Zionist art framed oriental Jews as living evidence of an authentic Jewish past

Evidence

For Schatz, the necessary ingredients for genuine Jewish art were the country’s landscapes, its history, and its (Jewish) “types.” From this point of view the people, especially the oriental Jews, the land, and its mythic past were perceived as one and the same thing when acting as a model for a new Jewish creativity that would come to the country from the West. While belonging to the physical environment of the East, the oriental Jews were also seen as a living testimony of the nation’s past there. Thus painting the features of Yemenite Jews or Bucharan girls as was frequently done in Bezalel was a step toward a Jewish national art in Palestine. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 617

Thus the next phase in the history of Israeli art continued some of the premises of its previous stage: in particular, pointing at the oriental Jew as the emblem of authentic belonging of Jews to the place, to the Land of Israel, and to the East. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 625

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The conflation of oriental Jews with the land and mythic past is a dense colonial logic: the Eastern Jew as living fossil, both part of the physical East and evidence of the nation’s ancient roots there — a way of claiming indigeneity through the bodies of a population simultaneously marked as ‘primitive.’
• XREF: Echoes Said’s Orientalism logic of the East as timeless exhibit, and parallels how colonial ethnography used indigenous subjects as living ancestors.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 617; Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 625