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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 fingers. 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 attitude, that precluded their dialogue from being accepted as normal. The synagogue clamor was often equated to “barking,” a contemptuous label that was occasionally 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 represented 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 491
