The Orient in Jewish Artistic Creativity

This chapter examines the “Oriental” theme and self-Orientalization among Jewish artists such as Samuel Hirszenberg and Leopold Pilichowski. In postcolonial discourse, the Western imagining of the Orient is often understood as being part of a pejorative and politically charged ideology known as Orientalism. More recently, the art-historical approach has revealed that Orientalist art does not only comprise works that reflect a Western or European construction of the “other,” but also the Oriental response to Western culture and modernization. The chapter considers the “Oriental” works of Maurycy Gottlieb as an expression of an emerging alignment of Jewish artists with modernism and universalism. It also discusses the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna and Gottlieb’s encounter with the Orient before concluding with the argument that the unexpected, imaginative abandonment and self-fashioning by Jewish artists as non-European “others” might be a Jewish version of European Orientalism, which found expression in the art of Gottlieb.