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being examined, the verdict was generally pervasive in signalizing an insidious
discussion.
In one of his works, the Romanian national painter Nicolae Grigorescu de¬
picted two Jews facing each other (ill. 218). The roughly sketched pew makes the
viewer understand that the scene is set in a synagogue. Yet, there is no devotional
act, no sacramental atmosphere; the two frowning old men are paused in their
own conversation. For the nineteenth-century viewer, the attitude might have been
somehow suspicious, as the Romanians’ church attitude—the one that was off¬
cially communicated in the nationalist speech—reflected piety. Interestingly, the
artist did not invent a situation but only assigned to the Jews an attitude that was
already known to be characteristic of them. A fair testimony to that was the fact
that many eastern European Jews that migrated in the United States at the end of
the nineteenth century were attending services, not out of religious duty, but for
the schmoozing and socializing that went on there (Hoffman 2005: 8). Sociolo¬
gist Samuel Heilman remarked at how uncontainable the social chatting that took
place during liturgical worship came to be: “[While the Torah is being read], many
people talk with one another. The gabbais [officials in charge of assigning Torah
honors] are trying to shush them, but small cliques and klatches defy this shushing
and keep on talking. Indeed, in one or two cases, the people being quieted engaged
the gabbai in conversation. They succeed in making listening deviant and talking
acceptable” (Ibidem).’ Therefore, there was no prejudice in portraying Jews talking
on his chest; the other, with a flat bonnet on his head, talks lively” (1859: 318). Who are they and what
are they talking about? The French critic applies a critical judgment to each couple, not only the couple
from the left: “They go in and they go out in couples of two, they crawl on the pavement of the temple
that plunges in the perspective of the claire-obscure. We hear them mumbling verses from the Bible
or discussing of trade. They are the jewels resellers, the pearls traffickers, the dress sellers, the furriers,
the moneychangers; they know how to test the diamonds and touch the gold; they know about laces,
ivories, silver works and antiquities; they wear old furs, mangy bonnets, rancid clothes. Their type is
accused, in this little stamp of the Synagogue, in an indelible manner, and it’s easy for us to verify today,
that the race wasn’t altered, and they are still the same men under other clothes” (1859: 320). In a 1990
study, Rachel Wischnitzer retraced Blanc’s convictions, considering that the two figures from the left
are arguing over the price of the fur (Perlove, Silver 2009: 242).
Edgar Degas’s Ar the Bourse, captured, in Linda Nochlin’s opinion, “a whole mythology of Jewish
financial conspiracy. That gesture—the half-hidden head tilted to afford greater intimacy, the plump
white hand on the slightly raised shoulder, the stiff turn of May’s head, the somewhat emphasized car
picking up the tip—all this, in the context of the half-precise, half-merely adumbrated background,
suggest ‘insider’ information to which ‘they’ are privy, from which ‘we’ the spectators (understood to
be Gentile) are excluded. This is, in effect, the representation of a conspiracy. It is not too farfetched
to think of the traditional gesture of Judas betraying Christ in this connection, except that here, both
figures function to signify Judas; Christ, of course, is the French public, betrayed by Jewish financial
machinations” (Nochlin 1989: 148).
7 The noisiness of the Jewish groups became grammatically associated with the synagogue. They gath¬
ered to talk, as if it’s the Jewish synagogue, says an old Romanian proverb. The archaic usage of the
word synagogue, havra, suffered a semantic contamination with the word lavra—noisy group. Lavra