An Inheritance of Jewish Art
The Schatz Medallion Collection
The history of contemporary art in Israel must begin with Boris Schatz, the Lithuanian-born sculptor who had a vision of a national Jewish art that would express “the soul of our people, felt in our prophets, in our festivals, in our customs, our rejoicing and our mourning.”
Driven by this vision, Boris Schatz established in 1906 the first school of the arts in modern Palestine, the Bezalel School of Industrial Art.
As his friend Prof. Klausner wrote in 1925, this took courage. “In a foreign land, in a forsaken corner of Asia, surrounded by a society where the Ashkenazi refuses to eat the meat prepared by a Sefardy ... in the old city of Jerusalem, the nest of bigotry and fanaticism [Boris Schatz] established an institution of art where ‘images, icons and idols’ were painted and cast in bronze.”
And in the early days of the school, Schatz suffered much hostility in this environment. However, due largely to his perseverance the school grew and became a national institution.
Schatz and the artists he drew around him believed that Jewish art must express Jewish themes and that it should form a synthesis of the historical characteristics of Jewish craftsmanship stemming from the Orient as well as the Eastern European ghettos. They fought the aspirations of modern art and eventually became so rigid and withdrawn from contemporary creative currents that their influence waned. But it was a beginning.
Boris Schatz himself was born in 1867 in the small town of Vornu in Lithuania. His father was a cantor and his mother was of a long line of rabbis and famous scholars. Firm piety and love of learning dominated his childhood and, because of his phenomenal memory and intelligence, his family was sure he would follow the scholarly tradition. But Boris was far too curious, too imaginative, too fond of life ever to settle for this introverted existence. His people were as wretchedly poor as most Jews of his time, though not so wretched as many, and though his town was almost purely Jewish and his own grandfather, the local rabbi, a veritable ruler, the weight of the “Golus” (exile) was always with them. There was always the contempt of the officials and police and the derisive enmity of the Christian peasants who came to town on market day. And the constant reminder of exile in every religious ritual.
“So keenly did we feel the loss of our fatherland ... so ready were we at a moment’s notice to start on the journey to the land of promise, waiting only for a sign from the Messiah, that we hardly noticed our own unbearable existence, and far from trying to improve the present, directed all our hopes and dreams to the future in ‘Eretz Israel’.”
Boris began to draw when he was little more than six. Before he was ten he “executed all the ‘misrachim’ (East wall memorial plaques), and all necessary decorations at the synagogue.” Nor did he “consider it beneath me to do designs for the ,Paroches’ (curtains for the Ark) which the young ladies embroidered, designs for ‘Tfilim’ bags, and even blankets.” And all this before he had ever seen a painting or any piece of art. For in his tiny Jewish town not even a photograph existed.
He saw his first painting quite by accident at the end of his 10th year, and it haunted his thoughts and stirred his curiosity until he was forced to draw it although he knew this was an unpardonable sin, because it was a picture of the Christian god.
When Boris Schatz left home at 15 it was not, as his parents thought, to complete his Talmudic studies but to “become an artist.” However, it took him nearly twenty years to find a satisfying goal in this field. And this happened by another accident.
One day in Warsaw as he was teaching drawing to a class of rich men’s sons, they heard outside a hoarse, half-smothered voice chanting “Handele, Handele, panstvo” with a chilling and desperate monotony which went on and on. His students rushed to the window and began to laugh and he, too, looked out. “In the blackness of the yard, narrow as a well, chilly and damp as the grave, stood the stooping figure of ‘an Old clo’ Jew with a white patriarchal head. His spare body was wrapped into a variety of rags, his misty gaze directed in prayer towards the garrets inhabited by poverty supplying his goods. He stood under the dazzling rain, alone and forlorn, unnoticed by all except for a dirty little pup . . . and the clean little pampered children of luxury teasing and mocking from above.”
Boris Schatz modeled him. “I worked with the passion of prophet and artist. I longed to show, to throw open to all, the soul of a pauper, a Jew tormented by hunger and cold, mortally wounded by human contempt, a Jew whose comical rags hid the soul of a being, a man.”
He had found his goal. “I wanted to load on my shoulders the ancient burden [of my people]. I wanted to help carry its ‘Golus’ (exile) and—if I did not succeed in drying his tears—at least I could make its grief known to others.” This was the goal which inspired him all the rest of his life. He studied in Paris and worked in many places, and as he refined his work his reputation grew. A statue of Mattathias, the father of the Maccabees, attracted the attention of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria who made him court sculptor at Sofia. He worked there for ten years and founded the Bulgarian Academy of Arts. But Boris had another dream, too. A dream of “a modest mankind, a mankind which would throw off ... . the false sheen of civilization.” “I felt that only through closeness to nature could man set himself free. I dreamed of collecting a group of cultivated people who . . . would settle in such natural surroundings as Palestine and create a sort of nucleus for mankind of the future in the manner of the early Christians.” They would not devote themselves to “rearing despotic power” as the Christians did. “Science would be their sacred hope, art and labor would give them life . . . the labor of a conscious being, a free man, work which in proportion to the taste and meaning put into its creation will bring joy and happiness to the creator.”
Out of this Utopian dream, with the encouragement of Theodore Herzl, came the practical plan for the Bezalel Society. This was conceived as a school of all the arts and crafts “to establish suitable enterprises and thus provide the Jewish population of Palestine with new ways of sustenance and possibilities of existence.”
With this formula Schatz secured the full support of the Zionist movement. Thanks to it, he received from the Jewish National Fund a large building in which the Bezalel museum was housed until the 1960’s (it was then made a part of the Israel National Museum). This was the cradle of the new Palestinian Jewish art.
Boris Schatz’ own work found its best expression in bas-relief sculpture, although he worked in all media. He studied his people, and with rare empathy and skill he translated living faces and raw emotion into bronze. Whether humble or heroic, his figures are all warm with life. And with Schatz’ own vision of the Jewish mystique. Historic figures burn with the dream of independence. Isaiah is the prophet of peace. Jeremiah is not only the lamenter, but the shining spur to freedom. Old Jewish grandmothers glow with wisdom and faith. And in all his works is one dominant thought—the thought of redemption. This thought burns in every face, reflecting, as Prof. Klausner wrote in 1925, “the spirit of God which shines on a new nation.”
Boris Schatz died in America on a fund-raising tour in 1932. Too soon to see his free land bloom. But he deserves a place of distinction as a builder in the land of Israel, as well as a remarkable sculptor. There are collections of Prof. Schatz’ works at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and in Rodef Shalom Temple in Pittsburgh as well as Congregation Solel. A large bronze plaque of “The Rabbi’s Blessing” is in Temple Israel in Columbus, Ga., a large “Prophet Jeremiah” is in Congregation Children of Israel in Athens, Ga., and a large “The Marriage Broker” is at North Shore Congregation Israel, in Glencoe, III.
NOTE: Quotations in this biographical sketch are all from a monograph by Boris Schatz, and its introduction by Prof. Klausner, privately published in 1925. Further material from The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Pages 391-392, Volume 9.
Prof. Joseph Klausner was born in Lithuania in 1874, and lived in Odessa until he went to Palestine in 1919. He taught Hebrew literature and Jewish history at the Hebrew University as well as writing books and articles about Jesus, Hebrew grammar and Bialik; and editing the Encyclopedia Hebraica. He died in Israel in 1958.
An Inheritance of Jewish Art
The Schatz Medallion Collection
The history of contemporary art in Israel must begin with Boris Schatz, the Lithuanian-born sculptor who had a vision of a national Jewish art that would express “the soul of our people, felt in our prophets, in our festivals, in our customs, our rejoicing and our mourning.”
Driven by this vision, Boris Schatz established in 1906 the first school of the arts in modern Palestine, the Bezalel School of Industrial Art.
As his friend Prof. Klausner wrote in 1925, this took courage. “In a foreign land, in a forsaken corner of Asia, surrounded by a society where the Ashkenazi refuses to eat the meat prepared by a Sefardy ... in the old city of Jerusalem, the nest of bigotry and fanaticism [Boris Schatz] established an institution of art where ‘images, icons and idols’ were painted and cast in bronze.”
And in the early days of the school, Schatz suffered much hostility in this environment. However, due largely to his perseverance the school grew and became a national institution.
Schatz and the artists he drew around him believed that Jewish art must express Jewish themes and that it should form a synthesis of the historical characteristics of Jewish craftsmanship stemming from the Orient as well as the Eastern European ghettos. They fought the aspirations of modern art and eventually became so rigid and withdrawn from contemporary creative currents that their influence waned. But it was a beginning.
Boris Schatz himself was born in 1867 in the small town of Vornu in Lithuania. His father was a cantor and his mother was of a long line of rabbis and famous scholars. Firm piety and love of learning dominated his childhood and, because of his phenomenal memory and intelligence, his family was sure he would follow the scholarly tradition. But Boris was far too curious, too imaginative, too fond of life ever to settle for this introverted existence. His people were as wretchedly poor as most Jews of his time, though not so wretched as many, and though his town was almost purely Jewish and his own grandfather, the local rabbi, a veritable ruler, the weight of the “Golus” (exile) was always with them. There was always the contempt of the officials and police and the derisive enmity of the Christian peasants who came to town on market day. And the constant reminder of exile in every religious ritual.
“So keenly did we feel the loss of our fatherland ... so ready were we at a moment’s notice to start on the journey to the land of promise, waiting only for a sign from the Messiah, that we hardly noticed our own unbearable existence, and far from trying to improve the present, directed all our hopes and dreams to the future in ‘Eretz Israel’.”
Boris began to draw when he was little more than six. Before he was ten he “executed all the ‘misrachim’ (East wall memorial plaques), and all necessary decorations at the synagogue.” Nor did he “consider it beneath me to do designs for the ,Paroches’ (curtains for the Ark) which the young ladies embroidered, designs for ‘Tfilim’ bags, and even blankets.” And all this before he had ever seen a painting or any piece of art. For in his tiny Jewish town not even a photograph existed.
He saw his first painting quite by accident at the end of his 10th year, and it haunted his thoughts and stirred his curiosity until he was forced to draw it although he knew this was an unpardonable sin, because it was a picture of the Christian god.
When Boris Schatz left home at 15 it was not, as his parents thought, to complete his Talmudic studies but to “become an artist.” However, it took him nearly twenty years to find a satisfying goal in this field. And this happened by another accident.
One day in Warsaw as he was teaching drawing to a class of rich men’s sons, they heard outside a hoarse, half-smothered voice chanting “Handele, Handele, panstvo” with a chilling and desperate monotony which went on and on. His students rushed to the window and began to laugh and he, too, looked out. “In the blackness of the yard, narrow as a well, chilly and damp as the grave, stood the stooping figure of ‘an Old clo’ Jew with a white patriarchal head. His spare body was wrapped into a variety of rags, his misty gaze directed in prayer towards the garrets inhabited by poverty supplying his goods. He stood under the dazzling rain, alone and forlorn, unnoticed by all except for a dirty little pup . . . and the clean little pampered children of luxury teasing and mocking from above.”
Boris Schatz modeled him. “I worked with the passion of prophet and artist. I longed to show, to throw open to all, the soul of a pauper, a Jew tormented by hunger and cold, mortally wounded by human contempt, a Jew whose comical rags hid the soul of a being, a man.”
He had found his goal. “I wanted to load on my shoulders the ancient burden [of my people]. I wanted to help carry its ‘Golus’ (exile) and—if I did not succeed in drying his tears—at least I could make its grief known to others.” This was the goal which inspired him all the rest of his life. He studied in Paris and worked in many places, and as he refined his work his reputation grew. A statue of Mattathias, the father of the Maccabees, attracted the attention of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria who made him court sculptor at Sofia. He worked there for ten years and founded the Bulgarian Academy of Arts. But Boris had another dream, too. A dream of “a modest mankind, a mankind which would throw off ... . the false sheen of civilization.” “I felt that only through closeness to nature could man set himself free. I dreamed of collecting a group of cultivated people who . . . would settle in such natural surroundings as Palestine and create a sort of nucleus for mankind of the future in the manner of the early Christians.” They would not devote themselves to “rearing despotic power” as the Christians did. “Science would be their sacred hope, art and labor would give them life . . . the labor of a conscious being, a free man, work which in proportion to the taste and meaning put into its creation will bring joy and happiness to the creator.”
Out of this Utopian dream, with the encouragement of Theodore Herzl, came the practical plan for the Bezalel Society. This was conceived as a school of all the arts and crafts “to establish suitable enterprises and thus provide the Jewish population of Palestine with new ways of sustenance and possibilities of existence.”
With this formula Schatz secured the full support of the Zionist movement. Thanks to it, he received from the Jewish National Fund a large building in which the Bezalel museum was housed until the 1960’s (it was then made a part of the Israel National Museum). This was the cradle of the new Palestinian Jewish art.
Boris Schatz’ own work found its best expression in bas-relief sculpture, although he worked in all media. He studied his people, and with rare empathy and skill he translated living faces and raw emotion into bronze. Whether humble or heroic, his figures are all warm with life. And with Schatz’ own vision of the Jewish mystique. Historic figures burn with the dream of independence. Isaiah is the prophet of peace. Jeremiah is not only the lamenter, but the shining spur to freedom. Old Jewish grandmothers glow with wisdom and faith. And in all his works is one dominant thought—the thought of redemption. This thought burns in every face, reflecting, as Prof. Klausner wrote in 1925, “the spirit of God which shines on a new nation.”
Boris Schatz died in America on a fund-raising tour in 1932. Too soon to see his free land bloom. But he deserves a place of distinction as a builder in the land of Israel, as well as a remarkable sculptor. There are collections of Prof. Schatz’ works at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and in Rodef Shalom Temple in Pittsburgh as well as Congregation Solel. A large bronze plaque of “The Rabbi’s Blessing” is in Temple Israel in Columbus, Ga., a large “Prophet Jeremiah” is in Congregation Children of Israel in Athens, Ga., and a large “The Marriage Broker” is at North Shore Congregation Israel, in Glencoe, III.
NOTE: Quotations in this biographical sketch are all from a monograph by Boris Schatz, and its introduction by Prof. Klausner, privately published in 1925. Further material from The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Pages 391-392, Volume 9.
Prof. Joseph Klausner was born in Lithuania in 1874, and lived in Odessa until he went to Palestine in 1919. He taught Hebrew literature and Jewish history at the Hebrew University as well as writing books and articles about Jesus, Hebrew grammar and Bialik; and editing the Encyclopedia Hebraica. He died in Israel in 1958.