A Bit Too On the Nose
First comes art, then comes law
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
Last week David wrote a piece for CNN on Bradley Cooper’s fake nose that he’s wearing in a new film on the life of Leonard Bernstein. His argument is basically that this is fraught ground, but that there’s also a history and you can’t simply dismiss the fact that he’s wearing a different nose because you think Cooper’s attempt to look more like Bernstein is a good movie-making move (Is that weird pointed nose on the right really like Bernstein’s more rounded nose on the left?).
But the other important point is that we should pay attention to the history rather than cancel the movie. Specifically, we wanted to draw your attention to the medieval history part of the story. David wrote:
Let’s state two facts. Cooper is not Jewish. Bernstein in fact had a pretty big nose. However, any non-Jewish person putting on a fake nose in order to portray a Jew is colliding with a grim history. Images of Jews with big noses have been associated with some of the most virulent anti-Jewish stereotypes since the later Middle Ages, according to art historian Sara Lipton, author of “Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography.” … Lipton, the medieval art historian, has argued that it’s the depiction of Jews as physically recognizable (mostly by wearing “eastern” hats) in art that led to the perpetuation of Jewish dress codes such as the mandatory wearing of a yellow star in the 13th century.
David argued that “you cannot have a non-Jewish actor putting on a fake nose in order to play a Jew and not at least pause for a moment to consider the history.” It’s that history we want to point to here.
One of the important points that Lipton has long made is that art and language can lead directly to violence, but that they don’t have to lead that way. In this 2014 review of her work, for example, she points out that it was often “difficult to tell which figures wearing beards, spectacles, metallic fabrics, earrings, veils and hats in manuscripts and on church walls were meant to be recognizably Jewish men and women. In the windows at Chartres cathedral, for instance, she found Jews and Christians alike portrayed as compassionate, generous and foresighted, as well as idolizing money and committing crimes. ‘You can get almost any message you want out of that building,’ she said.”
In 2015 she wrote for the New York Times that over the first thousand years of Christianity there was condemnation for “the Jews” as responsible for the death of Christ, but:
Before about 1100, Christian devotions focused on Christ’s divine nature and triumph over death. Images of the crucifixion showed Jesus alive and healthy on the cross. For this reason, his killers were not major focuses in Christian thought. No anti-Jewish polemics were composed during these centuries; artworks portrayed his executioners not as Jews, but as Roman soldiers (which was more historically accurate) or as yokels…In the decades around 1100, a shift in the focus of Christian veneration brought Jews to the fore. In an effort to spur compassion among Christian worshipers, preachers and artists began to dwell in vivid detail on Christ’s pain. Christ morphed from triumphant divine judge to suffering human savior. A parallel tactic, designed to foster a sense of Christian unity, was to emphasize the cruelty of his supposed tormentors, the Jews.”
And then we get the caricatures:
Ferocious anti-Jewish rhetoric began to permeate sermons, plays and polemical texts. Jews were labeled demonic and greedy. In one diatribe, the head of the most influential monastery in Christendom thundered at the Jews: “Why are you not called brute animals? Why not beasts?” Images began to portray Jews as hooknosed caricatures of evil.
One of the responses to David’s essay and other Jewish critics of Maestro has been to point out that Bernstein did, in fact, have a big nose. Lipton (in this interview most recently) acknowledges that medieval German Jews, a community that intermarried heavily (a practice called endogamy) and so may have developed distinct physical traits, may also have had larger noses than non-Jewish communities in the same area. But it’s the art showing Jews as distinct that leads to laws mandating Jews be physically identified through badges and back towards the idea that Jews are other. Eventually, the hooknosed Jew shows up in art for places like Iberia, where the physical traits for Jews were not at all the same as in Germany. So it’s not about reality (or not. Again, Cooper’s fake nose looks really fake), but about the way representation can connect to harm.
Humans make choices. Humans have agency. This is one of the major themes of our work in The Bright Ages and in other pieces we’ve written. Art doesn’t simply drive human behavior but rather it’s a complicated mixture of creator’s intention and reader’s/ viewer’s rectpion.
But one choice that could be made is to consciously not provide another example of an old stereotype, or at least be ready to engage in the conversation when others point it out.
Thanks for reading Modern Medieval! Subscribe for free to receive new posts every week.