Oldal 494 [494]
When Ytzig Met Shtrul: On Schmoozing and Jewish Conspiracy in Romanian Art
Content. The conversations covered other religious matters, other social and
economic concerns, and other political views—not those that would normally
concern Romanians.
For Romanians, the Jewish group and the Jewish dialogue was, perceptually
and responsively, unfamiliar. Any hereafter misjudgment seemed legitimate. Don’t
we find the same misconstruction, born out of an involuntary incomprehensibility,
for example, in the following lines from James Joyce’s Ullysses? “On the steps of the
Paris Stock Exchange the goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fin¬
gers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads
thickplotting under maladroit silk hats” (1992: 34). Their verbal manifestations
were too obscure and bizarre to be understood. In the nineteenth-century French
dictionaries, the figurative meaning of Hebrew, a language that was used in the
Jewish liturgical service, was chose inintelligible, a loosely semantic allocation that
encompassed especially a riddling language (Boiste P. C. V. 1823: 701; Noél M.,
Chapsal M. 1832: 475; Larousse 1873: 128)° But it was not the language, as all
around Europe Jews commonly spoke the national language of their country of
residence, but their behavioral oddness, especially their clannish and noisy atti¬
tude, that precluded their dialogue from being accepted as normal. The synagogue
clamor was often equated to “barking,” a contemptuous label that was occasion¬
ally placed on all Jewish sounds, noise, and perhaps even speech (Stow 2006: 31).
In 1871, pope Pius LX complained that the Jews were barking up and down the
Roman streets, aurally polluting the city (Ibidem). The misperception of the Jews
in front of the local national majorities cast suspiciousness on the Jews’ most basic
and unoffending social manifestations. Indiscernible, cliquish, and distressing, the
Jewish dialogue was beforehand condemned to prejudicial exploits.
Picturing a Prejudice
The strange impression of the intercommunicating Jews cemented a minor motif
in early modern and modern European art. Over the centuries, many artists repre¬
sented Jews involved in close discussions. But since a visual rendering of a dialogue
proved difficult, the actual subject of speech remained notional and inferential,
being debatable and, therefore, ascribed to the art theory. As the artist’s intentions
were but rarely known, art critics and art historians tried to elucidate the dilemma:
What are those Jews talking about?® Regardless of what particular topics were
> Parler hébreu meant and still means to speak an unintelligible language; it completed a list of far
and old languages that were hard to decipher and came to represent impossible gibberish, e.g.: c'est de
Uhébreu, du grec, du chinois, du syriaque, de l'arabe.
° Rembrandt's etching Jews in a Synagogue (1648) challenged the suppositional spirit of the modern
critics, set to discover what the characters (especially an isolated group of two Jews) talked about. The
nineteenth-century French critic Charles Blanc believed: “In the left forefront, two old Jews seem to be
engaged in a really animated conversation. One of them, seen frontally and with the head covered by
a tall bonnet, rests his left hand on a cane, in an attitude of profound attention, and holds his right hand
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