| Interview Transcript - Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics from the Roman Empire | |
| Exhibition Curator Dr. Edward Bleiberg speaks with About Art History |
In the transcript that follows, Edward Bleiberg, Ph.D., Associate Curator, Department of Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Middle Eastern Art, Brooklyn Museum, discusses the underlying symbolism, cultural context and curatorial intent of the exhibition Tree of Paradise: Jewish Mosaics from the Roman Empire.
This interview was conducted in March of 2006 by Roman art specialist and About Art History Correspondent, Gail S. Myhre, as she and Dr. Bleiberg toured the exhibition together. You may read her full review here.
Edward Bleiberg: So this photo shows Hamman Lif, the town. You have the Mediterranean, the beach, a fabulous place ... He (French Army caption Ernest de Prudhomme) wanted to dig a garden and that's what he found instead.
[Anteroom entering the exhibition space.]
This room is mostly about orienting people to the time and place. So we have one mosaic that came from Hamman Lif and this Punic Stela representing the Phoenicians. Tunisia's a really interesting place culturally, because so many different groups of people have been there.
Gail Myhre: It is quite a crossroads - and I notice that in the images (sent to About.com), we've got the first-century Roman mosaics, we've got the Coptic textiles …
Well, the Copts weren't actually there. I'll show you why we have them. The indigenous people are the Berbers, and the Phoenicians showed up in 900 B.C., and the Phoenicians started fighting with the Romans in the Fourth Century (B.C.) over commercial control of the Western Mediterranean, and in 146 (B.C.) the Romans occupied North Africa permanently.
So one of the boundaries for these exhibitions that I have to follow is that everything has to come out of our storerooms. What I've been doing is choosing a cohesive group of things like the mosaics, and then looking for supporting materials that give the [objects] a context.
I did read your essay as it was excerpted for "Jewish Heritage Online Magazine" and I was gratified, because as soon as I saw the images, I knew the approach that I was going to take for the article, was that I was going to place the synagogue in the context of the Roman community around it …
Well, that's good. That's exactly what the exhibition tries to do …
So it worked out very well, because it really dovetails with what you were already doing.
Thank you. So, we have a wonderful coin collection which we never get to show, and a lot of these exhibitions are really about, from the museum's point of view, an opportunity to take things that nobody ever gets to see because they're in storage, and use them to tell a story that will be of interest to people. And we have a very nice coin collection which we never show, and this is sort of our timeline, to help people get situated in time. [Indicating coins from left to right.] So this is Augustus, the first emperor; and this is Nero, the Persecutor of Christians, and this is just the very beginning when the Christians are beginning to separate themselves from the Jews, instead of thinking they were just another branch of Judaism; Hadrian, who put down the final Jewish Revolt against the Romans in the Second Century (A.D.); Constantine, the first Christian emperor; and Justinian, who was emperor at the time when these things were actually made. And then on the wall we have photographs of the coins for those who can't see them well …
[Moving into the main room of the exhibition.]
[Indicating the three Roman torsos just inside the entranceway.] And we also don't get to show our Roman art, so this is just the sort of art which would have been familiar to the people who lived in this community …
And the museum does have a marvelous Classical collection …
A very small Classical collection … but it's very good …
There are some important pieces …
So this is another chance to get it out on view …
As a sideline, just my own personal curiosity, I'm seeing a lot of resurgence of interest in the Classical arts. The "Pompeii" exhibit is an example, the reopening of the Met's galleries obviously, this exhibit is another one, then there's the "Roman Portrait Bust" exhibition that was in Dallas, and then I also see when I went to the "Pompeii" exhibition that the Italians themselves are starting to really publicize the works, and I'm wondering if this is in preparation of the opening of the site at Stabiae, and if we're not seeing a new interest in this because the Italians are actually lending more because they're trying to do that …
That may well be. For us, in the Brooklyn Museum, it started, you know in my department, the Ancient Mediterranean, Egypt is the main focus, I'm an Egyptologist …
I read that you were primarily interested in (Ancient Egyptian) economics.
Yes. So we do have this material, it's been in the museum since 1905, so this is an opportunity to get it out there, and I said I would try to do it. So I've learned a whole lot by doing it, I didn't know very much about this specific material until I actually started to do the work … [Turning to the Roman figural sculptures.] And again, in this kind of a context, especially in the Greek and Roman world, it (figural art) really plays such an important role, and we're aware it's frowned on in the Jewish tradition, and also the whole issue of circumcision is a very fraught issue in this time period as Jewish men tried to assimilate into the culture to be able to do business, do business at the gym and at the bath …
I was especially wondering about the whole "graven image" proscription, because in this exhibit I saw the "Bust of Serapis," I saw the "Personification of Roma," and is it that the Jews of the time are compartmentalizing this in their mind, or were they just assimilating the whole culture into the synagogue?
It's hard to say; they don't tell us, nobody really talks about it. I think it's just a variety of religious belief, and varying degrees of assimilation in different people . It's very modern - to me it's very modern. And in a way this is what the show is really about, that tendency, and what does it mean to be a minority in the Roman Empire, and I think it's thought-provoking for people in our country. Especially here in Brooklyn, which is so multicultural, it really makes you think what parts of me are American, and what parts of me identify with another ethnic group, with my ethnic group of origin, and what makes me Americanized …
It does look like those same questions are coming up here.
Yes, the Roman world had those same sorts of questions. So we're not so unique as we think, and we might even be able to learn some things from history.
[Moving right toward the case of religious objects.]
This case is here to represent the religious strands that were in the world at the time the mosaics were made. So the incense burner - you see scratched into the base, in Greek, you have the prayer for the Havdalah ceremony; the Havdalah ceremony ends the Sabbath, and today you burn a candle, but in ancient times you would burn incense. So the prayer here is in Greek but it's the same prayer said today in Hebrew. And there were still pagans, and this is Serapis, who was a composite of Zeus and the Egyptian god Amun, he was invented in Alexandria, he's a good example of the way religions came together …
I remember reading that he was Alexander's attempt to give the Egyptians a Hellenistic god that they could identify with.
Exactly. And of course there were Christians, who especially in this period were beginning to separate themselves out strongly, identifying themselves as not Jews, and Tunisia of course is a very important place for Christians, St. Augustine was from Hippo … And then this little gem is made by Gnostics in the southern part of Egypt and it shows an image of the Egyptian god Osiris, but in Greek below it says Yahweh, the Hebrew god. And there were Jewish Gnostics. These people had very strange beliefs. For one thing they called Serapis, Joseph Serapis, because Serapis had introduced the system of distributing grain in Egypt according to the Alexandrian intellectuals who came up with him, but these Jewish Gnostics said that was Joseph who did that, so they identified the two. So all of these people's religious beliefs are really very flexible. Even if you take the Christian religious, this cross, with the seashell, as a religious symbol it goes all the way back to Aphrodite. And then if you look at the sea symbols, you go into mosques of this period, the fountains that you use to wash your hands are in the shape of seashells, and that's found in ancient mosques, Egyptian mosques …
That's great, because I had simply assumed that, seeing the recurring sea life motif in the pictures I got of the objects, I had assumed that that was simply because it was a coastal community.
Well, that's true. But also all of that symbolism, in that region, in the Mediterranean they never give up a symbol. They change religions but they never give up a symbol.
[Moving behind the religious objects case to the textiles.]
And I was looking for a way also to show that the basic compositional devices you find on the mosaic floor were really common all over the Mediterranean world. And so we come to these Roman antique clothes …
Which is where the textiles come in.
Right. [Indicating a woven wool decorative border.] So you have little compartments that you place symbols into and the compartments are joined together by vegetable motifs. So we only have one complete garment, which I wanted to show so that people would understand what all these strips of wool are. These are all from Egypt and typical of what you would find all over the Roman world in the later period as far as clothing. The wool embroidery or tapestry was actually the more expensive part of the garment; the linen was relatively cheap and also wears out faster. So what they used to do was when they got a new linen garment, they would just transfer this, and that's what makes them so hard to date because the wool decoration might be a hundred years old and the garment would be new.
And you can see how it actually drapes [indicating the photo from 1942 of a male museum employee wearing the garment on exhibit]. You can see that it wasn't for some weird square-shaped person. In the 1940s when we acquired these things, they didn't hesitate to try them on. We wouldn't do that today.
So in this one you have little compartments with the vegetable motifs, you have the birds that you have on the floor. We don't have people on the mosaic floor, but here's a hare or a rabbit, lots and lots of birds …
So it just continues to be folded back into the culture again and again.
Right. On the second floor we have some eleventh-century (A.D.) Tunisian Islamic textiles which we brought out especially for this occasion and you see the same motifs throughout.
[Crossing to the left of the hall to the case of gold earrings.]
Let me take you back here. One of the things that struck me when I started looking at the floor was that the patron was a woman named Julia, which came as a big shock to me.
I noticed that immediately, and was going to ask about that. Was that uncommon?
It was pretty common, I think. About a third of the patron inscriptions that we have from synagogues and religious institutions in general are from women, and in this case she says it's from her own money. She makes it very clear, my dad didn't give me this money, my husband or my brother didn't give me this money, this is mine, I decided to do it. So I was looking for a way to represent Julia in the synagogue, and we have this very nice collection of contemporaneous earrings which is probably the sort of thing she would have worn, sort of my Macy's jewelry counter from the Sixth Century.
[Moving to the wall behind the jewelry case.]
And here's a Coptic textile from this time period. It's not Julia, but it's a woman who lived in that time. It gives us some idea of how she would have been represented, and she's wearing these very nice earrings, dangly earrings, and you can see how her hairstyle would have looked, and her makeup. I loved finding this up there, and thinking, "She could pretend to be Julia."
And this whole thing, the woman as a patron, it's not what we would call "normative" Judaism, the Judaism of the rabbis from the Third through the Fifth centuries (A.D.), which is incorporating the Talmud. As with Orthodox Jews today, women have three major responsibilities, to start the Sabbath rituals: light the candles; bake bread for the Sabbath; maintain ritual purity, which means after menses they would take a ritual bath. But real life was nothing like that, apparently. We have inscriptions which refer to women as being the president of the congregation, being on the board of the congregation, being in real decision-making capacities, and especially in the synagogues. There's about three hundred we've found surrounding the Mediterranean, and women play very active roles, and that came as a complete surprise, especially in the Nineteenth Century when this material was just being rediscovered, it came as a complete surprise. It's actually typical of the Roman world. Women were very powerful in the Roman world …
In a subtle way, but yes, they were landowners, they were donors, they were involved in civic life in terms of spending the money and establishing the institutions …
Correct. They were legal persons who could do all sorts of things, and so Christian and Jewish women were peers in this time period, part of the religious society, and which may have continued … unfortunately not throughout history.
[Moving to the map wall.]
And Tunisia was very much a part of the Roman world. These photos show some archaeological sites in Tunisia: we have the second largest amphitheater in the Roman world, the first being of course the Colosseum. And up here, there are temples. And it's a great place to see Roman ruins, although we don't normally think of that, and in fact Tunisia is really close to Italy, which I hadn't thought about. You can see it's about eighty miles from Sicily, so even though we don't think of them as being close to the Roman world, they're actually very close. And all of the inscriptions you find here are in Latin - even the Jewish inscriptions, which is very unusual. You expect to find Jewish inscriptions either in Aramaic or in Greek, which is the more common spoken language for Jews at this time.
[Continuing rearward to the first two mosaics, exhibited separately from the synagogue sanctuary floor.]
So when the mosaics were found, Captain Prudhomme had one of his corporals paint a watercolor of the floor, and so we can match up twelve of the mosaics with the watercolor. These two mosaics are not in the watercolor but are in the same style, they're early Byzantine style, and they clearly have some of the same themes: a fish in water and a rooster. So these are likely from the synagogue, and it's been suggested that they're from the atrium, because the plan of the building looks a lot like a Roman house. It's the nine that I kept separately that they're not at all, they're not the same style or material, and they have human representation - which people originally in the 1880s thought couldn't possibly be Jewish - but now we understand that it could be, because we've found so many other representations of human form …
Those are the ones that caught my eye specifically, because they're so classically Roman.
Exactly. [Moving to the left wall and the facsimile of the original watercolor drawing.] So here's the watercolor of what the entire synagogue floor would've looked like. It was published in 1884. One of the great things about archaeology then was that they published immediately. Even if it wasn't so accurate, they went into detail. So it was known to the scholarly world very early on. When it was first discovered it was divided up into blocks. All the mosaics we have in Brooklyn are the ones Prudhomme kept, and the rest of the floor went to the Carthage museum, and for the last 100 years we've had ongoing correspondence about whether or not they're still there, whether they know where they are. And I've just had a letter from the curator of the Carthage museum saying that they were never there, but I don't think … I mean, the records from the 1880s say they were sent there; but the current caurator was never aware of them.
[Continuing to the display of the floor itself.]
So what we did is take the watercolor, blow it back up to actual size, and we couldn't color-correct it well enough to make it match the mosaics, so we ended up just making it black and white.
I think that may actually have been a better choice, because it really showcases the mosaics quite well.
Yes, it really makes them pop out more.
[Indicating the caption.] So the inscription is in the Bardo Museum, and this is a pretty good representation of what it actually looks like. We have a translation here which points out that Julia gave it from her own funds, "for her salvation," for the synagogue of Naro, which is the Phoenician name of the town which is today called Hamman Lif - and it's still a resort today. Where we're standing would be where the reader would have read, probably from steps. This is the plan of the building - you would have entered this way, this is the atrium or some kind of forecourt, and you would have come in from that side. And what we tried to do is show you where the doors would be in this wing. We actually represent the doors you see on this plan. (This indicates the low wall surrounding the floor display, which has open places where the wall is replaced by bars, representing the doors to the sanctuary.) And there was an apse right here, just like in a church. This is where they read from. So the congregation would have probably sat on benches, and in archaeological digs of other synagogues you find benches. And they would probably face in this direction, which was East, toward Jerusalem …
So the story that the mosaics tell are - the inscription talks about how the patron, Julia, did it for her own salvation, which is not a Jewish idea of today, but was apparently an idea that was discussed in Judaism of that time period. And so that leads you to think that there is some kind of messianic theme to that floor.
[Describing the upper mosaic portion.] And so you have what appears to be the Creation, you have the three kinds of animals that Genesis uses. It organizes Creation into the kinds of animals. So you have the animals on land, you have the bull there. You have the sea animals, and the animals of the air represented by ducks. Then you have these weird things that don't belong in the ocean. You have a wheel, which may be a reference to Elijah who went up to heaven in a chariot, and who in traditional Judaism will return to announce the coming of the messiah. And then you have this partial design in the corner that looks a lot like the Hands of God, and in other synagogues you find is often labeled "Hands of God" doing the creating. And then you have these weird flowers out in the middle of the ocean. They're emerging from the mouth of the fish, they're emerging from the dolphin, and each of these animals had symbolic meaning in the Roman world as well as in the Jewish world - fish as a symbol of fertility, but also, according to the rabbis, a giant fish called Leviathan will battle a giant bull called Behemoth at the end of time, and they're sort of facing each other off. And in fact this is why the rabbis say it's praiseworthy to eat fish on Friday, and when I was growing up all my Catholic friends ate fish on Friday. It's something that was a shared tradition, and it's also the origin of Gefilte fish that you make for Friday night dinner, because of the rabbinical tradition that you eat fish on Friday, and it was in anticipation of the battle between Leviathan and Behemoth; Leviathan is going to win, and then the messiah will come.
So the dolphin saves Dionysus. And it's a symbol of the time.
[Describing the lower mosaic portion.] And then you have Paradise which will be re-established at the re-creation of the world and renewal at that time. And you have the fountain which is described in Genesis, and which is common to churches at this time. And here's the phoenix (peacock?) which in Latin cultures is a symbol of recreation, longevity and eternal life. The date palm: notice there's two of them. The floor is very symmetrical, but according to Genesis there's two trees: the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and that's where Eve gets the fruit that she offers Adam. In Hebrew it just says fruit, but in Mediterranean tradition, and in Jewish tradition generally, it's a date that she offers, because there are no apples in the Mediterranean.
I had heard it was a pomegranate.
Yes, pomegranate also, which is a fertility symbol. The apple comes in later, as a pun on the word for apple, which is malum, and of course the word for evil in Latin is mala, so that was how this tradition would begin, "Oh, it must have been an apple she gave him." But the date is an earlier tradition.
Then on either side you have what people who study mosaics call Inhabited Scroll Motifs. You have the vine forming a kind of scroll, making a composition apart for different kinds of symbols: the lion which is a traditional Jewish symbol, also found, of course, in churches of the same time period; water birds as a symbol of fertility. On this side, [you have] lots of symbols which are known throughout the Greek and Roman world like doves, partridge …
And the two baskets with fruit? …
The baskets are actually religious biblical symbols that you don't find in Roman mosaics in general in this kind of a context. But you do find them in churches. The bread, which is probably pita bread, is probably a reference to a passage in Exodus and in Leviticus which describes how you consecrate a priest. Among the things a priest is supposed to do is to bring a basket of bread to the temple in Jerusalem, and then you bless it, and you eat part of it, and part of it you give to God. And this is also the origin of communion - the same consecration of bread and then eating the bread is a common tradition that is just reinterpreted.
The fruit basket is probably a reference to …
… a symbol of the temple, and of pilgrimage to the temple, the pilgrimage festival. Of course the temple is rebuilt - again, when the world is recreated, the temple will also be recreated.
And that's the reason why the menorahs are there too. The menorah was the primary Jewish symbol in ancient Rome; there were no Jewish stars at that time. That was from the Fourteenth Century.
We have some other Coptic textiles that are reminiscent of what was missing on the floor, especially ... Here's one of my favorites: this one has a rabbit inside, and it's right next to the hare that would've been there, that's missing. This one has rabbits, or they could be gazelles. They've been abstracted to the point where you're not a hundred percent sure what they are, and maybe the person who made them wasn't sure what they were.
And on the other side, we have a painting of the town … This is from the 1920s, but it's not so different from when the mosaic was found. And this is a picture of the Arch of Titus, commemorating the destruction of the Temple. And here's the menorah - and that's probably the origin of the menorah as a symbol, known throughout the Roman world, of the Jews - or it may have been. And here's a nineteenth-century menorah; it has a different number of branches, eight instead of seven, because of the eight nights of Hanukah … It's something familiar to people. And then a Roman bowl for eating fish also has reference to the floor in its illustration, and that depression in the center is where you put the sauce, and the whole thing hung by a cord. And this is the sort of thing people would use at that time.
The exhibition is very well laid out; I like the idea of the contextual clues surrounding the central interest of the exhibition, the mosaics.
My main idea was that I wanted them on the floor. We used to show them on the wall - when they were installed permanently on the third floor they were always on the wall, and this distorts the perspective, and it doesn't really show you what they were intended to be. they almost become paintings if you put them on the wall. So if you put them back on the floor, you keep the idea of what they're for.
[Moving into the last room at the rear of the exhibition hall.]
The rest of the exhibit - there's been a question where these were from, where they were in the synagogue. They weren't on the watercolor, so they weren't in the sanctuary. We do know that some synagogues have (representational figures).
I was going to ask about these specifically, because they are so different. For one thing they're obviously from a different era, they're much earlier. They're so different in tone -- they're much more naturalistic. So I was in fact going to ask about their inclusion.
The facts we know -- they belonged to Prudhomme, we can trace them back to Prudhomme's personal collection. They are certainly Tunisian Roman art, and they're probably first- or second-century (A.D.), whereas the synagogue sanctuary was fifth- century. People have speculated that perhaps there were older rooms in the building, that the building was occupied for a long time and this was from the original building, or that there was a redecoration in the Fifth Century (A.D.). It's just impossible to know because his notes don't tell us anything like that. He wasn't a professional archaeologist, but he did pretty well for a complete amateur …
Well, he certainly was an enthusiast …
Yes, he was very enthusiastic, and I'm very grateful for that. And it wasn't his fault that he wasn't an archaeologist; there weren't very many of them in 1883. So I'm grateful that he did as good a job as he did, but I would love to know where these really came from. I consider them really beautiful, and they're interesting in and of themselves. This looks like a Good Shepherd, and where that came from could be very, very interesting. The figure of Roma, I say it's kind of like hanging an American flag in the synagogue, and Americans certainly do that. So Roma, at the time when this mosaic was being made, was the same time that Hadrian was building the temple of Fortuna and Roma in the Roman Forum. So it's possible that this was just a patriotic expression, not meant to go any deeper than that. Jews were capable of becoming citizens, so they would be patriotic.
These two animals, they're identified … This is an oryx - the very nice people at the Natural History Museum identified them for us. They're very naturalistic representations of those animals, and we know that there are Roman floors in Egypt that show a human figure in the middle medallion and then animals arranged around them. So it's possible that these came from some sort of arrangement like that.
Which would explain why they'd been kept together.
Yes. And then finally this square panel, about which scholars are doubtful - and they're probably right, but I talk in the catalogue about twenty-one panels, and a lot of our discussion is about the twenty-one panels, so I thought if I left it in the storeroom, I would get a lot of phone calls [saying], "There are only twenty out." So - the way it's shaded, the scholars who question it point out that the shading, the size of the tesserare, the technique in general, is more reminiscent of nineteenth-century Neoclassical mosaics than it is of true second-century Roman mosaics. And that's my most recent thought - that it was the dealer's intention to see if it would pass. And whether my predecessor in 1905 recognized that or not, he wanted to buy all of them. But I think it should be out for people to take a look and form their own opinion about whether it's a real antiquity, or whether it's from the Nineteenth Century.
[Walking away from the mosaic group.]
The captioning is very good, it's expository, it gives a good idea of the back story.
Well, good.
This last object from the Fatimid Period in the 11th century is just a little wooden plate with a vegetable motif and animals, and this is part of a screen that would cover a window. It's a nice reminder that Islamic artists continue to do what artists have been doing, they just find new reasons to explain what it is. And I really love that, to think that this kind of motif continues in Islam, that it has this very ancient heritage, and this mixture - we think of this as typically Islamic - but it shows that the Mediterranean is not so much a clash of cultures as it is a single cultural unit with many strands.
And that's my nickel tour.
