The umbilical of my omphalos winds its way back in time to the blessings of my mother and father, but also inwards and outside-of-time, stretching into a womb land that is all myth and dream and imagination. With some effort I can follow my way back into this makom, this space and hopefully return from it with something useful — or at least, interesting — and not just to myself mind you. I do love sharing these thoughts, but I am also interested in their relevance, by which I mean, their utility. Let me explain.

I was having a conversation with a mathematician, Yaakov, at the University of Maryland recently, and he was struggling with aesthetic questions on what is good or bad art, so I suggested an alternative more useful question as rather, “what is this art good for?” recalling Marcel Duchamp’s 1957 essay, The Creative Act:

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

The verdict of the spectator is separate from the activity of the artist. The spectator might very well take umbrage if the art object, the object of fascination (or boredom) had been or had not been toiled over, had or had not been the expression of a theory or movement, had or had not been the work of an artist at all. As a spectator, my verdict is not whether art is or is not art, but whether the art is useful — and useful only in the sense of whether it has opened my eyes and expanded my conscious awareness as to the existence of wonder in the world of relationships and things outside of frames and pedestals, galleries and museums — whether appreciation of the art object has brought me to appreciate everything else in the Everything Else room in the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum.

In a related sense, as much as I ponder myth in Judaism specifically, and religion in general, I return to this concern, that these ideas, while interesting to me, while stimulating and enriching an emerging creative expressive innerverse within me, that these ideas should also hopefully be useful for others. That if they are not, that they are trivial, and that this whole project is a delusion of self-indulgence. I will be honest with you, that I am not wholly convinced that this is not, but I am writing — with the intention that these labyrinth of ideas I’m exploring and sometimes getting lost in — that I will bring back along my wayfinding thread/trail of breadcrumbs/umbilical chord, something useful.

I’m hopeful that just as art becomes useful by revealing to an observer the greater wondrous reality outside the frame of (framed) Art, that my insights into myth and religion might also be useful for helping to reveal a greater wondrous imaginary world only hinted at within the source text of religious doctrine and dogma. Myth and storytelling thus convey the promise and potential of enduring creative liberty and the subversion of religious control to generations of eager children and aging heresiarchs.

Having said this, let me share with you something totally weird that I just found (on wikipedia, where else) that blew my mind. An Arabian myth of a creature called Bahamut (بهموت‎) which unlike the Behemot is not terrestrial, but like Leviatan, inhabits the endless depths of the ocean. This is mind blowing to me because the tradition in Sefer Chanoch, that the Leviatan is the mate of the Behemot seems much more plausible (in a sort-of mythic taxonomy) if we imagine both of them as sea dwellers rather than as opposites on a terrestrial/aquatic scale.

Just for review, I’ve written about the Behemot in Jewish myth, how it seems to relate to Apsu, the ancient ur-deity in Babylonian mythology, the personification of heavenly fresh water. I’ve written how the Behemot is imagined as a cosmically large hippopatamus dripping with condensation, and referred to in midrash as the “Ox of the Pit.” I’ve wondered whether the Pit was a reference to the t’hom, the primordial abyss, the abstraction of the other Babylonian ur-deity and personification of saltwater, Tiamat. How Leviatan seems to be synonymous with Tiamat in biblical writings. How Behemot/Leviatan are mated to one another in Sefer Chanoch. The Talmud also prefers the notion that Leviathan and Behemot were each created like all other creatures, male and female. So the existence of a myth where Behemot takes the form of a non-terrestrial sea creature like the leviathan seems significant.

From the wikipedia article on Bahamut:

Bahamut (Arabic: بهموت‎ Bahamūt) is a vast fish that supports the earth in Arabian mythology. In some sources, Bahamut is described as having a head resembling a hippopotamus or elephant.

If that’s not enough of a teaser, here is the entire fantastic entry on Bahamut written by Jorge Luis Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings (translated by Margarita Guerrero, Norman Thomas di Giovanni). I want to point out that I find it significant that similar to the Behemot tradition, the Bahamut myth describes the creatures with hippopotamus features.

Behemoth’s fame reached the wastes of Arabia, where men altered and magnified its image.

From a hippopotamus or elephant they turned it into a fish afloat in a fathomless sea; on the fish they placed a bull, and on the bull a ruby mountain, and on the mountain an angel, and over the angel six hells, and over these hells the earth, and over the earth seven heavens. A Moslem tradition runs: God made the earth, but the earth had no base and so under the earth he made an angel. But the angel had no base and so under the angel’s feet he made a crag of ruby. But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues, and feet. But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish he put water, and under the water he put darkness, and beyond this men’s knowledge does not reach.

Others have it that the earth has its foundation on the water; the water, on the crag; the crag, on the bull’s forehead; the bull, on a bed of sand; the sand, on Bahamut; Bahamut, on a stifling wind; the stifling wind on a mist. What lies under the mist is unknown. So immense and dazzling is Bahamut that the eyes of man cannot bear its sight. All the seas of the world, placed in one of the fish’s nostrils, would be like a mustard seed laid in the desert. In the 496th night of the Arabian Nights we are told that it was given to Isa ( Jesus) to behold Bahamut and that, this mercy granted, Isa fell to the ground in a faint, and three days and their nights passed before he recovered his senses.

The tale goes on that beneath the measureless fish is a sea; and beneath the sea, a chasm of air; and beneath the air, fire; and beneath the fire, a serpent named Falak in whose mouth are the six hells.

The idea of the crag resting on the bull, and the bull on Bahamut, and Bahamut on anything else, seems to be an illustration of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. This proof argues that every cause requires a prior cause, and so, in order to avoid proceeding into infinity, a first cause is necessary.

The story of Bahamut is thus a variation in a wide tradition of cosmic creatures said to be supporting the world. In Hinduism, the creature is Akupara, a ginormous tortoise. Or elsewhere in the Vedas, as the turtle being Kurma, second incarnation of Vishnu. In Greek myth, it is the titan, Atlas. If you’ve read any Terry Pratchett, you might also be reminded of the turtle that supports his fictional Discworld.

In modern Western philosophical debate, an anecdote relating the myth of Bahamut or Akupara is sometimes referred to as “Turtles all the way down” (explanation below). The anecdote has been used by enlightened moderns lampooning the logical fallacies of irrational belief systems since the 17th century. Or as the wikipedia describes it, the anecdote is used “to humorously illustrate both infinite regress, in cosmological imagery, and the perils of religious/mythic myopia.” This is how Stephen Hawking relates the anecdote in his A Brief History of Time (1988):

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Russell probably wasn’t the scientist to have been the recipient of this retort. Most identify the scientist in this popular anecdote as the 19th century psychologist and philosopher William James. But Hawking can be forgiven for thinking so since Bertrand Russell, said the following in his lecture Why I Am Not a Christian (1927):

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”

William James’ godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, may very well have been acquainted with the story from his peer, Henry David Thoreau who wrote in his journal in 1852,

Men are making speeches… all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise.

So whether the Turtles anecdote originated with Russell or James, it is clear that myths representing cosmological proofs were useful arguments of ridicule for enlightenment rationalists and other freethinkers. In 1690 John Locke may have been the first western philosopher to refer to this myth in a philosophical argument on what the substance is of an object being empirically investigated. From book 2, chapter 23 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke writes,

If anyone be asked what is the subject wherein colour or weight inheres, he would have nothing to say but, the solid extended parts; and if he were demanded what is it that solidity and extension adhere in, he would not be in a much better case than the Indian before-mentioned who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on, to which his answer was, a great tortoise; but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad backed tortoise, replied, something, he knew not what.

Perhaps the Indian said, “Bahamut.” Bahamut, the imaginary foundation of the world of myth.

Above: illustration of Bahamut for The Book of Imaginary Beings by the graduate students in the Department of Illustration and Art of the Book at the Vakalo School of Art and Design in Athens, Greece.

Tags: art,Behemoth,Jorge Luis Borges,Leviathan,makom,myth,mythic landscape,relevance
Categories: Aharonium, Art History, Mythology and Yiddishkeit
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This past Sunday, May 18th, marked the end of the Frida Kahlo exhibit this year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. My friend Robyn and I caught it just before its expiry along with hordes of locals who had waited till the last moment. Outside, pregnant rain clouds were birthing a fury of elements, a meteorological interruption of the Philly Jewish community’s Israel [at] 60 parade festivities taking place in Logan Circle and Ben Franklin Parkway, just outside the museum. More about the parade in another post.

Robyn and I purchased our tickets and waited patiently in the long exhibit queue where we had an opportunity to look at Diego Rivera’s Liberation of the Peon (1931). Once through the entrance, we accepted the audio guides and commenced our study of the work of Frida Kahlo. Narration on the tour was provided by a device contained a small LCD screen, a keypad, and pause, stop, and play audio buttons, as well as attached earphones.  To play the commentary for a particular image, one would simply press in the keypad the number listed next to the painting on the wall of the gallery. In addition to the audio commentary, informative text was also silk screened onto the walls of the gallery adjoining the paintings and photographs displayed.

This exhibit originally began its tour with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The fancy Antenna Audio gadget that had been used in these earlier Kahlo exhibits was for some reason not used for this show at the PMA. I’m not certain why. Also, the audio provided was not that of the exhibit curator Hayden Herrera, or her assistant Elizabeth Carpenter, but from some other British man. I’m still trying to find out who this is. I’d like to ask them a question:

Namely, why did the curator introduce Kahlo as having been born of mixed German and Mexican Indian heritage and not mention her Jewish heritage? This is what the narrator said:

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, a southern suburb of Mexico City, the third daughter of a German father and a mother of Spanish and Native American descent.

So I want to know: was Kahlo’s father Guillermo (née Wilhelm) Kahlo’s Hungarian-Jewish ancestry so irrelevant and besides the point to exclude it? Kahlo’s Indian heritage and Mexican socialist nationalism is well known because they are so much a part of her art work. But Kahlo herself claimed to be the granddaughter of Hungarian Jews that emigrated to Germany in the 19th century. Isn’t that significant? In an article on a 2007 Kahlo exhibit, Gannit Ankori, an art historian specializing in Frida Kahlo provides the details,

Kahlo testified “many times” about her Jewish identity, “stressing that her paternal grandparents, Henriette Kaufmann and Jakob Kahlo, were Jews from the city of Arad.” Further, many people who knew Frida and Wilhelm, such as Frida’s biographer, Hayden Herrera, and Frida’s husband Diego Rivera’s biographer, Bertram Wolfe, personally repeated this fact.

It seems a mistake to omit the fact that expatriate Eurpoean Jews made up an important core of the radical progressive political and art scene that Kahlo and her husband Diego inhabited, the most famous of whom was Leon Trotsky. This is an important point because socialism, communism, and anarchism, and the arts were secular programs that accepted the contribution of Jews at a time when anti-Jewish sentiment was profound and ubiquitous. Although antisemitism persisted (and still persists) in the Left, Guillermo Kahlo and his daughter, could find sanctuary among more enlightened contemporaries. And they did.

Perhaps the lack of attention or unwillingness of the art historian narrating the exhibit to be fully forthcoming about Kahlo’s Jewish heritage stems from ambivalence and ignorance of what Judaism is in general, let alone specifically how Kahlo and her father understood it as relevant to their self-identity. Judaism is correctly understood as not only a religion, but also as a civilization with an enduring culture the re religious aspect of which is not easily (or honestly) excised, as well as the inspiration of a modern nationalist and socialist movement of liberation and self-determination (Zionism). If Kahlo’s Jewish ancestry was only understood to be a religious identity then commenting on her Jewish parentage would correctly be considered irrelevant and misleading. So, what did Kahlo think of her Jewish heritage? How did she self-identify?

The answer to these questions was dealt with in 2003 at a Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Jewish Museum, “‘Frida Kahlo’s Intimate Family Picture.” In that exhibit, Israeli curator Gannit Ankori recognized an extremely important point revealed in Kahlo’s painting, “My Grandparents, My Parents and I.” Grace Glueck for the NY Times Art Review explains,

”My Grandparents” shows Frida as a small child, standing naked in the courtyard of the Casa Azul, the comfortable home built by her father in Coyoacán, then a village south of Mexico City, where Frida spent most of her life. (She died there, and it is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.) In her right hand she holds a ribbon that flows upward on either side of the picture to support floating portraits of each set of grandparents; the Mexican couple on the left, the Hungarian-Jewish pair on the right. (From her Kahlo grandmother, Frida apparently inherited those awesome black eyebrows that almost met in the middle of her forehead.) [emphasis mine]

The subject of Kahlo’s Jewish identity was returned to again in a 2005 book on Guillermo Kahlo’s photographic work, Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo, by Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle. The historians reveal that contrary to Frida Kahlo’s own claim, her father was the scion of a long line of German Lutheran Protestants. If this was indeed the case, then the curiosity remains why Kahlo claimed herself to be of Jewish ancestry. Was it a family legend encouraged by her father? Was it in vogue to have Jewish ancestry in artsy socialist circles in Mexico City? Or was Kahlo, in identifying her genealogy with Jews during the 1930s, declaring solidarity with another ethnic minority oppressed by fascists at the onset of Hitler’s campaign of extermination?

The complex construction of Kahlo’s identity and its relationship to anti-Nazi Jewish sympathies is the subject of 2007 article in the Jewish Press by Menachem Wecker on Kahlo exhibit in Washington, DC’s National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA). Wecker writes,

[Ankori] cited the position that Kahlo sought to distance herself from the Nazis based upon the fact that testimony about Wilhelm Kahlo’s Jewish background surfaced most frequently between 1936 and the 1940s. But she said over email, “I think in light of the new findings , these issues require further investigation. What is of great interest to me is not Wilhelm Kahlo’s ‘real’ religion, but Frida Kahlo’s construction of her self-image” insofar as it “impacted Kahlo’s self-image as manifested in her art.”

But later in Wecker’s article, Ankori does consider Wilhelm Kahlo’s “real religion” to be of interest, since besides Kahlo’s penchant for and mastery of her self-constructed image, she may very well have building a family tree to satisfy any doubts of her father’s identity in terms of both halakha (Jewish ritual law) and the Nazi’s ancestry laws. In short, what is relevant for Kahlo herself is whether her genealogy is Jewish enough to be murdered with her adopted semitic compatriots.

To Ankori, the question is whether Henriette Kaufmann was Jewish, since her Jewishness would make Wilhelm Jewish “according to both Jewish Halakha and Nazi laws.” If instead Wilhelm was a German Lutheran (Ankori says Lutheran, while Ronnen wrote Protestant), “why would Frida Kahlo ‘create’ a Hungarian Jewish genealogy for him and for herself?” Ankori wondered.

Even after Franger and Huhle’s book, for Jason Steiber, archivist at the NMWA, Kahlo remains a Jewish artist.

“I believe, without a doubt, that Frida Kahlo was a Jewish artist,” said Jason Stieber, archivist at the NMWA, through e-mail. But Stieber said other aspects of Kahlo’s identity played much greater roles in her life and work. “Frida was many things … and she embraced wholeheartedly everything that she was,” he said, noting that Frida “was proud of this lineage” and greatly delighted in “wheedling anti-Semites in America,” such as her famous inquiry put forth to Henry Ford of whether he was Jewish. Although she was an atheist, “she abhorred the Catholic religiosity of her mother,” and she “did embrace her Jewish ethnicity, if not the tenets of Judaic faith.”

“So yes, Frida was a Jewish artist,” Strieber continued, “however, I think she would have been more likely to refer to herself as a Mexican artist. Mexico held a very special place in heart and in her art.”

So I’ve been thinking about all of this and I’m left with an important quote that Wecker brings from an email in conversation with, Robin Cembalest, executive editor of ARTNews magazine, reveals the other side to the fascination with the question of Kahlo’s heritage.

“In my world the process of defining Jewish art, or what is Jewish in art, is both parlor game and intellectual exercise,” Cembalest wrote. “Either way, clearly it reveals as much about who is doing the assessing as it does about the figures we are claiming for our team.”

I think this is a remarkable statement as it rings both true and hollow — true in the sense that, yeah, ethnic pride is commonly expressed in appropriating the achievements of individuals as evidence of community capabilities. Hollow in the sense, that if art historians can not see beyond chauvinist ethnic boosterism to understand the importance of identity politics in the lives and art of artists then they are willingly blinding themselves to significant contextual meaning.

Kahlo’s creative philo-semitism is just one example of her passion for the liberation of all peoples. I, for one, am proud of Frida Kahlo’s defiant solidarity with Jews in the face of fascism, her storytelling in the face of a geneology and ritual law that would deny her a more rigorous and truthful connection with my people.

Categories: Aharonium, Art History and Yiddishkeit
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