First Prize Winner of the Second Annual Jewish Studies Program Essay Competition
Halley Epstein, “Moritz Oppenheim: The First Jewish Painter”
The Jews’ struggle to maintain their Jewish heritage in a world in which integration necessitated change accompanied their amalgamation into nineteenth century German society. Some Jews relaxed their religious observance, but held onto the heritage of their parents, and achieved considerable success as members of the German bourgeois middle class. Others maintained a way of life in strict accordance with halacha, or Jewish law. For many, integration prospects splintered their families between German culture and religious tradition. Through a medium unusual for Jews to explore, one artist encapsulated this time of change and of preservation, providing hope for his co-religionists. Born in 1800, Moritz Oppenheim experienced both the freedoms and limitations of emancipation and lived his life as a practicing Jew while achieving renown for his artistic talent. His work was respected not only by members of the Jewish community, but by non-Jews in the fields of art and poetry, state museums that acquired his paintings, and prominent members of German society who commissioned him as a portrait artist. Members of the Rothschild family, Gabriel Riesser, Heinrich Heine, and Ludwig Borne were among the prominent and intellectual Jews and non-Jews who sat for Oppenheim portraits. Resolute in his belief in the possibility of being both Jewish and German, Oppenheim forged and refashioned a new Jewish identity in Germany, one that accommodated the desire to integrate and, at the same time, to uphold tradition.
Born “in time to enjoy the fruits of the French Revolution,” Moritz Oppenheim lived in Hanau, a ghetto that was absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt in 1810, “whose new constitution decreed ‘that all Jews living in Frankfort…together with their children and descendants, should enjoy civil rights and privileges equal to other citizens” (Werner 10). This was a result of the emancipation rights granted by the French in 1806. Prior to 1810, Oppenheim attended the heder, the Jewish elementary school, but in 1811 he enrolled in the German school and the Hanau Academy of Drawing as a result of emancipation. Enlightened and observant, Oppenheim’s parents encouraged his art. Not only did the Jewish community typically shy away from purely artistic pursuits, but also “such a career had hardly been open to a Jew previously unless he was prepared to convert to Christianity” (Cohen 7).
Art was often discouraged in the Jewish religion because of the commandment against creating images that could be worshipped, and as such, it is remarkable that the young artist’s parents were so amenable to advancing his art career (Meyer 241). In fact, they later allowed him to travel to study at the Academy and Art Gallery of Munich. For the short time that emancipation spread throughout Germany, Oppenheim was able to break both the stigma art carried in the Jewish community and the usual exclusion Jewish artists experienced to freely cultivate his talent. His departure from conventional Jewish occupations demonstrated his willingness to transcend traditional Jewish roles in favor of German culture; at the same time, with the maturity of adulthood he began to paint Jewish-themed paintings, the subjects of which were his most famous and beloved works. Oppenheim’s own life exemplified a possible balance between secular, cultural pursuits and a commitment to religion through the decidedly non-Jewish vehicle of art.
Oppenheim’s non-Jewish teachers, recognizing his artistic talent, encouraged his parents to send him to Munich. There he learned lithography, a methodology that he later utilized to produce both portraits and scene paintings (Cohen 8). After a brief stint studying art in Paris, Oppenheim traveled to Rome, where “he remained an Orthodox Jew who took his meals in the Ghetto whenever possible” (Werner 11). In Rome he also shaved his beard and ceased wearing a hat, a manifestation of his desire to present a more modern image of himself (Meyer 242). Despite his close friendships with the Nazarenes, a group of Catholic German artists who sought to revive Christian art, Oppenheim remained steadfast in his faith, impervious to the prospect of conversion. He did, however, experiment by painting scenes from the Old and New Testaments and was influenced by the Nazarenes’ style: “the sharply outline figures, a rather stiff linearity and strong local colours” (Cohen 8). In 1823 he drew Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well anonymously for a contest. The judges proclaimed him the winner but refused to award him the prize when they discovered he was a Jew, despite the obvious fact that his work merited recognition (Werner 12). This incident exposed the lingering prejudices in Europe, the reluctance of some non-Jews, unlike Oppenheim’s teachers, to value the artist’s talent apart from his religion.
After four years in Rome, Oppenheim settled in Frankfurt in 1825, where he was “kept busy by a steady stream of lucrative portrait commissions” but remained acutely aware of the civil limitations imposed by his religious affiliation (Werner 12). Two of his brothers were already settled in Europe, providing the comfort of family, and the wealthy denizens of the city took a keen interest in his art. Having previously been influenced by the romantic style of the Nazarenes, Oppenheim’s evolving folk and familial style was “so appealing to bourgeois taste…[and] reflected the changed circumstances of a successful artist who now enjoyed the patronage of wealthy citizens” (Cohen 23). Few among Frankfurt’s Jews were still concerned “about the ancient Jewish prohibition against images,” a result of their integration into mainstream German society and separation from outdated suspicions of artistic creativity (Weissberg 133). The young artist from the Hanau ghetto rose by 1827 to the title of professor, given to him by the Grand Duke of Weimar through Goethe’s influence (Schorsch 33). Oppenheim did not particularly care whether he received the title but took to heart Goethe’s advice that “titles and decorations ward off many a blow in the crush” and incorporated the title into his signature (Weissberg 135).
Complementing this enormous honor was Oppenheim’s commission to paint two portraits for the Römer, the town hall of Frankfurt, a “choice recognition for a Jew who did not yet possess an official permit to live in Frankfurt” in 1839 (Kleeblatt 113). Although Oppenheim himself reported an easy life in the city, the Municipal Archives show that it was difficult for Jews born outside of Frankfurt to become citizens (Cohen 19). In fact, Oppenheim petitioned for twenty-five years to achieve citizenship; it was not until after the 1848 revolution that spread emancipation that he took the oath. All of these experiences shaped Oppenheim’s outlook on the changing landscape of German Jewry, the implications of integration for religious observance and Germany’s view of the status of its Jews.
In his 1833 painting “The Return of the Jewish Volunteer From War,” Oppenheim showed the Jews’ struggle to define their individual and collective identities within the framework of existing German perceptions. Suggesting that Germany saw its Jews in an unflattering, misguided light, he sought to emphasize that the Jews had earned their rights by their loyal and enthusiastic participation in the Napoleonic Wars but, with Napoleon’s defeat, the 1815 Congress of Vienna rescinded the Jews’ emancipation rights (Cohen 27). Returning home from exercising his patriotic duty, the soldier in the painting greets his family on the Sabbath – violating the injunction against traveling. He wears a war medal with a cross on it emblazoned on his chest, a symbol of German pride in his military actions. His father “examines it with a pride that is mixed with uneasiness” (POTJFL 16). The father’s uneasiness can also be explained as a feeling shared by Christian fathers regarding the growing divide between the generations, between modernity and tradition (Kleeblatt 116). The son embodies the “Jewish future, the hope that German Jews will be entitled to equality because they are willing to fulfill the state’s most dangerous demand upon them” (Meyer 243). But the symbolic message of the painting, an idea that corresponded with Gabriel Riesser’s views, was “a fact often denied by the enemies of Jewish emancipation – that the Jew could be as patriotic as his Christian fellow-townsman” (POTJFL 16).
Appropriately, the Jewish citizens of Baden gave Gabriel Riesser the painting in 1835 as an expression of “their gratitude for his active support in their fight for civil rights” (Weyl 84). Meyer also argues that Oppenheim “depicted the essence of Riesser’s political argument: the ability of Jews to become politically integrated Germans without uprooting themselves from the still cherished religious milieu” (243). The painting is also interpreted as “a telling document of the Jewish quest for acculturation and the struggle for reforms within the Jewish community” (Weissberg 145). The painting also served as a reference to Oppenheim’s own unusual career choice, which took him to many European cities but eventually back to his hometown of Frankfurt (Kleeblatt 117). Also of note is Oppenheim’s openness in addressing politically sensitive ideas in his art during this time of uncertainty about the direction of Jewish freedom in Germany (Kleeblatt 128).
Moritz Oppenheim completed his collection of paintings, “Pictures of Traditional Jewish Family Life,” between 1850 and 1880, during the second half of his career. Before this time Oppenheim painted biblical scenes but Jewish themes did not dominate his work. Henceforth he dealt almost exclusively with Jewish subjects and commissioned portraits. From scenes of circumcision to the bar mitzvah to Sabbath afternoons, his paintings reflect the growing wealth of Jewish Germans and provide a certain “appeal to the nostalgia of a Jewish community that wants to preserve memories that are dear to it and in danger of being lost” (Meyer 243-244). Oppenheim’s placement of the Jewish family as the central theme of these paintings resonated with German Jews, many of whom for which Judaism was “less of a faith or religion than a home (Heimat)…a sense of place” (Schorsch 39). Because Oppenheim was able to “instill pride in Jewish tradition, and teased out values of orthodoxy acculturated Jews could accept,” his paintings became emblematic of German Jewish life.
In a time of advancing emancipation still impeded by anti-Semitism, Oppenheim’s focus on the family provided a model for Jews to pursue their desires in a German society and maintain a connection to Judaism within the home (Schorsch 40). The Jewish bourgeoisie also “sought to find images that would be representative of contemporary society, but, at the same time, offer or create a new tradition,” a combination they found in Oppenheim’s paintings (Weissberg 146). Many of the paintings allude to changing customs that made some of the Jews feel more integrated into German society and “bridged the intellectual guilt that separated secularized Jews from the religious world of their recent ancestors” (Meyer 246). In “The Bar-Mitzvah Discourse,” the family wears fine clothing and displays books and pictures on the wall, “including one of King Frederick the Great of Prussia” (POTJFL 37). This symbolized the rise of Jews to the upper middle class and their patriotism towards Germany as well as “respect for the secular authorities” (Cohen 27). While the rabbi officiating “The Wedding” wears a tallit and a Polish streimel, or fur hat, the other men wear modern, fashionable breeches and three-cornered hats. However, the groom is engaged in the Jewish wedding ritual of breaking the glass, “a reminder of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple” (POTJFL 41). In this scene Oppenheim signifies the idea that German Jews were willing and able to practice important, distinctively Jewish traditions while shedding archaic external characteristics such as clothing. The new Jewish German identity being formed with the help of Moritz Oppenheim may have helped make Jews less conspicuous to their non-Jewish fellow citizens.
The attitudes of German non-Jews towards were simultaneously influenced by Oppenheim’s cultural depiction and the changing legal status of the Jews. To provide an historical framework for the completion of these paintings, it is important to consider that in 1848, two years before Oppenheim began his collection, the Jews of Germany were partially emancipated. The ensuing decades marked a great struggle for full emancipation, which was erratically achieved in the late 1860s because of differences in law and societal attitudes across a divided Germany. Yet, as Schorsch suggests, whatever their legal status, the Jews were still regarded as different. With the unification of Germany, full emancipation rights were uniformly granted in 1871. Yet the 1870s saw “renewed virulence and ominous dimensions of anti-Semitism” and Oppenheim’s paintings provided hope for the Jews whose “confidence in the permanence and quality of emancipation began to waver” (Schorsch 52). Despite the ambiguity of Jews’ actual civil rights during these decades, Oppenheim helped the “non-Jewish audience relate to Jewish religiosity” through his paintings by adeptly placing “religious practices in the context of social interaction” (Weissberg 147). Oppenheim’s talent in this regard may have enabled non-Jews to relate to Jews by seeing them in a familial and social, rather than exclusively religious, context. While Oppenheim’s cultural portrayals of German Jewish life in “Portraits of Traditional Jewish Family Life” served to link Jews to general German society, his political paintings again sent a message that Jewish emancipation was a right that should be upheld, not questioned.
In the paintings that deal with the Jews’ commitment to Germany, Oppenheim lucidly represented the dual identity of these Jews and hinted at underlying tensions between Jews who displayed patriotism towards Germany, a loyalty that was questioned. In “Soldiers Praying in Memory of the Departed,” Oppenheim depicts German Jewish soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 who are saying kaddish in an abandoned farmhouse in occupied territory. “The cross on the wall is hidden with a piece of cloth,” indicating the Jews’ sensitivity to their own religion (POTJFL 93). This painting also asserts that “piety and patriotism were co-equal” in Oppenheim’s desire to focus on “not what has to be surrendered but rather what can be preserved;” in this case it is the sanctity of Jewish yarzheit ritual (Schorsch 52). This painting indicated Oppenheim’s belief that emancipation ensured freedom of religion and the right of Jews to practice Judaism in the context of a German society even while acting in their capacity as state soldiers. Relating back to “The Return of the Jewish Volunteer,” this painting served as a political reminder that Jews deserved equal rights because of their commitment to Germany as citizens.
In painting “Pictures of Traditional Jewish Family Life” and his other historical, politically influenced works, Oppenheim incorporated characteristics of paintings by non-Jewish German artists. He judeaized the non-Jewish sources that depicted family milestones and civic events. Whereas previously non-Jews had crafted most Jewish-themed pictures for a non-Jewish audience and as instructional and educational references, Oppenheim painted for both Jewish and Gentile audiences (Weissberg 146). In some cases, he wished to correct Gentile perceptions about Jewish rituals. A century earlier, the German Christian artist Bernard Picart had drawn an “indelicate engraving” of the circumcision rite (Schorsch 46). Oppenheim, wishing to emphasize circumcision’s function as a Jewish religious ritual, painted a synagogue as the setting for his own piece depicting circumcision. Aside from clarifying Jewish scenes as religiously and culturally significant and specific to the Jews, Oppenheim infused familial and genre scenes with Jewish flavor. One of his influences was Carl Wilhelm Jakob Engel, famous for his family and home-centric scenes.
Combining “Engel’s cycle of everyday life with that of religious rites,” Oppenheim appealed to Jews by showing them that religious practice did not exclude modernity and German culture (Weissberg 146). Philipp Otto Runge, the late eighteenth century German Romantic painter, created “The Return of the Sons” in 1804, a painting that influenced Oppenheim in the loving and tender family mood it presented (Kleeblatt 119). Johann Peter Krafft also hailed from Hanau and had studied at the Hanau Academy. His paintings “The Departure of the Military Man” of 1813 and the subsequent “The Return of the Military Man” in 1820 have themes reflected in Oppenheim’s work. The father in Krafft’s first painting has his hands clasped, a symbol of “the religious devotion of an earlier generation as opposed to the nationalist valor of the younger” (Kleeblatt 119). Oppenheim incorporated this into “The Return of the Jewish Volunteer” as well, with the father clasping his son’s hand. The interactions between the various family members are similar in both paintings. Oppenheim succeeded in treating a national, political subject as Jewish while retaining the important historical symbolism, another testament to his ability to seamlessly mesh Jewish and German perspectives in his artwork. Schorsch adeptly sums up the role of Oppenheim’s art by stating “with Oppenheim, Jewish iconography emerged as a wholly new and unexpected resource in the battle to preserve Jewish identity” (54).
Fittingly, Moritz Oppenheim is remembered today as the first true Jewish painter, one who reflected and shaped the makeup of German Jewish society in the nineteenth century. As a Jew, he directed his life towards a distinctly non-Jewish vocation, but in such a way that Jews, both acculturated and traditional, saw the well-defined markers of their heritage embedded within each brush stroke of Oppenheim’s paintings. Influenced by non-Jewish sources, Oppenheim distilled their themes into a Jewish context to appeal to both his own people and non-Jews. Studying the ways Judaism was depicted in paintings by Gentiles, Oppenheim clarified the real roots and uniqueness of Jewish tradition and religion. Oppenheim was also aware of the prevailing attitudes towards Jews in Germany, especially with regard to emancipation. He used his art as a medium to express the German Jews’ loyalty to their country as citizens who should be given rights that allowed them to practice their religion while being legally and socially recognized as equal to their non-Jewish counterparts. In this way, Oppenheim served as an inspiration for the Jews to strive for equality and opportunity in German society while remaining rooted in their Jewish heritage.
Works Cited
Cohen, Elisheva. "Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: His Life and Art." Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: The First Jewish Painter. Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Printing Enterprises, 1983. 7-30.
Kleeblatt, Norman. "Moritz Oppenheim's Masterpiece The Return of the Volunteer." Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in 19th Century Art. Ed. Georg Heuberger and Anton Merk. Cologne, Germany: Wienand Verlag, 1999. 113-30.
Meyer, Michael A., ed. German-Jewish History in Modern Times - Volume 2: Emancipation and Acculturation 1780-1871. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
Pictures of Traditional Jewish Family Life. New York: Ktav House, Inc., 1976.
Schorsch, Ismar. "Art as Social History: Oppenheim and the German Jewish Vision of Emancipation." Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: The First Jewish Painter. Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Printing Enterprises, 1983. 31-62.
Weissberg, Liliane, and Georg Heuberger. "The Rothschild of Painters and the Prince of Poets." Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Jewish Identity in 19th Century Art. Ed. Georg Heuberger and Anton Merk. Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 1999. 131-52.
Werner, Alfred. "Oppenheim: A Rediscovered Master." Introduction. Pictures of Traditional Jewish Family Life. By Moritz Daniel Oppenheim. New York: Ktav House, Inc., 1976.
Weyl, Martin. "Catalogue." Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: The First Jewish Painter. Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Printing Enterprises, 198. 78-91.