a reflection on the painting by Marc Chagall by Bryan Owen
When I was doing my poetry reading tour of the United States in October 2007 I spent an afternoon with a Jewish friend in the Art Institute of Chicago. Sometimes when you visit an art gallery a picture generates within you such a visceral response that you keep going back to it to find out what made you react so strongly. That was what happened to me when I saw Marc Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’.
Chagall’s work developed out of his own very dramatic experience of life. So what was he saying in the ‘White Crucifixion’ when he painted it in 1938? And why is it still relevant all these years later? These are just two of the questions that have been gnawing away at me since that first moment of seeing what is, by any measure, a most powerful piece of art.
A Jewish Jesus The first thing we notice in this narrative painting is that it’s a kaleidoscopic whirl of images. There is hectic activity and turmoil in everything we see. The dominant colour is white – the Jewish colour of sorrow - and the cross is tau-shaped similar to those Jewish men wore to symbolise their deep lamentation over the desecration of holy things (see Ezekiel 9:4). The initial statement, then, is one of utter sorrow and the deepest sadness.
Jesus is hanging upon the cross dressed in a tallith, a Jewish prayer shawl of the kind worn by Jewish men when they pray. This is a Jewish Jesus painted by a Jewish artist but this Jesus is still the Christ who is claimed by Christians to be the redeemer of the world. Above his head are the Roman letters INRI and the inscription in Hebrew 'Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews'. Behind his head is the traditional halo affirming the innocence of this victim of judicial violence.
So often Christians turn Jesus of Nazareth into somebody like ourselves. We project on to him all the virtues, habits and behaviour patterns we would like him to have. But Christians forget that the historical Jesus didn’t speak English or drink cups of tea. He didn’t order pastrami on rye or drive a gas-guzzling car. This is the Jesus who lived 2,000 years ago in Palestine – the one who stayed in other people’s houses because he had no home of his own. Chagall’s Jesus was the one who ate unleavened bread and drank rough red wine, the one who ate hummus and olives and fish.
People running away But then we notice the rest of the picture! From the place of crucifixion, instead of the usual figures of Mary and John and the Roman centurion standing there looking at the suffering Jesus, we see Jews running away in terror and anguish.
Is this because of the reference in Matthew 27:25 – sometimes referred to as the most inflammatory statement in the New Testament - where ‘all the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children”’? This verse alone has been responsible for so much hatred against the Jews through the centuries. From it comes the erroneous notion of ‘collective guilt’ that anti-Semites throughout the ages have used as a justification for their racism.
However, take the verse and look at it. Firstly, Pilate has apparently just washed his hands of any responsibility. That in itself is historically unlikely because we know from Josephus, the Jewish historian, that Pilate was a brutal tyrant. There is no evidence he ever washed his hands of anything. Killing troublemakers was what he did. It was part of his job.
Secondly, since when can a hostile crowd of a few hundred commit a whole race of people to ‘collective guilt’? Could a chanting mob outside Congress commit the American people to collective ‘blood guilt’? What about all the Jews who weren’t in the chanting mob that day? Don’t they get a say? Doesn’t collective ‘blood guilt’ go against natural justice and isn’t God – Yahweh, Adonai Elohim -supposed to be a God of justice?
The reference to bloodguilt is in Matthew’s Gospel, the most Jewish of the four gospels written. Its purpose was theological rather than historical and it refers to the long past. Yet Christian persecution of Jews has been largely based on the wrong interpretation of this verse... the Jews were responsible for Christ’s death and so all Jews of every generation are somehow guilty. What theological nonsense! However, it is an example of how those who have decided to do wrong in the world then search for a Bible verse to support their twisted beliefs while ignoring all the rest. The same happens today when homophobes search the Bible for the three or four verses that support their prejudice while ignoring all those that don’t.
The Soviet Red Army In the top left hand corner we see the Soviet Red Army coming not to liberate but to continue and intensify the Russian persecution of Jews. Chagall had initially welcomed the 1917 revolution hoping it would bring peace and justice to an oppressed Jewish people. Even though he was appointed Commissar for Art in his home town of Vitebsk in 1918 he quickly became disillusioned with the nature of Russian communism – with its Jacobin violence and enforced social conformity. He once said, 'I think the Revolution could be a great thing if it retained its respect for what is other and different.' As we know, Russian communism could do no such thing. In ‘White Crucifixion’ the Red Army come to oppress his Jewish people just as the Tsarist army had done before them.
Nazi persecution But In the top right corner we see a synagogue being set on fire by the Nazis. The old Weimar German flag flies above and there is a figure in a brown shirt wearing a swastika armband below. Chagall painted the picture in 1938. By then, from the safety of his home in Paris, he knew what was happening to Jews in Nazi Germany.
It was in November of 1938that the Nazis unleashed their carefully planned Kristallnacht. Mobs burned down synagogues, Jewish homes and shops were ransacked, graves desecrated and Jewish families publicly humiliated. The events of that dark November night culminated in the arrest of thousands of Jews and their transportation to concentration camps.
Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, leaves both religious and non-religious faith in pieces. What can one believe in any more in the face of man’s inhumanity to man? To the religious we ask, ‘Where was God?’ To atheists we ask, ‘Where was Man?’
One temptation, of course, is to say that the mobs were made up of the worst people in society: they weren’t people like you or me... artistic, intelligent, educated, cultured. Oh, but they were! Many of them were people exactly like you and me. Remember that Reinhard Heydrich, deputy head of the SS, played the violin and was the cultured son of professional musicians. His father founded the Halle Conservatory of Music and was a Wagnerian opera singer, while his mother was an accomplished pianist. Even Hitler, an avid reader, had hoped to become a professional artist.
Germany was one of the most highly cultured and educated countries in Europe and still is. In spite of that, too many ordinary people fell under the malign spell of the Nazis. They believed Goebbel’s lies; they kept their heads down and limply hoped for the best. Social democrats and communists were arrested along with trades unionists, gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled. Even the German National Church accepted the Nazi myths forcing people like Dietrich Bonhöffer and others who refused to cross that line to create the Confessing Church and suffer persecution themselves.
Sleepwalking into disaster My contention is that we face similar threats today. In the developed West the forces of the hard right are in power in the USA. Elsewhere, parties of the left have moved towards the right to win votes and the danger now facing us in Britain, Europe and North America is that the power of popular discontent fired by continual exaggerations published by the tabloid press will force those in power – or those who are ambitious for power - over the edge.
Already in Britain and America - countries that hitherto have valued liberty and a liberal consensus - have illiberal and authoritarian governments. Both President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair disingenuously passed laws that have restricted the freedoms and rights of ordinary citizens in the name of ‘the war on terror’. The suspension of habeas corpus, the use of rendition flights so that suspects can be tortured, and the incarceration without charge or trial of suspects at Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, were all acts of weakness by a hard-right American government who didn’t trust the American system of justice they were constitutionally bound to protect.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown seems wedded to his own form of authoritarianism that may yet compromise his genuine progressive social democratic instincts. How long will it be before Western government generally becomes undemocratic and dictatorial? How long before Western governments accrue more and more powers to themselves under the guise of protecting the people or saving the state? Who was it who said, ‘All men are brothers except those who, in the name of brotherhood, have to be eliminated’? Is it a case now that all of us are free except those who in the name of freedom must lose theirs? Yet we still pay believe in the rule of law and in representative democracy... surely?
At what point do good men and women wake up and stand up and say ‘No further!’ At what point did they do it in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany?
As the West heads for an economic downturn, as the American way of life – built, as it is, on massive borrowing – comes crashing down, as the effects of climate change force all of us against our wills to change the way we live, how many of us are able to predict the long-term consequences for liberty and freedom of speech and the survival of civil society?
The warnings are there – and Chagall’s ‘White Crucifixion’ confronts us with the unpleasantness of things as they were and as they could be again.
The onslaught continues At the bottom of the picture copies of the Torah - the first five books of the Bible – are lying around or being snatched up and rescued as Jews flee. But also at the bottom the Menorah candles still flicker... symbolising God’s continuing presence in the burning bush. There is still some fragile light in the chaos in spite of the onslaught. That light, Chagall seems to be suggesting, cannot be put out.
To the left you can see a boat filled with Jewish refugees trying to make it to Palestine to start a new life free from oppression in Christian Europe. They are screaming for help. Above, their village is on fire and the houses are shown at impossible angles for their previously ordered world has been irrevocably turned upside down.
And above the figure of Jesus four ethereal figures float in the sky representing the presence of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob – the three Patriarchs – and Miriam who saved the baby Moses from being murdered by Pharaoh. Perhaps in spite of the dangers and the tribulation there is some way out?
No Messiah yet? At the bottom right of the picture we can see the figure of Elijah dressed as the Wandering Jew. Elijah’s presence is awaited at each Passover meal as the one who will bring news of the Messiah and the promise of freedom. But not on this night, says Chagall. In ‘White Crucifixion’, Elijah steps over a burning Torah scroll and escapes like everyone else.
Chagall, in this most harrowing of paintings, is reminding those of us who are Christian that the execution of this Jewish Jesus two thousand years ago unleashed one wave of oppression after another for Jews across Europe – from the Council of Nicaea to the Spanish Inquisition and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
And that should cause us to stop and think. Where is the integrity in our faith when Christians who worship God behave with such malice towards Jews who worship the same God? Christianity without Judaism is like a table without legs. It is nothing.
Chagall himself was a deeply spiritual man. He once told his granddaughter, ‘When I paint, I pray’. He was never temped to become a Christian but throughout his life he cultivated a genuine reverence for Christ.
Projecting and scapegoating Just as we are tempted to project onto Jesus our own values and our own behaviour patterns so that Jesus becomes like us so, throughout history, Christians have projected onto other people – Jews and Catholics in times past and Muslims and immigrants today – all the worst we see in ourselves. Our temptation is to blame others for all the ills of society instead of looking for the causes deep down within ourselves.
If Chagall’s painting is to mean anything at all surely it is to act as a warning that the dark forces that unleashed anti-Semitic pogroms in times past still exist today. They are not restricted to Christian cultures, of course. Muslims exterminated a third of the Christian population in East Timor, for example, and atheists have much to answer for in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and elsewhere.
A 19th century British Prime Minister – himself a Jew – once said, ‘The Jews are a nervous people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have taken a toll.’ His name was Benjamin Disraeli. Isn’t that what we see in ‘White Crucifixion’?
a reflection on the painting by Marc Chagall by Bryan Owen