Musée d'Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme (MAHJ), Paris
7 March – 8 July 2012
71 Rue du Temple, 75003 Paris
+33 1 53 01 86 53

This exhibition explores the world of Orientalist painting, focussing on the representation of the Jew as “Oriental” in art from 1832 to 1929. The artists who travelled to the Orient in the early 19th century discovered the Jewish communities around the Mediterranean rim. This unexpected encounter revealed another picturesque facet of an Orient often imagined before it was visited. Eugène Delacroix in Morocco and Théodore Chassériau in Algeria filled their notebooks with sketches of Jewish figures, using them later in large pictures such as Delacroix’s pioneering Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1841).

Beyond North Africa, the journey to the Holy Land took on a more symbolic dimension. Motivated by religious aspirations and the new archaeological interest in lands ranging from Egypt to Mesopotamia, Europeans went in search of the origins of western civilisation in the Middle East. The views of Jerusalem by painters such as David Roberts and Thomas Seddon epitomise this quest.

In a context in which the task of recounting ancient Jewish history fell to painting, the work of a few European Jewish artists also became a means of asserting a national identity. Eduard Bendemann and Henri-Léopold Lévy reinterpreted the theme of the exile in Babylon as an emblematic matrix of the history of the dispersion of the Jewish people. The most fascinating example is Maurycy Gottlieb’s re-examination of the interface between Judaism and Christianity, drawing on literature, in his painting Christ Before His Judges.