The Salon in Jewish History

The term salon originated in France and refers to an unofficial, often domestic space that is devoted to crossing social boundaries in order to foster great conversation, appreciation of the arts, and social mingling across classes. It is difficult to capture its ephemeral spirit in any material medium for its central legacy is the very fact of its existence and its spirit of a safe yet adventurous space. By allowing people who were often doubly marginalized in this society, as women and as Jews, to shine by virtue of their social skills, these private spaces came to exert powerful influence on the imagination of their time.

Salons fostered a new class of social leaders, a space for ideas and art appreciation to grow without fear of political reprisals. In a society still constrained by social and legal boundaries, salons and their hosts created a miniature world in which social taboos were temporarily cast off and members of different religious, artistic, and professional groups could mingle for the joy of their mutual company. The interiors and objects from these homes reflected a rarified setting of the luxury items and furnishings of the wealthiest Jews. Yet their purpose went far beyond a conspicuous display of consumption. These Jews used their homes to draw in a world that had excluded them for centuries, to host the political nobility in a style to which they were accustomed, and to announce that Jews had triumphed over centuries of discrimination in a society that still regarded them warily.

When in 1795 the wealthy Berlin merchant Isaac Daniel Itzig commissioned a porcelain teacup and saucer bearing his portrait and that of his palatial residence, he accomplished several goals with one object. He perpetuated his likeness, he showed off his princely residence as a Jew who had “arrived” in Berlin, and he projected a quasi-royal signal of power and wealth to those who frequented his household. Portraiture became a significant medium to signal social status, and Jewish subjects commissioned portraits from prominent artists. They presented themselves wearing special clothes and holding particular objects with coded significance in settings of their choosing, thus projecting themselves within a material environment that distilled their sense of their status in the social world. Portraits announced to the world that their subjects were comfortable with who they were, that they had arrived into the bourgeois life and were claiming their place in that world. Richard Brilliant noted the contrast between the ubiquitous lack of overtly Jewish identity in the paintings of American Jews and the strong ties to Jewishness that we know most of the subjects affirmed. The seeming contradiction resolves when we consider that these portraits were almost always hung in the semiprivate quarters of a family home. Anyone who entered, coreligionist or not, knew the Jewish identity of the family. The painting did not need to proclaim the obvious. Instead, portraits served as affirmations of class and of belonging to the larger society even while their commitment to Jewish identity was strong.

Not all portraits of Jews projected high status. Some “portraits” convey the opposite impression. The lithograph of Jewish washerwomen from Izmir (1830) portrays their poverty and drudgery as it conveys their inner dignity, and Delacroix’s painting of his Jewish translator’s wife, Saada, expresses the artist’s orientalist perspective while providing a sense of the circumstances of a North African Jewish woman in her home.