Dr Aaron Rosen, the Centre’s new Albert and Rachel Lehmann Junior Research Fellow in Jewish History and Culture, has published exciting research in Jewish art and the place of Jewish iconography in art by non-Jews, and is looking forward to carrying out further research during his time in Oxford.

He grew up in New England, living for a time in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, an island off the coast of Maine, and later in central Maine where he attended Maine Central Institute. Growing up, he frequently travelled through the States and abroad with his father, who lectured on endocrinology. Aaron felt for some time poised between his father’s Judaism and his mother’s Catholicism, before opting for Judaism as an adolescent after private coaching with a rabbi. He recalls being one of the only Jews in his small hometown of Pittsfield, Maine, and was frequently—and awkwardly—called on to sing Jewish tunes for his classmates on Jewish holidays.
Given his inter-religious background it was unsurprising that at Bowdoin College, founded in Maine in the eighteenth-century, he studied religion, later taking a minor in art history. He was first drawn to religion by attending lectures on early Christian heresies, adding art to his curriculum after teaching ceramics during the summers and becoming fascinated by modern painting. His third year as an undergraduate was spent abroad at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and after completing his BA at Bowdoin with an honors thesis on Holocaust art, he returned to Cambridge to continue with a second Diploma, and subsequently an MPhil and PhD. His thesis, entitled ‘Brushes with the Past: Art History and the Jewish Imagination’, examined Jewish identity in modern painting, and its theological implications.

During his post-doctoral year at Columbia University, he published this thesis in expanded form as Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitaj. He argues that Jewish visual art is rare less for religious reasons (the Second Commandment applied really to images designed to be worshipped), than because of poverty and a lack of opportunities in a European art-world dominated by the Church. In the early twentieth century, however, figures such as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine and Jacques Lipchitz were central in the Paris art scene, as were Jewish artists such as Philip Guston, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko in post-war New York.

Aaron is delighted that his Oxford post is allowing him to focus on research, and to develop avenues which he was not able to delve into in his book. The easy acceptance of fluidly interdisciplinary approaches in Oxford also impresses him, and he has enjoyed conversations with colleagues working in Jewish thought and Jewish literature. He also feels lucky, he says, to be in a place which values his own ‘rather fruity’ interest in combining Jewish studies with the history of art.

His current work includes a paper on R. B. Kitaj’s reinterpretation of Paolo Uccello's fifteenth-century ‘Miracle of the Profaned Host’ (1467-8), which shows Christians breaking down the door of a Jewish home to prevent the alleged desecration of a host, after which the Jews were burned at the stake. Kitaj’s ‘Eclipse of God’ (1997-2000) inverts Uccello’s work by depicting the Jews as sympathetic and the angry Christian mob as geometric abstractions. Kitaj’s work also represents an intriguing reading of Buber’s idea of the hidden face of God, whom Kitaj renders as a guilty witness to Jewish persecution.

Aaron is also working on an examination of the non-denominational Rothko Chapel in Houston, for which the painter prepared fourteen dusky canvases, creating an environment that the artist himself regarded as his masterpiece.
Aaron’s next major project is a book on artistic interfaith dialogue, discussing borrowed symbolism and iconographic interactions among philo-Semitic Christian artists, as well as Jewish responses to anti-Semitic imagery (such as Uccello’s ‘Profaned Host’). He also plans to look at images of Jesus by non-Christians, and at artistic and architectural commissions for churches from non-Christian artists, such as Shirazeh Houshiary’s new stained-glass in the church of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, which replaces a window destroyed in the Blitz.

Aaron in Russia, where he delivered a paper on Chagall's Russian background.