さまよえるユダヤ人

Hirszenberg painted this large canvas in 1899, in Łódź, in Russian-ruled Poland, during years of rising violence against Jews across Eastern Europe. He took an old Christian legend, the Wandering Jew condemned to roam the earth forever for mocking Christ on the way to the cross, and turned it around. His figure is not the sneering old man of tradition. It is a nearly naked man running in terror through a field of crosses, dead bodies at his feet, the crosses reading less as signs of salvation than as the cause of his flight. It was a bold and bitter thing for a Jewish painter to make in Catholic Poland. Hirszenberg made it about 40 years before the Holocaust.