Jewish Body Politics and the Oriental Gaze: Discovering Jewish Orientalism in Ephraim Moses Lilien’s images of women (1874-1925).

Martin Buber, the well-known German Jewish philosophy and the artist Ephraim Moses Lilien collaborated on one of the first exhibitions of modern Jewish art in 1901. Buber suggested that the ‘Renaissance’ occurring in Jewish art and literature at the German fin de siècle, was due to a new modernist spirit affecting all Jews. Indeed, a new type of [male] Jew was developing in ‘body, mind and spirit’: explicitly heterosexual, with a strong musculature. Lilien, a consummate cosmopolitan artist, and the focus of my forthcoming book Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation: Women in the Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien at the German fin de siècle, has been celebrated in art historiography for creating this groundbreaking male iconography. Yet Lilien’s seminal female images remain largely undiscovered. This paper argues that Lilien’s image of Jewish woman are equal partners to the new Jewish man, occasionally radiating a palpable energy and agency. Lilien’s female images offer a compelling glimpse of an alternate, independent and often sexually liberated modern Jewish woman, a portrayal that often eluded the Zionist imagination. This paper begins with Lilien’s images for the journals Jugend and Mai-Festzeitung, and examines contemporary illustrations to assess just how radical Lilien’s image of a dangerously modern Jewish woman was for this period. As his work progressed, Lilien discovered a Jewish Oriental style that reflected the fin de siecle tensions and difficulties inherent in the navigation of German -Jewish identity but also celebrated both his Jewish roots and his acculturated modern German-Jewish identity.