Super flumina Babylonis

“By the rivers of Babylon” (Masoretic Ps. 137; Vulgate and Russian Synodal Ps. 136) is one of the better-known Psalms, due to the featured role of its verses in Jewish and Christian liturgies, as well as in poetic, musical, and artistic paraphrases. This lecture focuses on representations of this Psalm in medieval and modern European Jewish art and visual culture. Historically, Psalm 137 describes the Babylonian exile of Jews in the 6th century B.C.E. Thematically, Jewish manuscript illuminators, synagogue painters, and designers of prints referred mainly to the Psalm’s two interrelated topics elaborated in the Psalm’s first six verses: the sorrow of exile and mourning over the destruction of Jerusalem: “we wept when we remembered Zion” (verse 1). When appearing in wider settings, the images of sorrow were juxtaposed with prophetic visions of the reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem. Conceptually, many images reveal the Jewish perception of the world as the sacred realm of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, surrounded by the domain of temporal exile associated with Babylon. Poetically, Psalm 137 employs two powerful metaphors for collective sorrow and historical memory. One, the bodily pledge for faithful adherence to the sacred geography (“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,” v. 5), is distinctly verbal. To the best of our knowledge, the artists never visualized the vows relating to the human ability to play string instruments and to sing: “let my right hand forget her cunning” and “let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” (Vv. 5–6). In contrast, musical instruments hung on willows (v. 2) have become a popular visual representation of the exiles’ mourning. A pair of lutes on a tree, aside weeping men, illustrates Psalm 137 in the Hebrew Parma Psalter produced in central Italy ca. 1280. Joining numerous depictions of musical instruments, musicians, and singers in this manuscript, the illumination implies the moralizing approach to music and joy in medieval Jewish thought. The figures display conventional medieval gestures of lamentation known to us from Giotto’s paintings of mourning angels in the Capella Arena completed several decades later. The unused lutes indicate that their music is inappropriate, so long as the people are staying “by the rivers of Babylon.” The morality of playing music and singing – two interlaced faculties essential in the Psalms and prominent in Psalter illuminations – met an ambivalent rabbinical stance. Melodies and songs expressed joy, which could become either a desired spirit of godly devotees and a proper mood for their mystical union with the Divine Presence or a celebration of sinful delights. In the Parma Psalter, music’s proper role is implied by the choir singing in praise and rejoicing in God, as invocated by Psalm 149. The choir includes a bride and bridegroom, whose gladness is reminiscent of the joy of the faithful glorifying the Creator. The Psalm’s oath to not forget Jerusalem in the Exile inspired Hayim ben Isaac Segal’s painting of Jerusalem and Worms in a synagogue in Mogilev on 86 87 the Dnieper in 1740. The artist’s association of the German town of Worms with Babylon relied upon a legend asserting the establishment of the Jewish community of Worms by a group of Judean exiles from the Holy Land after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, who fled to Worms instead of to Babylon. When the Jews in Babylon were redeemed and resettled in the Holy Land, the Jews of Worms did not leave the Diaspora, arguing that Worms had become their comfortable home and a “lesser Jerusalem.” For those reasons, the Jews of Worms were visited by harsh persecution; for their sin, the other European Jewish communities were also punished. The synagogue painting represents the town as a European Babylon, an archetypical figure of Jewish exile; and a quasi-Jerusalem contesting the memory of the true Holy City. Hayim Segal added the figure of a terrifying dragon before the town walls, which acts as an agent of divine anger punishing the heretics. Straightforward expressions of the antithesis “Jerusalem versus Babylon” were implied by depictions of musical instruments hanging on trees, and in the background of some of these images appears a cityscape. These were much more frequent in east-European synagogue art from the 18th-century on. In synagogue paintings, the depictions of musical instruments, which the Jews in the Babylonian exile abstained from playing as a gesture of their mourning for Zion, became a common complement to the images of Jerusalem. The Jewish perception of the exiles’ persistent memory of Jerusalem as a precondition and prelude to national revival coincided with the spirit of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Nabucco’ (1842), generally considered a forceful hymn of longing for Italian national independence. The painting ‘Die trauernden Juden im Exil’ by the Jewish-born German academic artist Eduard Bendemann interprets Psalm 137 differently – as the lack of hope in Jewish redemption. The despair of Judaism was to justify the artist’s conversion to Christianity. Nevertheless, the remakes of Bendemann’s painting in Jewish popular art overrode its original pessimistic message with the traditional hope for redemption despite the sorrow of the Exile. The image of the Holy Land is moved further to the periphery in the early 20th-century painting “Upon the willows…” by an anonymous artist in the Great Synagogue of Iaşi. The painting renders Babylonia as the side from which the Jewish viewer in Romania observes the heart of the Holy Land. The romantic-national perception of the Holy Land as a distant vision glimpses from the depths of the Diaspora was made familiar to a wide stratum of Jews through the works of Ephraim Moses Lilien, beginning with his illustration of Der Jüdische Mai in 1902. The visual arts promoted the mental reconnection of the Jews in exile to the revived Jerusalem, or, in the words of famed Va, Pensiero chorus of Jewish slaves in Verdi’s Nabucco, a “flight of thoughts.” (from the book "The East of Ruvim Mazel, s. 85-86).