(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 67, No. 1, Pesach 2012)
To Jews, the crucifixion motif is an unhappy reminder of two thousand years of persecution, oppression and discrimination, a blood-soaked symbol associated with the Inquisition, pogroms and annual fears at Easter-time.1 The aversion Jews feel towards the image features in Chaim Potok’s novel My Name is Asher Lev,2 which recounts the anger in a Hasidic community when artist Asher Lev, son of the Rebbe’s assistant, decides to paint a crucifixion theme:
My name is Asher Lev… the notorious and legendary Lev of the Brooklyn Crucifixion. I am an observant Jew. Yes, of course, observant Jews do not paint crucifixions. As a matter of fact, observant Jews do not paint at all – in the way that I am painting. So strong words are being written about me… I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflictor of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.3
The narrator is advised by the Rebbe to move to Paris because of the pain he is causing his family and community. No such shame is attached to Christian portrayals, as attested to by rooms full of paintings of crucifixions found in the most prestigious Western art galleries.
Christians view the figure of Jesus on the cross as the symbol of their God’s self-sacrificing love, hope and redemption, an emblem of peace and a symbol of martyrdom and salvation. To Jews, the symbol of martyrdom and redemption is the Akeida – the Sacrifice of Isaac – which is frequently used in poetry and art to represent the Holocaust. The crucifixion is an image of dread.
With modernism Jews, even religious Jews like Asher Lev, have been exposed to the symbols of the outside world. Some Jewish artists have used the crucifixion motif but with an inverted meaning, implying that it is a symbol not of redemption but of suffering. This has resulted in protests by both communities. To Jews, the symbol is taboo because of its historic implications; to Christians, the misuse by Jews of an image they regard as singularly holy has led to charges of blasphemy and heresy.
Much has been written about the role Jews played in the struggle for democracy and human rights in South Africa4. However, the use by Jews of art as a means of protest has received little attention, aside from a recent exhibition at the South African Jewish Museum on Zapiro’s Mandela cartoons.5
The writer’s attention was drawn to this accidentally through an exhibition, hosted by the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town, on the work of the Hungarian sculptor Herman Wald6. Looking for some information on Wald in Esmé Berman’s invaluable Art & Artists of South Africa, I was surprised to find only one passing reference to Wald, in which he is listed as having been one of the teachers of the artist Harold Rubin.7
Who was this Rubin? The information Berman provides about him is intriguing. Amongst other things, he was charged with blasphemy for exhibiting a drawing of a crucified figure entitled ‘My Jesus’.8 That was in Johannesburg in July 1962. In Cape Town, too, a painting of a crucifixion was banned in that same month. This was Ronald Harrison’s ‘Black Christ’. Harrison’s death in Cape Town in June 20119 attracted considerable media coverage. Amongst the mourners at his funeral were Chief Albert Luthuli’s daughter, Dr Albertina Luthuli.
Both these pictures – one by a Christian, one by a Jew – were provoked by the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960 and were intended as visual statements attacking apartheid. Both pictures caused an uproar and were banned by the Censorship Board. The latter body was established in 1956 to censor books, films, and other materials imported into or produced in South Africa which were deemed indecent, obscene or on any grounds objectionable.10
The State reaction to the artists themselves differed. Rubin, who was ‘white’, was tried for blasphemy. Harrison, who was ‘coloured’, was detained on several occasions, interrogated and tortured.
The Crucifixion Motif in Art
The symbol of Jesus on the Cross appeared relatively late in Christian art. To portray him on a cross dying a criminal’s death would have made a mockery of his claim to be the Son of God during the first centuries after the Common Era. It was only after 315 C.E., when Emperor
Constantine abolished crucifixion, that the stigma attached to that kind of death sentence was forgotten. From the early Middle Ages till the 19th Century, the crucified figure meant to Christians that God’s son, to whom they prayed for mercy, died because he took upon himself the sins of the world, which were to be abolished by his death.
In Western iconography a Christian crucifixion painting traditionally shows Jesus on the cross; below him to the right stands his weeping mother Mary and an apostle consoling and supporting her. To the left stands a Roman soldier or centurion with a lance who tests whether the victim has breathed his last.
Naturally, it was unacceptable for Jews to paint such Christians symbols. Such taboos, along with many others, began to be broken in the 19th Century, but as much as it was unacceptable to Jews for Jews to paint a crucifixion, so was it unacceptable to Gentiles for Jews to do so. “A Jew has no right to depict ‘our’ Russian rulers and our Christian saints”, the Russian Jewish sculptor, Mark Antokolsky (1843-1902), was told when he dared to portray Jesus Christ as a Jew: “The Jews rebuke me: why did I do ‘Christ’? And the Christians rebuke me: why did I do ‘Christ’ like that?”11 Antokolsky wrote. He added that if Jesus returned, he would be horrified at what the Christians had done in his name, and for this the Christians would crucify him again.
Chagall’s “Crucifixion”
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) also challenged the taboo. He considered himself to be an emancipated Jew accepted by the Christian world which had then turned on them. Chagall reversed the symbolism, making his crucified Jesus represent not a Christian dying for people’s sins, but a persecuted Jew dying as a result of Christian sins perpetrated on Jews throughout the ages.
Chagall said, “For me, Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr. That is how I understood him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time … It was under the influence of the pogroms. Then I painted and drew him in pictures about ghettos, surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish mothers, running terrified and holding little children in their arm”12
Chagall’s ‘White Christ’ was painted in 1938 to protest the persecution of Jews, specifically the German ‘Aktion’ on 15 June, in which 1500 Jews were sent to concentration camps; the destruction of the Munich and Nuremberg synagogues on 9 June and 10 August; the deportation of Polish Jews at the end of October and the Kristallnacht pogrom on 9-10 November.
Chagall’s figure of Jesus is clearly Jewish, with his tallith as his loincloth, stretched in all his immense pain above a world of horror. At his feet burns the Menorah surrounded by a halo like that which frames his head (the only steady circle in this tumultuous structure). Above his head is written the Biblical “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews” in the traditional Latin abbreviation (INRI,. John 19:19) with its Hebrew translation underneath (Yesu hanazeri melech hayehudi), thus providing Jewry’s confirmation of Pilate’s words.
But most important of all, this Jesus’ relation to the world differs entirely from Christian representations of the Crucifixion. It lacks the Christian concept of salvation. For all his holiness, the figure is by no means divine. Chagall’s Jesus is a Jew who suffers, who is eternally burned by the fire of the world and yet, being an archetype, remains indestructible. It is not his divine but his human nature that is suffering.
Chagall used the symbols deeply embedded in the art of the Christian West. The theme does not address Jews. It is addressed to Christians. It condemns their actions against the nation of Jesus. In this way, the holiest Christian symbol, the crucifixion, is used to indict Christianity: “An image which had been anathema to Jews has become a symbol of Jewish martyrdom.”13
In his book Night, Wiesel describes a young child hanged at Auschwitz between two adult like Jesus crucified between two thieves. “Where is God now?” a witness asks, and Wiesel writes, “I heard a voice within me answer him: Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”14[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] Marc Chagall: “White Christ” Harold Rubin, a Johannesburg architect, was both a gifted jazz clarinettist and a talented artist who had five solo shows addressing socio-political issues between 1956 and 1962. He was 24 when he held his first exhibition. By then, he had his own jazz group, which played in townships with black musicians, despite laws forbidding this. Horrified by the Sharpeville shootings, Rubin responded in the best way available to him, with his drawing pen. In 1961, he publishing a series of drawings focusing on apartheid brutality, entitled ‘Sharpeville’. The following year, he submitted a crucifixion, ‘My Jesus’, for a closed competition on religious art. It was included in a July 1962 solo exhibition in Johannesburg’s Gallery 10115 together with another picture of a naked figure on a cross with two men, one firing a light machine gun, the other stabbing the machine-gunner with a spear.16 Rubin’s My Jesus has an immense artistic power. It is an expressionistic rendering of Jesus as the Man of Sorrows in the tradition of the Isenheim Altarpiece of Matthias Grunewald (1460-1528). In this tradition viewers are addressed directly and an appeal is made for their reaction through a feeling of identification with the figure of Jesus. The suffering face and upper torso is rendered in frenzied, transparent strokes. His upper torso in side-view, is wrung in curved agony. Jesus does not wear a loincloth and his nakedness emphasises the horror of his suffering. The colour contrast between the brown cross, the blue sky and the writhing sickly coloured figure of Jesus are exceptionally powerful. Most controversially from the Christian viewpoint, Rubin replaced the words “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” with “I forgive you, O Lord, for you know not what you do” in his handwriting. This is a direct accusation against the Christian God. Rubin’s crucifixion was not a Christian symbol of redemption nor did he, as had Chagall, replaced the suffering Jesus with a suffering Jew as a reproach to Christian antisemitism. He used the language of Christianity to express what has been done to Jesus not as a Jew but as suffering humanity, a victim of the apartheid legislation enacted by the Nationalist Government whose members were in the main ardent supporters of the Afrikaner Calvinist churches. Here was a Jewish man using Christian symbols to indict Christianity. There was such an outcry in Johannesburg that the police were sent on 27 July to seize the picture, returning a few days later to seized the other crucifixion picture as well. Both were sent to the Censorship Board in Cape Town and Rubin was charged with blasphemy. Die Vaderland reported under large headlines – Godlastersaak, Baie Belangrik.17 The Cape Times disagreed: “My Jesus is a religious painting. People who make a sex-scandal of it distort the very purpose of the painting. People who complain that it is blasphemous do not realise that Christ was a human being and the Crucifixion was one of the greatest humiliations that could be inflicted on Christ as a human being.”18 Ronald Harrison (1940 – 2011) worked at Wilmill textile factory designing garment labels for Fritz Raphaely, whom he described as a kind and principled Jewish man who never exploited his workers.19 Harrison had been looking for a non-violent way to express the anger he experienced as a coloured man under apartheid.20 Harrison wrote that he “became obsessed with the idea of taking some constructive action in the liberation movement through the medium of my artistic talent. One evening, while lying on my bed, a thought flashed through my head. How could a government that professes to be Christian perpetrate such immoral deeds and inflict so much pain and suffering on its own countrymen simply because its supporters were of another race, another colour, and another creed? …(I)n fact all races that were not classified as ‘white’ were being crucified… The vision forming in my mind’s eye was rather unusual… that the figure on the cross was a black man… I realised that I could depict the suffering of the black people and equate this to the suffering of Christ.”21 Worried about blasphemy, the deeply religious Harrison consulted his priest. The latter enquired of Anglican Archbishop Joost de Blank, who reassured Harrison on this score. Harrison then visited the SA National Gallery, studied the crucifixion paintings on display, went home, screwed a canvas onto the wall of his home and started painting. It took him six months. Archbishop de Blank visited and told him it was good, but “very, very dangerous”. When it was completed in June, it was put on display at the Anglican Church of St Luke in Salt River, Cape Town. Mediaeval artists often painted the portraits of their patrons into the religious scenes they had commissioned. This is what Harrison did – with a difference. He followed the rules of crucifixion composition strictly but rendered the figures in portraits which were recognisable to any South African, thus turning a pictorial compositional element into a political statement. The work’s originality lies in the specific use that Harrison made of the crucifixion motif. He, too, used the crucifixion not as the customary Christian symbol of redemption, but in the form of the Jewish symbol of reproach. He painted the suffering Jesus as a black man, specifically as the banned ANC President Chief Albert Luthuli, who two years previously had become the first African to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the top of the Cross, instead of the usual inscription “INRI”, is written out “HIC EST REX JUDEORUM” – This is the King of the Jews. Harrison added a ‘Coloured’ Madonna, an Asian St John and, at the foot of the cross, two White Roman centurions holding lances.22 The people responsible for the crucifixion were clearly the Roman centurions, identified as Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd (with a fatuous expression on his face) and behind him, holding a sponge for vinegar and gall, Justice Minister (later Prime Minister) Balthazar Johan Vorster with a self-satisfied grin. Vorster had recently tightened the repressive noose by passing laws allowing people to be detained for 90-days without trial. He had formerly been a general in the proNazi Ossewabrandwag and was interned during the war at the Koffiefontein detention camp. Here was a Christian man, regarded as a second-class citizen in the pigmentocracy of the time, using Christian symbols to indict apartheid laws introduced by deeply religious politicians by portraying the banned Luthuli as the suffering Man of Sorrows. Although Harrison’s work has less artistic merit than Rubin’s, its power is in the originality of his use of portraits for a religious iconographical motif and thus turning it into an accusation. There is no feeling of redemption in either of these crucifixion pictures. The suffering is on-going; it does not end and neither does the accusation. Harrison wrote that he “was satisfied that the crucified figure did indeed echo the suffering of black South Africans”23 He told his friends and soon reporters were knocking on his door. He proudly wrote in his autobiography: “The following day, the story was in practically every major daily newspaper – all said it was going to cause a nationwide controversy”.24 On 11 July, Die Burger contacted Harrison to ask if they could publish a photo of the painting. Harrison told them the painting was not political. He was astonished to read later that Die Burger had accused him of blasphemy.25 The Afrikaans press arranged a press briefing to urge the Government to respond quickly. Ronald Harrison: “The Black Christ” Harrison was arrested and beaten up. He was asked who was behind the idea of making such a painting? Was there a conspiracy to humiliate Verwoerd and South African whites?26 This was the first of several arrests, interrogations, torture and beatings. Die Kerkbode, official mouthpiece of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, which was headed by Vorster’s brother, demanded that Luthuli publicly reject any claims to being a crucified ‘Black Saviour’. Dawie, Die Burger’s political columnist, pointed out that there was “just one problem. If [Luthuli] were to make such a statement of disapproval, nobody would know about it because the newspapers would be contravening the “Sabotage” Act if they were to publish it”27 (Luthuli, as a banned person at the time, was not allowed to comment in the media).28 Condemnation of the crucifixion was not unanimous. Harrison received support from his church, as well as from the Catholic, Methodist and Evangelical churches. He was summonsed to go to the police station and issued a sworn statement describing Luthuli as a perfect image of Christ because he was a man of peace and saying that the painting showed that “racial discrimination should not be practised, for we are all united in one bond with Christ”.29 Rather disingenuously, he stated that he had the deepest respect and admiration for the Prime Minister as a man and felt that Verwoerd, as a true Christian, would not mind representing humanity.30 Harrison was released and allowed to hang the painting in his church but the Government then had second thoughts. A few days later, the Ministry of Interior prohibited any further display of The Black Christ until the Board of Censors had issued its ruling.31 In due course, the Censorship Board banned the painting on the grounds that it was “calculated to give offence to the religious convictions and feelings of a section of the population”, and its public exhibition was prohibited. In September 1962, the Censorship Board informed Rubin that he was forbidden to exhibit the two protest works described above.32 Although both were sent to the public prosecutor, Rubin would only be prosecuted for blasphemy for the one picture, My Jesus, because he had drawn Jesus as “a naked being with a man’s body and the head of a thief or a sort of monster” and added to it the words “I forgive you O Lord, for you know not what you do”. The blasphemy trial started in November, with evidence for the defence given by artists Cecil Skotnes and Prof Heather Martienssen and writers Uys Krige and Richard Daneel. The Prosecution’s argument was provided by the Malvern Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk’s Dominee Cruywagen and a policeman. Judgement was delivered in the middle of January 1963. The Rand Daily Mail reported “Rubin Not Guilty – Court Remarks on ‘Middle Ages’”.33 In a two-hour judgement, Magistrate PJ Nel concluded that what was considered to be blasphemy in the Middle Ages was no longer considered to be so in South Africa and that the works had to be judged from the standpoint of the ordinary reasonable man, not from those of a theologian or a detective. The prosecution had brought in no art experts and it was significant that no non-Christians had given evidence for the defence. The charge that the head of Jesus was animal-like or monster-like relied solely on the evidence provided by a dominee and a detectivesergeant. The defence had proved to the magistrate’s satisfaction that inversions of Biblical texts were not blasphemous and were frequently used by great writers. Regarding doubts of God’s omniscience and infallibility, these were often expressed with no question of there being a prosecution for blasphemy. Thus, Rubin had not slandered Jesus and/or God in the exhibition of My Jesus. The ruling was regarded as a victory for freedom of expression in South Africa.34 Having been acquitted, Rubin left South Africa in disgust. Like the architect Arthur Goldreich, also a talented artist, he settled in Israel. He went on to design buildings in both Israel and Nigeria, and exhibited in South Africa, Europe, England and the USA. Rubin continued his activism, only now he concentrated on anti-war themes as part of the peace movement. He produced a series called the ‘Israeli War’, which showed highly stylised modernistic figures in contorted poses, as symbols of the anguish and pain of war. His work continued to shock, and a biting Homage to Rabbi Kahane, which showed Kahane as a Jewish Nazi was pulled off the wall of a Haifa gallery in 1985 by an outraged member of the Knesset.35 He continued playing jazz and recording albums and received the Landau Award in 2008 for his contributions to jazz. His latest exhibition in South Africa was in 2007 at the Goodman Gallery, entitled Diary Pages, accompanied by a one-hour documentary film on his life and work called ‘A Magnificent Failure’. Ronald Harrison’s Black Christ was smuggled to London with the help of the exiled Neville Rubin, a former president the UCT SRC and NUSAS and a founder member of the underground African Resistance Movement. Rubin was the legal adviser to the International Defence and Aid Fund in England,36 and the painting was displayed to raise funds in Britain and Europe. After the demise of apartheid, Harrison commenced searching for his painting. He asked the Department of Foreign Affairs, which enquired of the British Council, which in its turn approached Ruiradh Nicholl, South Africa correspondent for The Observer. Nicholl’s subsequent Observer article, which appeared in July 1997, was read by 92-year-old Jewish activist Julius Baker, who scribbled across the top of his newspaper: “Well, I’ll be damned. I’ve got it”. It was leaning against a wall in the basement of his home in Hampstead, London.37 Baker was a lawyer and Communist Party member who had owned a bookstore in Johannesburg and had worked with Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Walter Sisulu, Bram Fischer, Oliver Tambo, Brian Bunting, Chief Luthuli, and Nelson Mandela. Arrested in 1960 under State of Emergency laws for helping raise money and disseminate propaganda for the ANC, he was released from custody for one day. Recalled Baker, “One of the police said, ‘I’ll get you tomorrow’, and I left for Swaziland.”38 Harrison flew to London. On 24 September 1997, Heritage Day, he was reunited with his painting, which had been the cause of so much personal suffering, and brought it back to Cape Town. It was displayed in St Georges Cathedral before being acquired by the SA National Gallery, who put it back in the basement.39 Replicas are on display at St Luke’s Church and in the offices of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and 21 life size reprints (seven-feet high) were produced in aid of the Spirit of Africa Arts Foundation for young disadvantaged artists. As for the National Party, to show that all was forgiven, it gave Harrison a special merit award for his contribution to the visual arts!40 Like Rubin, Cape Town-born Jonathan Shapiro studied architecture before switching over to graphic design when he decided to become a cartoonist. He was arrested under the Illegal Gatherings Act in 1983, when he had become involved in the UDF, and released after a court hearing. Two years later his mother (a refugee from Germany) and sister were arrested. That was the year that the apartheid government, wanting to protect itself from artistic criticism, banned the pictures of Rubin and Harrison. In 1987, Zapiro became a cartoonist for South, an anti-Apartheid paper. It was not long before his cartoons raised the ire of the ruling National Party, which banned his UDF calendar poster. Zapiro continued to use his cartoons to draw attention to apartheid human rights abuses and was arrested by the Security Police and placed in solitary confinement. He left South Africa shortly after, having been awarded a Fulbright scholarship. In New York, he studied under Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman and Art Spiegelman, a second-generation Holocaust survivor, who had portrayed his parents’ sufferings in ghettos and concentration camps in two graphic novels, Maus 1 and Maus 11.41 On his return to South Africa, Zapiro started drawing cartoons for the Sunday Times, the Sowetan and The Times, remaining true to his own opinions and beliefs without fear or favour. Zapiro, art historian Dr Ute Ben Yosef has stated, uses his artistic talents, his ability to put to paper his summary of the faults and foibles of current events and people in power and his sense of humour to criticize the great and speak truth to power whenever their actions go beyond what he, with his sharpened understanding of integrity, of ethics and justice, believes to be wrong.42 Zapiro’s cartoons have angered Clinton, Bush, Zuma, the ANC, the SACP, COSATU, the ANC Youth League and the Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities, yet he has continued to comment on events as he sees them, not as others would like him to see them. For this, he won the Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award at the annual Cartoonists Rights Network International in the USA.43 Zapiro also found the crucifixion motif an ideal tool to portray not Christian martyrdom and redemption, but the Jewish interpretation as representing a persecuted victim as a reproach to the perpetrators. At different times the victim has been people with HIV/AIDS refused adequate treatment, boys abused by priests with a denialist pope, or even a persecution that backfired, with Julius Malema using the opportunity of his ‘crucifixion’ as a platform to get an audience. Like Rubin and Harrison, Zapiro addresses the socio-political issues in South Africa and the viewer is summoned to identify with the figures on the cross. But like them, he has found that the crucifixion motif, although ideal for his purpose, is a dangerous symbol to use, guaranteeing a backlash from offended believers. In his cartoon Black Easter,44 Zapiro portrayed Jesus as Harrison had done, as a black man on the cross, with emaciated features, a crown of thorns and an inscription above his head reading “People with HIV/AIDS”. The figure was representative of all South Africans suffering from the disease. Behind him, nailed to the cross of the “righteous criminal” of Christian iconography, are other victims, one a skeletal black woman, the other a dying baby. Marching towards the viewer is a Roman centurion gleaned straight from an Asterix cartoon. Ronald Harrison had made his centurions people recognizable to any contemporary South African, the apartheid politicians Verwoerd and Vorster. Zapiro did likewise. Now, in place of the Apartheid perpetrators, the centurion figure represents a grim-faced Manto Tshabalala Msimang, Minister of Health, holding the hammer with which she has nailed her victims to the cross. Imprinted on her armour are the words: “Refusal of treatment”. It is a brilliant cartoon, with its fragile balance between wry comedy and abysmal tragedy. This crucifixion is an expression of reproach, an act of protest in the tradition of Chagall. The black man on the cross is not dying for the sins of the world, but as a result of the sins of the world, specifically as a result of the sins of a government that denies him life-saving antiretroviral medicine. This was understood by the satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, who in a letter of support wrote, “If anyone is dying for the sins of others, it is the people in South Africa who don’t have access to salvation through care and communication. The main criticism of the cartoon is simply – why only three crosses?45 Nothing. It is now a new South Africa, with freedom of the press. Its constitution guarantees freedom of the media, religion and opinion, which ensures that a portrayal of a crucifixion, no matter how offensive some viewers might find it, cannot lead to a trial on charges of blasphemy, nor to its being banned or its creator arrested. That does not mean there was no criticism of Black Easter. ‘Cartoon was blasphemy’ was the caption of the Sunday Times report, quoting a reader, Gerrit Myburgh, who considered it “blasphemous to the highest degree”. Another reader, Willem Schoombie, while not going as far as calling the work blasphemous, pointed out that the crucifixion was a highly sensitive subject and should not be depicted in a derogatory manner, “even by a talented artist” like Zapiro. He asked the newspaper to consider rejecting art that could offend the religious convictions of the reader.46 Zapiro also raised ire with a cartoon portraying three victims of child abuse nailed to the cross, with the centurions being represented by two bishops and an arch-bishop, still holding crucifying hammers.47 On the right stands Pontius Pilate, portrayed as the Pope, washing his hands as a ritualistic declaration of innocence. Here, Zapiro used the Catholic Primate to indict the silence and inaction of the Catholic clergy against those of their members who were perpetrating the abuse. Surprisingly, this cartoon got praise from a reader who found it powerful and heart-breaking, writing “You may get criticism from the Catholic Church. But…you got it absolutely right.”48 The crucifixion motif as a genre is itself lampooned by Zapiro in a cartoon depicting the then ANC Youth League President Julius Malema hanging in mid-air from a cross.49 Malema’s folded arms reveal an oversized luxury wristwatch. He smugly turns to the crowd and declares, “Now let me tell you more about the struggle I conducted before I was born”. The crowd cheers: ‘Our hero, our martyr”. Three centurions represent the elders of Afriforum, who remark with sour faces: “Well, that didn’t go exactly as planned”. The theme of the Man of Sorrows has here turned into the heroas-victim, leading the crucifixion motif as a cartoon image to its utter extreme. Harold Rubin, Neville Rubin, Julius Baker, Fritz Raphaely, Zapiro – the story is full of Jewish names involved directly or indirectly in these stories of artists who used the symbol of the crucifixion to criticise the apartheid regime. Each artist adapted the Western iconographic tradition as an accusation of inhumanity, of suffering and despair. The crucifixion is no longer the Christian symbol of their God’s self-sacrificing love, hope and redemption, an emblem of peace, but the Jewish symbol of persecution, oppression and discrimination. It has become an indictment of the failure of humankind and a form of protest. These tales of artistic representation and the passionate reception they obtained show how the meaning of an iconographical symbol such as the Crucifixion can be turned into a message of high potency. Through this, it becomes possible to transcend the boundaries of aesthetics and religion, gaining political ramifications and assuming a defining message of morality understood by everyone. Gwynne Schrire is Deputy Director of the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. She is a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs and a member of its Editorial Board. She has written, co-written and edited a wide range of books on aspects of local Jewish and Cape Town history. 
Rubin’s “Crucifixion”
Harrison’s Crucifixion
What Happened to Rubin?
What Happened to Harrison?
Zapiro’s Crucifixions
What Happened to Zapiro?
NOTES
