Morgan Meis visits the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit on Chagall and observes that the artist “had about a five-year period during the Second World War in which he became utterly obsessed with painting Jesus Christ”:
The paintings have little to do with Jesus as we usually see him — the central figure in the Christian Passion narrative. Chagall’s Jesus is a Jewish Jesus through and through. In many of the Crucifixion scenes (like The Artist with Yellow Christ, 1938 and Persecution, c. 1941) Jesus’ nether parts are covered with a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl. In Study for The Yellow Crucifixion (1942), Jesus is wearing tefillin, little black boxes containing verses from the Torah that are wrapped around the head and arm, with black straps going down to the hand.
The meaning of Chagall’s Crucifixion paintings, in their historical context, is thus pretty clear. From the time of the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s, through the end of WWII, Chagall was preoccupied with the fate of European Jews. He saw Jesus on the Cross as a universally recognizable symbol of human suffering. Chagall hoped that Jews and non-Jews alike would be able to relate to this symbol. By making Jesus unmistakably Jewish, he was highlighting the fact that the Romans crucified Jesus as a Jew. In the midst of the Holocaust, Chagall wanted to make the universality of Jesus’ crucifixion specific again, he wanted the world to look at Jewish suffering.
The Dish 