Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation: EM Lilien ..... guest post

In January 2020, Bloomsbury Academic Press published Dr Lynne Swarts’ first book, encompassing her passion for intellectual int­ersections: modern European history, Jewish history, gender studies and visual culture. Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation: Women in the Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien at the German Fin de Siècle is about one of the important (but overlooked) Jewish artists of modern times, Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874–1925).

EM Lilien,
Das stille Lied, c1900,
Judo.

EM Lilien has been romanticised or demonised, depending on one’s view, as the first major Zionist artist. Surprisingly there has been little in-depth scholarly research and analysis of Lil­ien's work available in English, and so this research makes an important contribution to historical scholarship. Most of the hist­or­iography on Lilien so far has concentrated on his ground-breaking iconography of the muscular (male) Jewish body, much discussed amongst scholars of Israeli and Zionist art histography. There has been little debate on his images of the modern Jewish women.

Lilien was a superb illustrator, printer, photographer and film maker. Born in Drohobycz, at the base of the Carpathian Mountains in the Hapsburg Empire in 1874, Lilien went to art school in Krakow before ending up in Munich. Arriving in 1896, he worked for the fledgling Jugend art magazine as an illustrator and photographer. This was when the journal was first published, and Jugendstil (named after the rebellious style) became a household name. With the same ability to sense new moments in art history, he moved to Berlin in 1899, just as Berlin was taking over as the centre of the German art world.

In Berlin Lilien collaborated with Börries von Münchhausen (1874–1945) on a book titled Juda (c1900). The book became an overnight sensation. Von Münchhausen, fascinated by German Romantic poetry, composed a series of Hebrew Ballads that Lilien illustrated. In perhaps the most well-known illustration from these ballads, Das stille Lied, Lilien fashioned a new, modern and Jewish artistic style, a fresh interpretation of Jugendstil for a very different audience. As Juda, the male hero of the story, kisses his female lover, their bodies dissolve into an erotic, sensual embrace.

Juda’s cloak, with its decorative, flat Jugendstil patterns, swirls around them, helping to convey their passionate, exotic or Oriental love. For Lilien’s Jewish German audiences, the kiss was not a gen­eric Germanic kiss but a specifically Jewish kiss, with the hand­some Juda looking a little like Herzl. The emphasis on handsome good looks and normative sexuality were all part of the Zionist body aesthetics that encouraged strong, heterosexual, manly behaviour.

His images of muscular new Jews, tilling the soil like their socialist brethren, helped launch Lilien’s career. Martin Buber (1878–1965) and the cultural Zionists, who believed that Jewish re­newal would be based on culture not politics, were happy to praise Juda for its depiction of ancient male heroes. Lilien became the darling and hope of their movement. However his depiction of a Jew­ish woman as licentious or submissive was passed over in silence.

EM Lilien at his drafting table in c1902,
National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. 
Wikicommons

This book concentrates on Lilien’s female imagery and divides them into 3 separate genres:
1. his non-Jewish femmes fatales (similar to other non-Jewish successful avant-garde artists);
2. his images of courageous Jewish biblical heroines; and
3. his more sensuous images of Jewish orientalised women with a certain amount of sexual agency.

Lilien merges misogynist Jugendstil aka Art Nouveau images of the femme fatale with a western Orientalism, that often worshipped the exoticism and unbridled sexuality of the eastern other. The book argues that his use of orientalism as an artistic style to repres­ent images of strong heroic Jewish women was not a part of these white, Western, male fantasies. Rather his images represented a fundamental and critical attempt to explore the complexities of German and Jewish identity.

To Lilien, the Orient was not simply a fanciful place, but an internal space to explore multiple and transnational identities. Lilien was part of an increasingly large, ingenious and active group of fin-de-siècle Jewish writers, poets and artists whose response to the problems of otherness was to view German Jewish orientalism as an inspiration that would help explain their multiple identities.

Lilien searched in his oriental and biblical imagery for an authentic Jewish identity that would help overcome how non-Jewish Germans perceived or classified him and his fellow Jews: as being ‘not quite white’ and certainly ‘not quite German’ i.e as barbaric Asiatics or Orientals. Lilien’s sense of otherness not only prod­uced tensions between his apparent Germanness and Jewishness but demanded a psychological gestalt or answer to the perennial quest­ion that Buber’s spiritual ideas had posed to the cultural Zionists on the Jewish essence. His images of orientalised Jewish women form part of that search for identity, roots and meaning. Grounded in their European origins, Lilien’s images were, also part of the quest for a Jewish and authentic oriental voice.

Concentrating mainly on his illustrations for journals and books, the book acknowledges the importance of Lilien's ground-breaking male iconography in Zionist art. Like other vanguard male artists at the end of the C19th, painting continued to be a male preserve. Lilien’s work mirrored the misogyny inherent amongst non-Jewish avant-garde artists. As a secular Zionist, Lilien pushed the limits of Jewish visual representation in the interests of Jewish cultural literacy. The modern Jewess who emerges from the shadows or blind spots of the gendered male historiography is a distinctly contemporary figure. Lilien's female images offer a compelling glimpse of an alternate, independent and often sexually liberated modern Jewish woman, a portrayal that often eluded the Zionist imagination.

Using an interdisciplinary approach to integrate intellectual and cultural history with issues of gender, Jewish history and visual culture, the book explores the important fin de siècle tensions between European and Oriental expressions of Jewish femininity. Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation demonstrates that Lilien was not a minor figure in Europe's art scene, but a major fig­ure whose work needs re-reading in light of his cosmopolitan and national artistic genius.

Dr Swarts is a Sydney historian and academic. Her book Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation can be purchased here.