Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme by Asher D. Biemann (review)

Abstract

DREAMING OF MICHELANGELO: JEWISH VARIATIONS ON A MODERN THEME By Asher D. Biemann. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2012. 180 pp. 3 illustrations.How can religion tolerate art? What is the value of art compared to the simple truth, to the justice of plain religion?It is customary to regard the European Jewish enthusiasm for art as Bildung: the and intellectual education through which Jews became citizens of the world. What if this intense connection with art-expressed through collecting, scholarship, travel, and all forms of production-was not just a way into secular culture, a distraction from Jewishness, but an empowering and ennobling form of religiosity? The premise of Asher D. Biemann's study is that cultural eroticism has something essential in common with the religious experience. Religion not only tolerates art; it is, as Hermann Cohen wrote, always nurtured by art. But can modern Judaism, undergirded by the second commandment and the prophets' rebukes, embrace something called statue-love? It ultimately depends on what is meant by love.The widespread Jewish fascination with Michelangelo's in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome forms the heart of this imaginatively composed inquiry. The primal scene is of course Sigmund Freud's experience visiting and writing about this statue between 1901-1914 (The of Michelangelo, 1914), which has spawned volumes of commentary. Yet Freud's obsession was not sui generis. From the nineteenth century on, pictures, replicas, and literary impressions of the seated Hebrew lawgiver with his ominous gaze and horned head were omnipresent in Jewish society; figured in belles lettres, injournalism, in Jewish living rooms. In effect, by the time Freud wrote his essay, and even earlier, when Tchernichovski wrote the famous Hebrew poem Before a Statue of Apollo (1899), confronting a statue [had become] a modern Jewish genre.But what was the nature of this fascination? Freud was not alone in finding Michelangelo's to be more awesome, complex, and genuine, than his scriptural counterpart. Biemann discusses in detail the responses of Guiseppe Revere, a Triestene Jewish poet, and the writer Salomon Steinheim, who moved to Rome in 1849. Most unforgettable is Steinheim's dramatic sketch, in which the prophet actually takes the artist to task for his decisions (what evil demon, what buffoon . . . gave you the idea of these horns?) before shattering the statue with a lightening bolt: ('You shall not make a graven image'... 'and yet you have sculpted one of ') Biemann argues, however, that Freud, Steinheim, and others were not aesthetic idolaters but Jewish Pygmalians: they beheld the statue as an uncanny Other and dreamed of its awakening. The statue was ambiguously alive, revelatory, at once a symbol of origins and of mortality; it returned their gaze and created them. Jews did not love the statue as much as they wanted it to love them back. The Jewish dream of a moving Moses was of a kind with the plastic aesthetics of Winckelmann, Lessing, Heine and others, but Biemann identifies something more: a type of statue-love that was unchristian, unromantic, unmodern, unrequited-a love known firsthand by the people whose God commands them, Love me! (Rosenzweig).The theater of Jewish statue love is, of course, Italy. Biemann's first chapter gives account of modernjewish Italophilia as expressed in the works of numerous Jewish German thinkers and poets. …