Ephraim Moses Lilien

The art-nouveau illustrator and photographer Ephraim Moses Lilien (Maurycy Lilien) created the most iconic images associated with the burgeoning Zionist movement at the turn of the century. Born in Drohobycz in Austrian Galicia (near what is today L’viv, Ukraine) to a working-class family, Lilien studied graphic art and painting in Kraków. He embraced art-nouveau illustration in Munich in the mid-1890s, becoming a contributor to the Jugend journal. From the turn of the century, embracing Zionism, Lilien turned his focus to producing compelling and iconic illustrations and photographs in service to Zionist and Jewish national revival ideas. These illustrations, widely circulated in Zionist posters and other movement productions, are marked by symbolic images of Jewish national and social suffering or, alternatively, by images of healthy “New Jews,” sometimes frankly eroticized, regenerating themselves in a biblically troped Palestine/Land of Israel. His photograph of Theodor Herzl leaning over a bridge in Basel further enshrined Lilien as the most recognized Zionist artist of his day. Lilien also provided iconic illustrations of Jewish working-class social suffering in his work for Lieder des Ghetto (1902), a German translation of the sentimental social poetry of the then-leading American Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld. In 1906, Lilien helped Boris Schatz establish the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem, where Lilien taught illustration and photography.