Spirituality and Action
Comparative commentary by Simona Di Nepi
The Maccabees are the protagonists of Hanukkah, celebrated every year on 25 Kislev, the ninth month of the Hebrew calendar. They are also the object of fascination for the three twentieth-century artists in this exhibition: Zeev Raban, Yehye Yemini, and Jack Levine, each conveying in their own way the Maccabees’ faith and conviction.
1 Maccabees recounts the events surrounding the Hasmonaean uprising against the anti-Jewish persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Seleucid King and ruler of Judea in the second century BCE. Determined to hellenize the land of Israel, Antiochus outlawed Jewish practice; he turned the Temple of Jerusalem into a place of pagan worship, and, under penalty of death, banned the Torah, circumcision, and the Sabbath (1:41–64).
It is against this backdrop that chapter 2 begins. Although it appears so near the start of Maccabees, this chapter brilliantly encapsulates the entire Hanukkah story: on the one hand, it promotes a strong message of spirituality and on the other it urges war and action. These two aspects are present in chapter 2 as two traits of Mattathias’s personality: the aged priest who lucidly verbalizes his faith in God’s covenant (vv.19–22) abruptly turns into the violent man who gives vent to anger, kills on the altar (v.24), strikes down sinners, and forcibly circumcises boys (vv.44–46).
The three works here seem to oscillate between this very duality. Zeev Raban freezes the scene in the ‘calm before the storm’ moment, that of Mattathias’s firm yet composed defence of his beliefs to King Antiochus’s officials (2:19–22). For Jack Levine, one of the angry social realists in mid-twentieth-century America, the time for conversation is over and his Judas (Mattathias’s son) is ready for battle (3:3–9). With Yehia Yemini’s shimmering silver relief, there is a return to spiritual purity with the cleansing of the desecrated Temple (4:42–51).
And yet these works all seem to express awe and admiration for the Hasmonaeans’ moral standing. For Raban and Yemini, this idealization is part of the wider programme of the Bezalel School of Art in early twentieth-century Jerusalem. As envisioned by its founder Boris Schatz, its teachers and students were to create a Hebrew style in the service of the Zionist vision. The Hasmonaeans, the founders of the last Jewish sovereign state in 2000 years, were the ultimate symbols of Jewish independence.
In this context, the two scenes by Raban and Yemini encouraged a proud Jewish cultural and political identity. Levine seems to have been prompted by more personal motives. His interest in Jewish biblical figures, as well as sages and rabbis, was triggered by the death of his father Samuel. It was shortly after this experience that Levine painted his most celebrated religious painting, King Salomon and Hiram, made to ‘score points with his father’, and celebrating the same Jewish tradition he had once rejected (Baskind 2007: 83).
If Levine stands apart from the two Jerusalem artists in the apolitical use of his Judas Maccabeus, it is Yemini’s piece that, as a ritual object, adds a further dimension. Rather than merely depicting the events, his Hanukkah lamp brings them back to life—the kindling of the eight flames serving as a re-enactment of the lighting of the gold Menorah in the Temple (4:50).
Beyond any differences between these works, what remains is that the Maccabees, officially rejected from the canon of the Hebrew Bible, were the chosen subjects of these three Jewish artists. In their work, they not only legitimized, but also celebrated the Hasmonaeans. Indeed, one might argue, they reinstated them as a worthy and glorious chapter of Jewish history and made a case for treating them as part of the Hebrew Scriptures.
References
Baskind, Samantha. 2007. ‘Midrash and the Jewish American Experience in Jack Levine's Planning Solomon's Temple’, Ars Judaica: The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art, 3: 73–90
