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The Jewish journey
Diaspora: Homelands in Exile
2003 Time Out New York review

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

Photography, many a theoretician has observed, is intimately bound up with problems of authority and authenticity. Can any particular print rightly be called an “original”? Does the fact that a photograph can be (infinitely) replicated somehow diminish its “aura” or ability to offer testimony? Toss in the question of what it means to be Jewish—a member of a people scattered across the globe, whose faith includes strongly particularist and strongly universalist elements—and you have the makings of the heady, enthralling concoction that is Diaspora: Homelands in Exile (HarperCollins, $100), the boxed, two-volume, 512-page anthology of French photographer Frédéric Brenner’s work.

Brenner, whose retrospective “The Jewish Journey: Frédéric Brenner's Photographic Odyssey” opens this week at the Brooklyn Museum, has spent the past quarter-century documenting the lives of Jews in more than 40 countries. Volume one of Diaspora (Photographs) contains 264 images (262 duotones and two full-color photographs), whose subjects range from the Jews of Haïdan (Yemen) and Beijing to such stateside luminaries as Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Mark Spitz. Volume two (Voices) reproduces 60 of those images, surrounded—in the style of the Talmud, the 1,800-year-old code of Jewish law—by commentary from leading intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida, Natalie Zemon Davis, André Aciman and Carlos Fuentes.

While Brenner was trained as a social anthropologist, his images are anything but dryly academic. The earliest photograph in Diaspora, “Purim” (1978), captures a child costumed as an angel scampering down a Jerusalem alley, the glistening snow on the ground and downy, back-lit angel wings in sensuous contrast to the stark shadows and mottled stones of the holy city’s walls. A 1995 shot of the International Jewish Arts Festival in Commack, Long Island, illustrates Brenner’s gift for provocation. On Native American land now scarred with pavement and cluttered with electrical towers, suburban families dress up as Hasidim to be photographed in front of a plywood mock-up of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. Children of survivors of the Shoah unthinkingly tread on ground where another genocide took place; “authentic” Jewish attire and the structure that once shielded the Holy of Holies are reduced to simulacra, props in a carnivalesque enterprise.

Black Jews of Ethiopia, Roman Jews in the stance of gladiators, female rabbinical students at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary: Brenner's images challenge the persistent notion that to be Jewish is to be white and of Eastern European descent (and to judge from public visibility, male). Perhaps most striking in this regard are his photographs of Portuguese crypto-Jews, or Marranos (see photo, above), who still practice the clandestine form of Judaism born when their ancestors were forcibly converted to Christianity under the Inquisition. The Marranos light Shabbat candles in cubbyholes and bake Passover matzot locked away in their attics. Are they apostates, and if so, from what faith? Do they bear witness to victimhood and ignorance or (as George Steiner argues) to survival and tenacious creativity? The Marranos’ enigmatic gaze, like that of many of Brenner's subjects, suggests the fundamental mystery of the Jewish people: at home in exile and in exile at home.

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