Picturing the Orient, Portraying Jews: Images of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish Communities in Nineteenth-Century Belgian Painting

Nineteenth-century Orientalism is often exclusively regarded as a European representation of Muslim culture. This particular idea, however, not only underestimates the ethnic and cultural complexity of the Orient perceived and/or imagined by the nineteenth-century artists, but also takes no account of the heterogeneous character of Orientalist art itself. When one visually analyses Orientalist images, quite some pictures contain references to Jewish culture, for instance. As a result of the vogue for travelling, depictions of oriental Jewish community events as well as representations of Middle Eastern and North African Jews were popular among artists. Subsequently, the pictures they produced were disseminated all over Europe and thus got anchored in the Orientalist image.

Basically, the interest of the European – and thus also Belgian – painters, in Jewish oriental subjects was hardly different from their interest in Arab or Muslim culture. The artists were attracted by the noble, classical physiognomy of the Orientals, by their colourful and richly detailed costumes and by the picturesqueness of their lives. Jewish men and women were not drawn and painted because of a particular Jewish identity, but mainly because they were exotic artistic study topics, and in general easier to persuade to pose than Arabs. European artists searching models to give shape to images of oriental beauties consequently gazed upon the Jewish communities. Jews living on the eastern or southern shores of the Mediterranean thus became part of – what was perceived in Europe as – an oriental exoticness.