Israel

Moses Jacob Ezekiel (Richmond, VA 1844-1917 Rome, Italy)
Rome, 1904
Bronze relief, h. 44 x w. 56 in.
Cincinnati Skirball Museum, 67.62

Ezekiel, who fought as a Confederate cadet and graduated from Virginia Military Institute, entered the Medical College of Virginia in 1867 to study anatomy. After just one year of medical school, his family moved to Cincinnati, which by 1865 had developed into a major regional art center. Ezekiel came under the influence of sculptor Thomas Dow Jones (1811-1881) and began a disciplined study of sculpture. Determined to study abroad, Ezekiel left Cincinnati for Berlin, where he entered the Berlin Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Religious subjects, often Jewish, were among Ezekiel’s earliest themes. While in Berlin he sculpted the bronze relief Israel, for which he won the Michael Beer Prix de Rome in 1873, an award specifically earmarked for Jewish artists to study in Italy for one year. Israel is an allegorical work based on the story of The Wandering or Eternal Jew (Ahasver), which describes the suffering of the Jewish people throughout their long history. According to the artist’s own description of the work, “Israel is represented by a strong male figure…in an attitude of complaint and despair with the… arm over his head, the eyes upraised to Heaven beseechingly…the right foot resting upon the demolished golden calf of idolatry. On the left a female figure bowed in grief, abandoned and with a…crown on her head represents Jerusalem; [to her right] the last Jewish king reposing on his broken scepter; and where his blood is spilled a tree grows up in the form of a cross upon which Christ is nailed.” In identifying the Crucifixion with Israel, essentially a crucified people, Ezekiel wrote, “You must not think me personal in this figure. [The Eternal Jew’s] agony is the type of all human woe and…is an allegory founded upon the history of Israel.” The original relief, executed in Berlin, which measured 8 feet wide and 6 feet high, no longer exists, and this 1904 smaller version, roughly 3 ½ feet wide by 2 ½ feet high is the only known Israel, made for the B’nai B’rith of New York. When the artist wrote of this work, perhaps in response to comments about his radical appropriation of a traditional Christian motif, he stated: “In the religion of art there are no creeds; there is but one article of faith, the service of beauty. Art is the solvent of prejudices.”

Publications:
Artistic Expressions of Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Abby Schwartz, 1997, p. 10.