Orientalist painting rendered Jesus as European and Jews as oriental

Evidence

Gérôme’s Flight from Egypt pictures an angel leading Joseph and Mary, dressed like Bedouin, in the desert. In his Entry of Christ to Jerusalem (1890), a blond Jesus approaches on a white donkey, accompanied by another blond male and a white donkey colt. The welcoming party is led by Magdalene, the ex-prostitute, a richly adorned character prefiguring the artist’s Woman of Cairo (1897). Behind Magdalene, a little hard to discern in the shade of the oscuro part of the painting, several male Jews prostrate themselves to the Son of God in the Muslim fashion. What clearer image could there be of the overlap between Christian conversion and European expansion? The white man Jesus has here risen above his swarthy Jewish-oriental surroundings. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 208

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and to the broader theme of Christian Europe constructing the East as its inferior other.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ via Magdalene’s adornment framing, though tangential; more directly extends Orientalism’s own argument about visual knowledge and imperial domination.