Chagall’s Green and Yellow Jews: Painting Race in Russia and Post-Dreyfus France

Abstract

In early twentieth century Paris, the Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall began a series painting Eastern European Jews in hues of green, yellow, and red. The paintings were based upon Chagall’s childhood memories, as well as his personal encounters with Jews in the shtetl. They were also portraits of a universal social type. I argue that Chagall’s experiences as a Jew in both France and Russia influenced this series. He repeatedly depicted archetypes of the Jew such as Rabbis and klezmers. Yet he visibly altered these archetypes via non-naturalist hues of green, yellow, and red. This play on skin color served to both signify and destabilize perceptions of racial differences that underscored French and Russian society at the time. These perceptions included a range of Jewish phenotypes, and, particularly in France, took their most extreme form in the dichotomy between blackness and whiteness. Chagall’s multicolored images of Jews illuminate the roles of both the individual and the collective imagination in shaping these perceptions of race. As such, these paintings offer a compelling view of racial identity as existing somewhere between the psychic and the social. That is, they reveal racial identities as phantasms—illusions that, despite their immaterial nature, are linked to the social sphere. In emphasizing this phantasmatic aspect of race, they offered a form of political resistance to the racial politics that, coursing through post-Dreyfus France and Russia, would have widespread and devastating consequences on Jews and other dispersed populations throughout Europe in the decades to come. In more general terms, this analysis of Chagall’s paintings of Jews demonstrates the power of art and visual culture as a means of both producing and reconfiguring notions of identity within political and social spheres.