It recently became widely known that the favorite paintingnof Pope Francis is the White Crucifixion by Marc Chagall. The newsnstirred up considerable speculation and controversy. Chagall, born Moishe Segalnin the Polish-Lithuanian village of Vitebsk (now in Belarus), was probably thenmost prominent Jewish painter of the twentieth century. His WhitenCrucifixion was not new to religious controversy. It received severelyndisparaging reviews from Jewish critics when it was first shown in France, andnmore since. The work (now hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago) representsnJesus the Jew crucified between, on the left, communist soldiers storming a villagenand, on the right, Nazis desecrating a synagogue. The Crucified, his loinsndraped in a tallit, or prayer shawl, is hoisted in the middle, a victim ofnhatreds from left and right alike.
For Chagall, not alone among Ashkenazi artists, Jesus on thencross represented the painful predicament of all Jews, harried, branded, andnviolently victimized in an apparently God-forsaken world. The INRI over hisnhead is translated by Chagall into Hebrew, “Yeshua Hanotzri Melech Hayehudim.”nIn the foreground, fleeing, is a peasant wearing a German placard reading “Ichnbin Jude.” Below, front and center, a sense of the whole scene as a horrificnmodern altarpiece is created by a candelabrum—not a menorah but a six-candledncandelabrum in which one of the candles has been quenched. Explicit use ofnclassic Jewish images, the vivid presence of modern-day horrors: Many havenfound the White Crucifixion a disturbing work, and not just pious Jews.nFor it to be singled out for admiration by a reigning pontiff is remarkable.
Bloggers have commented on the pope’s singular admiration ofnthis painting. Some Catholics fear that he has betrayed a kind of “ecumenicalnsyncretism”; others hope for a shift toward religious pluralism. Some Jewishncommentators think the pope does not understand the uniquely Jewish—and, fornthem, even anti-Christian—character of the painting. Others welcome what seemsnto be his appreciation of a commonality in the face of evil too long neglected.nWe can have no doubt that the juxtapositions of Jewish and Christian symbolsnare unsettling. The burden of history remains heavy. The hope for deliverancenfrom its antagonisms and agonies is strong.
Much is in the eye of the beholder. Chagall himself claimednthat this dramatic use of the central symbol of Christian faith did not make itna Christian painting. Nevertheless, as he himself also said, his juxtaposition wasna deliberate invitation to reflect on the meaning of the cross. And indeed, henpainted many such images. In his Yellow Crucifixion (1943), for example,ncompleted in New York after Solomon Guggenheim and his wife Irene got him outnof France, he presents a double subject, pairing a huge suspended Torah withnanother crucified Jew. The crucified figure has tefillin, the ritual phylacteriesnput on by Jewish men for daily prayer, on his forehead and strapped to hisnoutstretched arm, but also a Christian halo. This painting, too, is andeliberate juxtaposition of the Atonement in both Jewish and Christiannversions. This past year, when the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Crossncoincided with Yom Kippur (the last time was 1899, the year of Chagall’s barnmitzvah, when, he tells us, he discovered he was an artist), Chagall’snwork acquired for me an added resonance.
I do not presume to put words into the mouth of the bishopnof Rome, or to claim to have access to his thoughts. I do want to propose thatnhis declared affection for Chagall’s juxtaposition of the Jewish people as thensuffering servant and Jesus as the crucified redeemer suggests a deepnidentification with the suffering of the Jews, which he perhaps includes in hisncontemplation of the cross. It also invites reflection on the time in which wenlive, in particular on the fate of those who are daily being martyred aroundnthe world. As people fortunate enough to live far away from the horrors ofnreligious violence, anaesthetized as we are by technologies and amusements, wenseem able to banish from our minds the incessant slaughter of those elsewherenwho are killed simply because of their faith. But there are indeed places todaynas inflamed and deadly for Christians as the scene surrounding the centralnfigure in the White Crucifixion. As the Canadian Jewish poet SeymournMayne put it to me after an atrocity some years ago: “Last time, Saturdaynpeople; this time, Sunday people.” Or, it seems, perhaps as Chagall intuited,nboth together.
Though he escaped the worst himself, Chagall was haunted. Itnwas after he learned about Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938) that he painted thenWhite Crucifixion. But as he worked on it, he also wrote out his grief andnfears in poems. Years later, in the mid-1960s, he sent a selection of thesenpoems, some with line drawings in their margins, to the Yiddish journal DinGoldene Keyt (The Golden Chain) in Tel Aviv. In one, a Jewish man is on hisnknees, hands reaching toward a large rooster, for Chagall a kind of signature.n(A rooster is often found in Chagall’s crucifixion paintings, probably becausenit was traditionally sacrificed on the eve of Yom Kippur.) Opposite thisndrawing is his remarkable poem “Mayne Trern” (My Tears). In four stanzas, eachnfour lines, he utters a cri de coeur. Translated, the last stanza reads:
I carry my cross every day,
I am led by the hand and driven on,
Night darkens around me.
Have you abandoned me, my God? Why?
Chagall engaged in a weekly study of Tanakh, the JewishnBible, in Hebrew. His command of biblical idiom was fluent, as his recollectionnhere of Psalm 22:1—though in Yiddish—shows (“Hastu mir verlatzen, mein Gott?nFer was?”). But the first line in the stanza, the allusion to Luke 9:23,nreveals also a knowledge of the New Testament. Here, as in his paintings, thentwo testaments are drawn together in a personal expression of spiritualndistress.
His parents and his beloved first wife Bella were fromnHasidic families, and he refers lovingly to the Hasidic rabbi from Mohileff asnhaving “the greatest influence” on him. Yet there is little evidence to suggestnhe went to shul during his sojourn in Russia, France, or briefly (1943–48) innthe United States. Instead, it seems he hoped his art itself would be salvific.nHis spiritual exercise, as he put it, was “to breathe my sigh into my canvases,nthe sigh of prayers and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth.”
We do not look into the heart of an artist for analyticalntheological warrant. He is not a religious pedagogue or pulpit preacher. InnChagall, we may more reasonably look for moving power, symbols ofntranscendence, perhaps reasons of the heart, gestures of hope—or despair—for anfractured, atomized world. Chagall was a lifelong friend of Raïssa Maritain,nlike him raised in a Yiddish-speaking orthodox Jewish community, but who alongnwith her husband Jacques converted to Christianity in 1906. She said that Chagallnshows us “Christ étendu à travers le monde perdu,” Christ spread across thenlost world.
For Chagall, images of hope tinged with despair, of joyousncelebration in the face of death, remained in the foreground of his essentiallynJewish religious imagination. No artist of modernity so happily representsnmarriage on his canvases (as in his life)—marriage as a good and symbolic of anhigher good. And he did so despite pogroms, the Russian Revolution, and twonworld wars, which so often impinged on his canvases. But he also reflected onnthe darker elements of Jewish experience, characteristically framing them innthe light of the biblical story.
Among the most memorable Jewish narratives is the Akedah,nthe account of the almost-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. Chagall camenback to this scene many times, gradually moving from darkness to light. Hisnearly treatments illuminate his later crucifixion paintings in a distinctivenway. In 1931, while he was working on his celebrated Bible etchings for artndealer Ambroise Vollard (1931–39, 1952–56), he first showed a naked Isaacnstretched out for ritual slaughter, Abraham with his knife raised, and thenangel pointing to a ram caught not in “a thicket,” as the usual readingndepicts, but in the roots of a tree. He also painted this rendering of the Akedahnin oil and guache on paper, just as he did with many of the other etchings donenfor Vollard. The shading of this work is almost as dark as the ink of thenetching. Then he did another painting, still more disturbing, of Abraham andnIsaac going in the predawn darkness up Mount Moriah, the boy carrying wood fornthe sacrifice in a sack over his shoulder. Abraham’s knife gleams in the lightnof his candle, grimly against the dull chiaroscuro, the black, brown, and ochrenof the rest of the scene.
Whether or not he attended synagogue services, Chagall wouldnhave known from his youth that the text read from Genesis 22 in the morningnservice was conventionally moralized and read to refer to Jewish martyrdom, thensupreme act of sacrifice in loyalty to God’s covenant. It was inherently a somber,ntroubling narrative, a painful mystery at the heart of Jewish experience. Yetnwhen he returned to the subject again in 1964–66, he abandoned ink andnchiaroscuro, doing instead several sketches and studies in pastels on paper.nThe colors and figures are not somber but red and blue with touches of gold.nAll the original elements are present, but now there is a background scene notnpreviously to be found, showing in the far distance a crucifixion with figuresnof mourners.
The juxtaposition of the sacrifice of Isaac with the Passionnof Christ is familiar to Christians. We have from early times seen the Akedahnand the divinely provided substitute ram for the sacrifice as prefiguring thenCrucifixion of Christ. While I do not presume that Chagall knew patristicnexegesis, he might readily have seen this juxtaposition in stained glass or,nperhaps, in something like the Biblia Pauperum on exhibit at the Muséende Cluny. It is abundantly clear that Chagall had “eyes to see.”
He also had “ears to hear.” Multilingual, he spoke not onlynthe Lithuanian-inflected Polish of his birthplace but also Yiddish andnRussian—he wrote poetry in both—and French, the language in which he wrote thenstory of his early life. He learned the Bible in Hebrew through a method bynwhich the text takes on life through oral recitation, aural reception, andnmemory. It is also therefore entirely possible that his familiarity with thenverbal texture of the Akedah in its original Hebrew provoked wordnassociations when he was reading the New Testament, just as his knowledge ofnPsalm 22:1 may have encouraged the combination of Jewish and Christian elementsnthat make the White Crucifixion so powerful.
Whether he was reading in French, Polish, or Russianntranslations, he would have encountered the final words of Jesus from thenCross, always left printed in their original Hebrew: “Eloi, Eloi, lamansabacthani.” Jesus was quoting Psalm 22:1—the verse echoed in Chagall’s poemnwhere he translated the verb a-zabtani as verlatzen, “forsaken.”nThe same verb appears in Genesis 22:13. Abraham looks up and sees a ramn“ne’echaz ba-sbach b’kamav”—caught in the thicket by its horns. The Hebrew is anbit richer than our standard translation, however. The root for the verbndescribing the ram’s condition, sbach / tzvach, conveys distressednabandonment.
There is a visual hint that Chagall connected the last wordsnof Jesus from the cross with the ram “hung up on the thicket.” His ram isnentangled not in a thicket, as in the depiction of so many Christian painters,nbut in the roots of a tree, evoking the upright span of wood so central to thenChristian imagination. Whatever Chagall’s prompt, the intertextual echo innHebrew is here clearly given artistic form. Yet his distinctive typology is anreversal of Christian convention. The almost-sacrifice of Isaac isnforegrounded; Christ on the Cross, the tree of new life, is the background, anpoignant midrash on its Jewish meaning.
However we contemplate the Christ of Marc Chagall, whether innthe light of early twentieth-century Jewish intellectual appropriations ofnJesus as a type of all suffering Jews or in the light of Chagall’s personalnidentification with the one he called “my Christ” in one of his letters, hisnverbal and visual universalizing of biblical narrative in a way that juxtaposesnthe Jewish and Christian stories of sacrifice and redemption is unique innmodern art.
Today dark clouds are again on the horizon. Jewish voicesnare sounding the alarm for Christians, often with greater clarity than do wenfor those to whom we are joined in baptism. In these times, our times, is itnsurprising that a spiritually sensitive pontiff should be drawn to such anprophetic exponent of our interwoven story? Passover and Easter are alwaysnproximate. Perhaps the time is ripe for more of us to contemplate the Christ ofnMarc Chagall.
David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor ofnLiterature and Humanities in the Honors College of Baylor University.
