Let them praise his name with dancing. (Psalm 149:3)

The Romanian-born artist Reuven Rubin completed his ‘Seekers of God’ woodcut series, from which The Dancers of Meron is taken, in 1923, shortly after moving from Europe to Palestine. It anticipates his better-known oil painting of the same name from 1926.

As with much of Rubin’s work, the woodcut series illustrates his experience of the Zionist optimism engendered by the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which gave political impetus to the possibility of a Jewish national home. The ecstatic gesture of the figure on the right was prominent within the choreographic vocabulary of Rubin’s friend the Romanian-born dancer-choreographer Baruch Agadati, who was responsible for establishing Hassidic dance traditions in Palestine following his own move there in the early 1900s (Manor 2002: 73–89).

Rubin developed an artistic idiom derived in part from German Expressionism and Russian neo-Primitivism to express a sense of ‘rootedness’ in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel). ‘Rumania was forgotten, New York far away … In Palestine there was sunshine, the sea, the halutzim (pioneers) with their bronzed faces and open shirts … A new country, a new life was springing up around me … The world around became clear and pure to me. Life was stark, bare, primitive’, the artist proclaimed (Zalmona 2013:44).

The woodcut medium—with its associations of ‘primitivism’, and its discipline of simplification and elimination of extraneous detail—helped Rubin to distil the essential from his experience. The rhythmic continuity between the human forms and the landscape not only accentuates the figures’ gestures, but also serves to tie them into their environment.

‘Let Israel be glad in his Maker, let the sons of Zion rejoice in their King. Let them praise his name with dancing’ read verses 2 and 3 of Psalm 149. The two men in this woodcut enact the close association between communal dancing and worship among the Hassidic Jewish community, who make the annual pilgrimage to Mount Meron on the festival of Lag ba-omer.

While the figure on the left embraces the Torah scroll as he sways in a votive reverie, his companion raises his hands, as if overtaken by a spiritual frenzy. Their gestures may be complementary: holding Scripture close to your heart can at the same time open you to the heavens.

References

Manor, Dalia. 2002. ‘The Dancing Jew and Other Characters: Art in the Jewish Settlement in Palestine During the 1920’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 1.1: 73–89

Zalmona, Yigal. 2013. A Century of Israeli Art (Surrey: Lund Humphries)