Recepción de los judíos, de la serie «Historia de la civilización en Polonia»

The year on the picture is 1096, the year of the First Crusade — and in the Rhineland, crusading mobs were murdering whole Jewish communities as they marched. Many who survived fled east, and one of the lands that took them in was Poland. Over the centuries that followed it would hold the largest Jewish population anywhere in Europe. Matejko folded that long story into a single imagined moment: Jewish newcomers being received by a Polish duke, Władysław Herman, before the Romanesque cathedral of Płock, its heavy bronze doors standing open behind them. No such ceremony is actually recorded. He built the scene to carry a truth that unfolded slowly, over generations. He painted it in 1889 as one panel in a cycle he called the History of Civilization in Poland, at a time when the country had no state of its own and its past was one of the few things left to hold onto. The commission came from a Kraków lawyer named Arnold Rappaport, himself a Jew.