Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation
Description
In Kraków's Remah and Kupa synagogues, intriguing paintings of the biblical Deluge and the Ark of Noah are found. While most other paintings in these synagogues echo more traditional topics in synagogue art, e.g., the twelve Zodiac signs, landmarks in the Land of Israel, and the Jerusalem Temple's vessels, the Deluge scene introduced new imagery into these synagogue decorations. On the one hand, they can be seen as the revival of violent zoomorphic scenes in eighteenth-century Polish synagogue art, showing domesticated animals kidnapped and devoured by predators. However, in contrast to the earlier paintings, generally considered to have reflected an artistic response to the suffering of the Jews during the Khmelnytsky riots, the Deluge paintings might have represented a more national view of these events, referring to the mid-seventeenth-and nineteenth-century destructive military campaigns in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. On the other hand, the Deluge images reflected an all-Polish inclusive approach towards pre-Jewish biblical events in synagogue paintings. The paper aims to explain the Kraków synagogues Deluge paintings considering changes in Polish Jewish society from a religious, social, and national point of view from the beginning of modern times until the nineteenth century.