 1), Lilien fashioned a new, modern and Jewish artistic style, a fresh interpretation of Jugendstil for a very different audience. As Juda, the male hero of the story, kisses his female lover, their bodies dissolve into an erotic, sensual embrace. Judas cloak, with its decorative, flat Jugendstil patterns, swirls around them, helping to convey their passionate, ‘exotic,’ or ‘Oriental’ love. For Lilien’s Jewish German audiences, the kiss was not a generic Germanic kiss but a specifically Jewish kiss, with the handsome Juda looking a little like Herzl. The emphasis on handsome good looks and normative sexuality were all part of the Zionist body aesthetics that encouraged strong, heterosexual, manly behavior.
E. M. Lilien, Das stille Lied, c. 1900
His images of manly, muscular ‘new Jews’, who tilled the soil like their socialist brethren, helped launch Lilien’s career. Martin Buber (1878–1965) and the cultural Zionists who believed that Jewish renewal would be based on culture not politics, were happy to praise Juda for its depiction of ancient male heroes. Lilien became the darling and hope of their movement. However, his depiction of a Jewish woman as licentious or submissive was passed over in silence.
My book concentrates on Lilien’s female imagery and divides them into 3 separate genres, his non-Jewish femmes fatales (similar to other non-Jewish successful avant-garde artists); his images of courageous Jewish biblical heroines; and his more sensuous images of Jewish orientalised women with a certain amount of sexual agency.
Lilien merges misogynist Jugendstil (or Art Nouveau) images of the femme fatale with a western Orientalism, that often worshipped the exoticism and unbridled sexuality of the eastern other). I argue that his use of orientalism as an artistic style to represent images of strong heroic Jewish women was not a part of these white, Western, male fantasies. Rather, his images represented a fundamental and critical attempt to explore the complexities of German and Jewish identity. To Lilien, the Orient was not simply a fanciful place, but an internal space to explore multiple and transnational identities. Lilien was part of an increasingly large, ingenious and active group of fin-de-siècle Jewish writers, poets and artists whose response to the problems of alterity was to view German Jewish orientalism as an inspiration that would help explain their multiple identities.
Lilien searched in his oriental and biblical imagery for an ‘authentic’ Jewish identity that would help overcome how non-Jewish Germans perceived or classified him (and his fellow Jews): as being ‘not quite white’ and certainly ‘not quite German’- ie as barbaric Asiatics or Orientals. Lilien’s sense of ‘otherness’ not only produced tensions between his apparent ‘Germanness’ and ‘Jewishness’ but it also demanded a psychological gestalt or answer to the perennial question that Buber’s spiritual ideas had posed to the cultural Zionists on the Jewish ‘essence’. His images of orientalised Jewish women form part of that search for identity, roots, and meaning. Grounded in their European origins, Lilien’s images were, also part of the quest for a Jewish and ‘authentic’ oriental voice.
Concentrating mainly on his illustrations for journals and books, my book acknowledges the importance of Lilien's groundbreaking male iconography in Zionist art but is the first to examine Lilien's complex and nuanced depiction of women, which comprised a major dimension of his work. Like other vanguard male artists at the end of the nineteenth century, painting continued to be a male preserve. Lilien’s work mirrored the misogyny inherent amongst non-Jewish avant-garde artists. Ironically, as a secular Zionist, Lilien pushed the limits of Jewish visual representation in the interests of Jewish cultural literacy. The modern Jewess who emerges from the shadows or ‘blind spots’ of the gendered male historiography is a distinctly contemporary figure. Lilien's female images offer a compelling glimpse of an alternate, independent and often sexually liberated modern Jewish woman, a portrayal that often eluded the Zionist imagination.
Using an interdisciplinary approach to integrate intellectual and cultural history with issues of gender, Jewish history and visual culture, I explore the important fin de siècle tensions between European and Oriental expressions of Jewish femininity. Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation demonstrates that Lilien was not a minor figure in the European art scene, but a major figure whose work needs re-reading in light of his cosmopolitan and national artistic genius.
This gives you a brief idea of what the book is about. My website give you a little bit more information about my background and interests. Including a link to order the book from Bloomsbury with a 35% discount.
If the personal is the political, how I came to write about these ideas is significant:
I have always been interested in things spiritual from my earliest years as a young girl brought up in traditional Jewish Orthodox family. My mother’s side of the family have been in Australia for more than four generations, so I was well and truly acculturated into the predominantly Anglo Christian world I grew up in. I went to public schools for primary and high school and had lots of non-Jewish friends who were sometimes curious (and often not so curious) about my Jewish heritage.
There came a point where I realised that if I didn’t explore more about the religion of my forefathers and mothers, I wouldn’t bother with it anymore. I read many of the classic texts on the Holocaust by Wiesel, Friedlander and Primo Levi. All the fiction of Leon Uris and the English translations of the Yiddish novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer and the spiritual life of the Baal-Shem Tov (the Master of God’s Name, aka Israel ben Eliezer), the founder of Hasidism, a mystical-religious movement created in Eastern Europe around the early eighteenth century. After Year 12, I rebelled against things intellectual, deciding that one needed a skill in life to create a sustainable world. I obtained a degree in the visual arts instead of pursing my initial choice for communications, law or the arts generally. By happenstance, I loved teaching and embarked on a career in education, then pursued a post-graduate degree and worked in museums and galleries. I still had a penchant for intellectual ideas, and Jewish knowledge, and went on to study Classical Hebrew and Biblical Studies.
I pursued a master’s in art history and kept wondering why it was that modern art can have whole books written about the history of modern art that begins with Neolithic art, then Egyptian art, even Persian art and Greek art, but somehow has no mention of Jewish art, instead calling this period Early Christin art. For me, reading Michael Mack’s book German Idealism and the Jew that uncovered the deep roots of antisemitism in the German philosophical tradition, particularly the link between the definition of the Jew as an irrational oriental Other, that persuaded me to undertake further research. I came across a group of Jewish artists who wished to pursue a spiritual, cultural and national renaissance or renewal of Jewish art. They belonged to the Jungjüdische Bewegung (young Jewish movement) a group of Zionist literary and visual artists who were interest in Cultural Zionism. So began my interest in Zionism and nationalism.
Ephraim Moses Lilien’s images deal with very contemporary aesthetic ideas about the ideal body, the classical body and the embodiment of the political/national body, and were often associated with a gendered (male) construct. Lilien’s portrayals of women instead weave together the image of the Jewish women as femme fatale, biblical heroine and Oriental beauty. Though Lilien’s images of Jewish femmes fatales, initiated with Juda, challenged more overtly antisemitic, racialised representations of Jewish women (as well as Jewish men) by other male avant-garde artists, they retained a certain cosmopolitan or avant-garde liberalism regarding the female body that often intensified women’s sexual objectification. While attempting to transform the more dangerous image of female Jewish difference into a new representation of the modern Jewish Zionist woman, Lilien’s liberalism remains ambivalent to the anti-feminist, even misogynist attitude to women propagated in those same sexist stereotypes. By transforming Jewish difference into a redemptive vision for Jewish acceptance, Lilien found a new role for biblical Jewish heroes and heroines in the guise of a Jewish national art.