Between Types: a Symbolic Analysis of Simeon Solomon's Hebrew Image

Simeon Solomon (9 October 1840 – 14 August 1905) was a Jewish pre-Raphaelite artist whose life and works demonstrated the supposed difficulties of replicating symbolic patterns between cultures as a Jew. The reception of Simeon Solomon’s symbolic project between the 1850s and 1870s thereby illustrates the ambivalent and contested nature of British Jewish assimilation during and after Jewish emancipation, when Solomon was expected, and failed, to portray a specific Jewish image for his audience. My unique contribution will be to investigate stereotype parameters by analysing the fringes of Solomon’s depictions of Hebraism, through rabbis holding scrolls of the law, Jewish domestic scenes, biblical patriarchs, prophets, and furious sovereigns, to test the assumptions of the British Hebrew stereotype placed upon the artist.

Solomon’s reception varied within that short period as the forces governing the national Hebrew image changed rapidly, especially leading up to Benjamin Disraeli’s second premiership, and following the dissemination of Matthew Arnold’s theories of culture. However, Solomon’s British romantic symbolism has been seen to constitute a hidden homosexuality that was not neatly framed within the expected terms of the Hebrew national image. The rejection of his symbolic project marks the definition of perceived Jewish self-hatred by Sander Gilman: Solomon was seen to be “unable to command the language, discourse, or both, of the world that [he] inhabits”, to articulate the expected symbolism according to his Hebrew stereotype. The ambivalent reaction to Solomon’s romantic symbolism creates boundaries over the image of Hebrew nationhood and demonstrates how he interiorised and represented the contested Christian supersession and conversion fantasies placed upon him. This thesis will therefore look at the fringes of Solomon’s supposed unified Jewish Hebraism to question gendered assumptions of symbolic assimilation.