Israel – Page 2 – From Under the Fig Tree

Is an Ancient Menagerie Pagan or Jewish?

joselitOctober 5, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

This article, which first appeared in the Forward's blog The Arty Semite , is part of a cross-posting partnership with the Forward.

By Menachem Wecker

Though it features illustrations of a menagerie of animals that carry Jewish symbolism, an ancient Roman mosaic discovered in Lod, Israel, in 1996, is not a religious work, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the fourth-century artifact is on exhibit for the first time until April 3, 2011.

Lod Mosaic as displayed — Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

According to the museum's press release, "because the mosaic's imagery has no overt religious content, it cannot be determined whether the owner was a pagan, a Jew, or a Christian."

But virtually all of the animals depicted in the work — birds, bulls, a deer, a donkey, ducks, an elephant, fish, gazelles, a giraffe, hares, leopards, lions, a sea monster, a snake, peacocks, a rhino and a tiger — carry Jewish symbolism.

According to Shlomo Pesach Toperoff, author of The Animal Kingdom in Jewish Thought, the following animals carry biblical and rabbinic symbolism: donkeys (transportation, redeeming firstborn donkeys per Exodus 13:13, symbol of Issachar), birds (the mother must be shooed before accessing the eggs, doves as peace symbols), elephants (per Berakhot 56b, a wonderful sign when seen in dreams), fish (eaten on Rosh Hashanah to symbolize multiplying), gazelles (frequent appearances in Song of Songs, its speed idealized in Ethics of the Fathers), harts and hinds (symbol of Naphtali), bulls (the Red Heifer), leopards (a character in Daniel's dream, cited in the same part of Ethics of the Fathers as the gazelle), sea monsters (the Leviathan, a Talmudic regular), lions (tribe of Judah), peacocks (brought by King Solomon from Tarshish) and serpents (Edenic embodiment of evil, symbol of Dan).

Hares are sometimes depicted in scenes of Esau returning from the hunt in haggadahs, according to Marc Michael Epstein, professor of religion and Jewish studies at Vassar College and author of the book Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature, which examines animal references in medieval art.

The Torah is referred to as a "loving doe" in the Shavuot prayers, Epstein adds, and hare hunts appear in haggadahs.

The ducks, giraffes, rhinos and tigers stand alone, but shouldn't 13 of 17 be compelling enough?
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Can pigs fly?

joselitOctober 3, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

What's kosher -- and what's not -- has been the subject of intense discussion ever since the dietary laws were first promulgated in Leviticus, way back when.

The fault line along which the Jews have defined themselves vis-a-vis the outside world, kashruth in the modern era has also divided the Jews among themselves. With the advent of modernity, growing numbers of Jews began to jettison the dietary laws, insisting that conscience rather than cuisine, ethics rather than ritual behavior, should inspire them.

Others, however, rejected this position out of hand and resolutely kept on keeping kosher, while still others (the majority, perhaps?) sought a middle ground, choosing, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has so evocatively put it, to be "selectively treyf."

Under the confusing circumstances, one might think that kashruth would eventually have gone the way of so many other biblically-mandated practices: into the dustbin of history. But, in this instance, as in so many others that have to do with religion's surprisingly resilient encounter with modernity, not only has keeping kosher not withered away but, as Kosher Nation, Sue Fishkoff's new book vividly points out, it has emerged in the 21st century with renewed vigor, especially among a younger generation of Jews for whom kashruth affords an authentically Jewish response to the ethics and practices of responsible eating.

What, then, are we to make of the recent news that a cookbook roundly celebrating the delights of pork, an animal historically anathematized by the Jews, has recently been published, and in Israel of all places?

Eli Landau's The White Book is hardly the first cookbook whose Jewish author advocated the use of unkosher items. Aunt Babette's Cook Book, which was first released in the United States in 1889 by Bloch Publishing and Printing Company, has it beat by more than a century. But Landau's compendium is surely the first to thrust pork loin front and center and with no sign of apologetics to sweeten the dish.

Could this represent a watershed in the history of the Jewish people, or is it merely a tempest in a teapot?

For some, a pork cookbook sold in Israel makes as much sense as the above sign. Credit: joeventures, creative commons licensed on Flickr.

Juice

joselitSeptember 13, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I was casting about for a couple of food-related posters with which to decorate the kitchen at 2142 G Street, home to the Program in Judaic Studies, when I stumbled across a number of advertisements that touted the merits of oranges from Israel and, by extension, those of Zionism as well.

Dating from the era of the yishuv or, in some instances, from the early days of the state, some promotional gambits were sweet and sappy, like the fruit itself. "Visit Palestine. See Ancient Beauty Revived," trilled a poster produced by the Tourist Office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which featured a trio of beautifully rounded oranges adorned by a crown of sparkling white orange blossoms.

Other posters, mixing their metaphors right and left, drew both on Orientalist imagery and the modern preoccupation with physical well-being. Summoning the "genie of Jaffa," who magically materialized from the inside of a Jaffa orange, this advertisement also summoned up the potent word "vitamins," and with it, the promise of good health.

Photographers, too, were beguiled by the potential of the orange and took countless shots of Jewish settlers cultivating the citrus fruit through the most modern methods of irrigation and mechanized farming. They also trained their sights and their cameras on Arab orange growers, many of them from Jaffa, sharply contrasting their traditional methods of farming and distribution with those practiced by the yishuvniks.

Many of these archival images appear in Eyal Sivan's new documentary, Jaffa: The Orange's Clockwork, which explores what happened to the Palestinian population of orange groves and to those who had for years carefully tended to them once the State of Israel came into being and oranges became one of the country's leading exports. It's not a happy story. If, for the Israelis, the orange spoke of possibility, for the Palestinians, it spoke of loss.

Ultimately, Israelis and Palestinians alike freighted the humble orange with profound symbolic importance, linking it to two conflicting national narratives. Along the way, the orange, bursting with juice and color, became a veritable hot potato.

Image: Orange trees loaded with fruit in an orchard, Matson Photo Service. Source: LOC.