The Afterlife of Early Modern Images of Jews

Early modern copperplate engravers, painters, and printers produced an increasing number of images that depicted Jewish individuals or more often groups of Jewish men and women. Many of these images sought to present an ideal type, displaying (allegedly) typical Jewish dress and outward appearance. Some of these images saw adaptations already during the eighteenth-century, but all were photographed, reprinted, adapted, and altered from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. This article choses three images - an engraving of a Jewish man and woman from an early-eighteenth century costume book, the depiction of a Jewish couple from a late eighteenth-century painting, and the painting of Bertha Pappenheim posing as early modern Jewish merchant Glikl bas Judah from the early twentieth century - and follows their adaptations over time. I analyze how these adaptations were (re)used in different contexts and the problems they may create for historians as well as for (non-professional) observers interested in the history of early modern European Jewry. The afterlife of these early modern images is often framed in a discourse of Jewish belonging and identity. Especially popular adaptations are characterized by an uncritical and sometimes ahistorical approach to these images.