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Familiar Jewish Scenes
Alphonse Lévy
1903
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Born in Alsace, Alphonse Lévy moved to Paris, where he studied academic painting with the French painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme. Beginning in the mid-1860s and continuing through the years of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, he published his political cartoons (under the pseudonym Saïd) in a number of Parisian journals, including Monde comique, Journal amusant, and L’éclipse. Lévy’s interest turned to Jewish subjects in the mid-1870s, and his caricatures of rural Alsatian Jews illustrated Léon Cahun’s La vie juive (Jewish Life, 1886) and Sacher Masoch’s Contes juives (Jewish Tales, 1888). In 1902, he published his own volume, Scènes familiales juives (Jewish Family Scenes).
The Lord said to Abram, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
I will make of you a great nation,
And I will bless…
When will the walls of prejudice collapse,
That split the fraternal human tribe into foes?
Will the flame of love, illuminating the earth,
Disperse the grim darkness of ignorance?
—Meanwhile the sun…