Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur
Maurycy Gottlieb
1878
Credits
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 6.
Engage with this Source
While not front and center, Jewish women are shown here sitting together in the synagogue balcony, or women’s section. Despite the pronounced gender division, the women’s gallery appears full of life. Women seem to be conducting their own business as they confer with one another. Note what appears to be a woman holding a charity box, which could have been used for collecting charity specifically for poor women. Even in this traditional depiction, we can see the artist acknowledging women as more active community participants than we might think based on the strict segregation of roles in the synagogue.
What do you imagine the two women engaged in private conversation in the back row might be discussing?
How would you interpret the artist’s depictions of the men as opposed to the women in this image?
Do you see any clues that Gottlieb painted this image as gender roles slowly began to shift in the nineteenth century?
Born to an Orthodox family in Drohobych, Galicia (now in Ukraine), Maurycy Gottlieb studied art in Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), Vienna, Kraków, and Munich. Important early works on Jewish themes included A Jewish Wedding (1876), Self-Portrait as Ahasuerus (1876), and Shylock and Jessica (1876), inspired by Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Gottlieb is best known for the large Rembrandtesque paintings that he made in the last three years of his short life, most notably Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1878) and the unfinished works Christ before His Judges (1877–1879) and Christ Preaching at Capernaum (1878–1879). His premature death at age twenty-three cut off a brilliant talent, but he had already earned a place in the history of representing Jews in art for his warm, direct, and unapologetic images.