Some are striking, others subtle. A two-day symposium at the TU Berlin brought together scientists, curators, artists and educators to talk about anti-Semitism in visual form. Where in art do stereotypical anti-Semitic motifs appear? How did they end up there? And: How can we deal with these images and symbols today?
The event was held hybrid and was public. Anyone who is not an expert or scientist themselves was surprised at how young research into dealing with anti-Semitic images is in some areas.
The big advantage: In a scientific context, you can speak calmly and with the necessary sobriety. There is room for differentiated viewing of images that is not possible in current events. When, as at Documenta 15 or in the context of the debates about the Middle East conflict, art with anti-Semitic symbolism suddenly comes to the surface, reactions are needed quickly and as clearly as possible. There is little you can learn.
Anti-Semitic symbolism is widespread in art
Images that exclude Jews and portray them as inferior, weak, threatening and exploitative are widespread in art. Depending on who is looking, they will notice it in everyday life or not. The lectures raise awareness of the typical contexts: anti-Jewish motifs in Christian iconography from the altarpiece to the church window; anti-Jewish codes in painting from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, for example in the form of an idealized agrarian romanticism, as the Berlin scientist Ines Gerber shows.
Genre paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder Tanners serve as an example for older artists or the French realist painter Jean-François Millet to show how Millet’s romantic depiction of field workers served to visually underline the distinction from the supposedly lazy Jews who were unable to work; Activities permitted to Jews in the Middle Ages and modern times included trading and moneylending; in many places they were neither allowed to lease nor own land on a long-term basis. As a result, they were denied access to agriculture.
© dpa-Zentralbild/Hendrik Schmidt
The examples range from architectural sculptures from the 13th century to the pig’s nose in the painting “People’s Justice” by the Indonesian artist group Taring Padi, which caused a scandal at Documenta 2022.
The symposium was organized by the Forum Kunst und Markt, which was founded by Dorothee Wimmer, Bénédicte Savoy and Johannes Nathan in 2012 in the field of art history at the TU Berlin and conducts research in the area of tension between the art trade and art policy. The symposium was conceived in cooperation with the Department of Digital Provenance Research at the TU Berlin and the Professorship for Art Education at the HFBK Hamburg.
When the swastika became an anti-Jewish symbol
The scientists Nora Sternfeld and Julia Stolba from the HFBK Hamburg report in their keynote speech about the swastika ornament in European art at the end of the 19th century. According to her research, the Aryan interpretation of the swastika symbol begins with the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. During his Troy excavations in 1886, he came across vases with engraved swastikas and gave them a German nationalist and anti-Semitic meaning – the Jews would have rejected the symbol.
This reading diffuses into academic circles and into European art, encountering ethnic discourses, a longing for antiquity and a new wave of anti-Semitism in the wake of a political power vacuum in the Weimar Republic. The symbol can be found in floor mosaics, as an Art Nouveau ornament, in picture frames and on bridge railings. According to the researchers, it is not apolitical, even if its meaning was only made clear under the National Socialists.
Degrading depictions of Jews in combination with pigs, such as those found in churches, are not very subtle. There is heated debate about these “Judensau” sculptures from the 13th century – but only for about 25 years, as the architecture critic and freelance Tagesspiegel contributor Nikolaus Bernau notes in his lecture. The most prominent case is the sculpture on the outer wall of the Wittenberg town church, where the relief was even reinstalled during Luther’s time.
Remove or keep as a memorial?
Places of worship in Magdeburg, Regensburg, Cologne and Calbe are also equipped with them, and many have now found their way with these representations. Either they end up in the museum, or they have been critically commented on with plaques or contextualized with steles and floor slabs. Bernau cites the city of Zerbst in Saxony-Anhalt as an exemplary example. The community and city society have developed a counter-monument for the pig sculpture on the ruins of St. Nicolai Church, “without outside interference”.
But so much agreement in dealing with sculptures of this kind is the exception; it often fails because of one central question: Should we preserve anti-Jewish traces and use them as a visual school in order to make one aware of the history of ideas of anti-Judaism and the demarcation mechanisms in anti-Semitism?
This is what Elke Anna Werner, professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, deals with. She gave an insight into anti-Judaism in early modern art and illuminated the curatorial approach in museums. The Jew as a Christ-killer, as a thief, as a bad person, with a red face and yellow robe, the color of envy, as in the Wittenberg Reformation Altar. Other motifs show Jews in noble clothing to suggest their greed.
Werner also asks how to properly deal with anti-Judaism as a cultural heritage. She provides examples from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuremberg, which is revising its permanent exhibition. Collection objects with anti-Jewish depictions are contextualized there with early modern evidence of Jewish life, and others are commented on textually. Werner’s suggestion is to show connections between Christian and Jewish worlds in museum work – and ideally not only historically, but also currently.
Protest against the Suharto regime
In 2022, a huge painting by the Indonesian artist group Taring Padi was exhibited at Documenta 15 on Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz. In a crowd of people, it shows, among other things, a soldier with a Mossad helmet, a pig’s nose and a Star of David, and also a Jew with SS runes on his helmet. The image was first obscured, then removed. The artists argued that they did not mean to hurt or offend anyone. Her image refers to the events in Indonesia during the Suharto dictatorship, in which tens of thousands were murdered.
This image is also the subject of the TU symposium. The Southeast Asia scholar Timo Duile from the University of Bonn, the Berlin artist Leon Kahane and Dorothee Wimmer, director of the Art and Market Forum, will discuss. Moderated by Nora Sternfeld from the HFBK Hamburg, they should first just describe the picture, then analyze it and finally comment on it. Even the experts don’t find it easy to simply look at images without judging them.
In his analysis, Leon Kahane refers to anti-Semitism as a cultural technique of scapegoating, which is manifest in the image. The world is divided into light and dark, the Jews are the masterminds of capitalist exploitation. Dorothee Wimmer makes it clear that at Documenta 15 the opportunity to learn more about the systemic struggle in the context of the Cold War in Indonesia was missed using this image as an example. Maybe also about post-Nazi anti-Semitism here and there. In Indonesia, dictator Suharto justified his resignation in 1998 after long, bloody student protests with a Jewish, financial capitalist conspiracy. These enemy images, mixed with references to Western collaborators, ended up in the image of Taring Padi.
Taring Padi published a new picture on Instagram this year, Ines Gerber discussed it in her lecture on agricultural romanticism. Again it is a protest image with a clear logic of good and evil. This time it’s about Palestine and the war in Gaza, presented in the contrast of rural idyll and a cosmopolitan outside with Israeli tanks.
Show, comment, put away? A dilemma remains. But only if you learn to read and perceive anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic codes can you stop reproducing them.