A Language of Esoteric Signs: Deciphering Jewish and Masonic Gestures in Viennese Expressionism

Herr [Gustav] Klimt indoctrinates Frau [Serena] Lederer into the art of Secessionist painting. This rapprochement between modern art and nouveau-riche Jews, this progress in the art of design, capable of transforming ghettos into affluent quarters, warrants the loveliest of hopes.[1]

—Karl Kraus, Die Fackel (November 1900)

In his dryly sardonic “praise” of Jewish patronage in relation to the then-dominant Secessionist aesthetic, the polemical critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936)—who, not insignificantly, had renounced Judaism one year earlier—implicitly conveys his belief that the Wiener Moderne style was as superficial as the Jewish-owned, Jugendstil homes that populated Vienna at the fin de siècle. Here, Kraus’s words were likely meant to recall those of his close friend, the modern architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933). Loos had argued in April 1900 that the Vienna Secession (which had been formed in 1897) was now synonymous with the Jewish bourgeoisie, whose houses and villas—many of which had, or were, being designed by the Secessionist architect Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867–1908)—constituted a new, commodity-driven, overly curated district in the Austrian capital.[2] Although Kraus’s intent in the epigraph was pejorative, he was not incorrect in his observation that modern artists affiliated with the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops), especially Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), had enjoyed considerable success at the turn of the century thanks to the support of private clients, including Jewish patrons like August and Serena (Szeréna) Lederer (1857–1936; née Pulitzer, 1867–1943) (fig. 1). In recent years, revisionist historians like Steven Beller and Elana Shapira have examined the complex and complicated nuances of daily life for Jews and assimilated Jews in Vienna circa 1900, showing, respectively, that the city was replete with a plethora of paradoxes: namely, that antisemitic prejudices and stereotypes abounded, even as Loos’s and Krauss’s networks attempted to integrate Jewish clients into mainstream Viennese society.[3] These scholars and others have drawn attention, moreover, to the degree to which Klimt (who was not Jewish) was primarily dependent on Jewish patrons after 1905—that is, the period that followed the public controversy surrounding his 1894 government commission to provide three, large-scale paintings for the ceiling of the great hall at the University of Vienna.[4] Known collectively as the Fakultätsbilder (Faculty Paintings, 1900–07), the canvases were publicly ridiculed by government officials, University academicians, and Kraus, the latter of whom proclaimed that Klimt’s first painting, Philosophie (Philosophy, 1900–07), was indicative of the Secession’s goût juif, or “Jewish taste”—a phrase that Kraus repeatedly cited throughout 1900 when referring to Secessionism in the pages of his satirical magazine Die Fackel (The Torch, 1899–1936) (fig. 2).[5]

Medicine (1900–07), the second of the Faculty Paintings, received similarly damning attacks when it was shown at the Secession’s tenth exhibition in March 1901, as did the third painting, Jurisprudence (1903–07).[6] When the Austrian Ministry of Education officially rejected the Faculty Paintings in 1905 at Klimt’s request, the artist made further revisions to all three canvases until 1907, at which point he re-exhibited them in Vienna, then Berlin. The government’s ignominious attitude toward his paintings was not without consequence: Klimt was denied a professorship at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), and consequently abandoned all further state-sponsored projects by 1905, relying instead on private commissions until his death in 1918.[7] Similar to Beller’s and Shapira’s research on fin-de-siècle Jewish patronage, Robert Jensen and Gemma Blackshaw have subsequently analyzed the dynamics of this historical scandal, which became known as the “Klimt Affair” throughout the local press. Their research argues that the artist’s retreat from the limelight provided an opportunity for the next generation of Expressionists—artists like Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), Maximilian “Max” Oppenheimer (called MOPP, 1885–1954), and Egon Schiele (1890–1918)—to successfully emerge as the new, artistic vanguard in the Viennese art market of circa 1909/10.[8]

Unlike his low regard for Klimt and the Secession, Kraus was contrastingly complimentary of the young Expressionists, especially Kokoschka, who joined the “Kraus-Loos-Kokoschka Clique” in 1909.[9] That same year, Kokoschka painted oil portraits of Kraus and Loos, and additionally completed two lithographs in 1910 titled Portrait of Adolf Loos and Portrait of Karl Kraus, both of which were reproduced in the pages of the modernist Berlin magazine Der Sturm (The Storm, 1910–2) (fig. 3). In his analysis of the historical trio, Claude Cernuschi has more recently suggested that “the radicalism of Loos and Kokoschka demarcated [for Kraus] a territory uncontaminated either by the dominant culture or by the inescapable ‘Jewish’ veneer often attached to the Secession.”[10] While the novelty of their modernism certainly appealed to Kraus, especially within the context of the fin-de-siècle Viennese art world, Cernuschi’s assessment does not necessarily highlight the complicated nature of the artist’s, the architect’s, and the critic’s relationship to Viennese Jews. For example, Loos and Kokoschka each profited from the support of numerous patrons—including shared clients—who were Jewish.[11] This reality presented a bit of a conundrum for Loos, given that he reportedly declared to his third wife, Claire Loos (the second Jewish woman he married) that he was “an anti-Semite,” even though his personal and professional life may suggest otherwise.[12] Kokoschka, who did not refer to himself as a xenophobe, openly celebrated his Jewish teachers and patrons, and consequently found favor on both sides of the ethno-religious-cultural divide. His most important Jewish clients included the Viennese writer Peter Altenberg (né Richard Engländer, 1859–1919), the Expressionist poet Albert Ehrenstein (1886–1950), the socialite Lotte Franzos (1881–1957), and the Berlin gallerist Herwarth Walden (né Georg Lewin, 1879–1941), who had founded Der Sturm.[13]

Oppenheimer—the only Expressionist among the three discussed in this essay who was Jewish—likewise completed portraits of Loos and Kraus around 1909/10, and even placed likenesses of the two men in his painting The Deposition (1910), which included representations of other friends and supporters, including Schiele, Altenberg, the celebrated German novelist Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), and the Viennese physician Oskar Reichel (1869–1943).[14] Reichel was an assimilated Jew, and Mann’s first wife (perhaps inconsequentially) was Jewish, even though Mann was not. As I discuss later, Oppenheimer abruptly lost favor with Kraus and Loos in 1911 when Oppenheimer and Kokoschka were engaged in a public feud. It is important to acknowledge, however, that they had initially championed Oppenheimer’s burgeoning career. Similar to Kokoschka and Oppenheimer, Schiele also benefited from a mixture of support from Jewish and non-Jewish clients. Among Schiele’s Jewish collectors, the most significant were the Lederers (who Klimt introduced him to in 1912), Reichel (who Schiele “shared” with Oppenheimer), Hugo and Lili Steiner (1874–1947; née Hoffmann, 1884–1961), Heinrich Rieger (1868–1942), and Alfred Spitzer (1861–1923).

Throughout the complicated and often contradictory cultural milieu that shaped turn-of-the-century Vienna—which included Jewish and non-Jewish artistic patrons who were both friends and combatants, Jewish and non-Jewish artists who were supported by these clients, and the rhetoric surrounding the Secession’s goût juif—Kokoschka, Oppenheimer, and Schiele began to include esoteric hand gestures in their various portraits, including self-portraits (see figs. 3–5, 8–10, 13–17). Deciphering the “secret” language of these signs is the primary aim of this study, in which I argue that the three Expressionists were creating images that incorporated Jewish and Masonic hand gestures in order to “speak” a language of exclusivity, and thus modernity. In so doing, meaning was thus visually communicable between themselves and their sitters, as well as to erudite viewers who were cognizant of these historic “gang signs.” This contention suggests, moreover, that Kokoschka, Oppenheimer, and Schiele had developed a niche lexicon of signs by 1910 based on two separate, yet interconnected, concepts: the mysteries encoded in the gestures of the Freemasons; and an awareness that “talking with one’s hands”—as discussed, for example, by the Austrian-Jewish writer Elisabeth Freundlich (1906–2001)—persisted as a cultural stereotype of Jews in fin-de-siècle Vienna.[15] Importantly, the Expressionists laid claim to these Jewish and Masonic gestures at a moment when the search for “greater truths” was key to their avant-garde agendas, and when Kraus—for better or for worse—had already associated the Secession-led art market with a “Jewish taste.” Beyond Kraus’s assessment, however, these burgeoning artists saw firsthand the benefits of being supported by those who had formed the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte (created in 1903), regardless of their sociocultural, ethnic, or religious identities. The Workshops, which were principally funded by the Jewish entrepreneur Friedrich “Fritz” Waerndorfer (1868–1939), had, after all, produced Kokoschka’s “breakout” piece—his illustrated book Die Träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Youths, 1908)—and had also employed Kokoschka, Oppenheimer, and Schiele on various projects throughout the early twentieth century.[16]

The present essay endeavors to specifically demonstrate that each of these artists (though, as I will show, Oppenheimer and Schiele were more prolific in this arena than Kokoschka) worked in tandem to create an expressive language that iconographically referenced two very specific hand gestures. The first drew upon the Jewish symbology of the Nesi’at Kapayim, or “raising of the hands,” which is still enacted today as part of the Aaronic priestly blessing known as the Birkat Kohanim (ברכת כהנים in Hebrew; see fig. 6). During this benediction, a Kohen (or Jewish priest) invokes the Hebrew letter Shin (ש) by forming his or her fingers into the telltale “W” sign (the thumb serves as one side of the letter), thus drawing a visual reference to the Hebraic word for Shaddai, or “God Almighty.” The second gesture—the Masonic upside-down “M” sign, which also resembles the Shin—was historically used by secular and religious Freemasons to show members that they too were part of the secret fraternity (fig. 7). The “M” gesture, in turn, conceivably developed from the Kabbalah—the ancient source of Judaic mysticism and esoteric teachings—given that the origins and “secrets” of Freemasonry were already connected to Judaism by the time the society was officially formed in the eighteenth century.[17]

It should be noted, moreover, that Freemasonry (Freimaurer in German) was not a practice autonomous from the Jewish Kabbalah, the fifteenth-century Judeo-Christian Kabbalah, or even non-Kabbalistic Jewish texts and ancient traditions. Rather, a Masonic version of the (Jewish) Kabbalah had been established by the time the First Grand Lodge was founded in 1717 in London, and was consequently accessible to practitioners when lodges opened across Central Europe and the Russian Empire in the mid-1700s.[18] This phenomenon led David Rosenberg, a nineteenth-century Kabbalist scholar, Hungarian rabbi, and Masonic Templar, to conclude in 1842 that it would be “an error to suppose that Masonry has come down to us from the Egyptians, while, on the contrary, its true source takes its rise from the Hebrews” (Rosenberg, “Explanation,” 29). The fact that Jews were allowed to become Freemasons at a time when other European institutions, clubs, and societies were not admitting Jews, is culturally significant, for it demonstrates that tangible, social conduits existed between Jewish traditions, Masonic practices, and other non-Jewish fraternities by the second decade of the twentieth century.[19] A review of the history of Austrian Freemasonry and fin-de-siècle Viennese print culture additionally reveals that the ritualistic Shin and “M” signs were both present in Vienna during the celebrated Wiener Moderne period, and were therefore available to Kokoschka, Schiele, and Oppenheimer, the last of whom was reportedly a Viennese Mason by 1919, if not earlier.[20] What follows, then, is an account of these symbolic hand gestures and the manner in which these esoteric signs were supplanted by the three Expressionists to “speak” a language of exclusivity to erudite viewers, many of who were already supporting artists affiliated with the Secession’s goût juif.

Austrian Jews, Le Goût Juif, and Freemasonry in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

When, in 2006, art historian Gemma Blackshaw observed that “the centrality of Jews—whether practicing, recently converted to Christianity, or konfessionslos [secular]—to Viennese fin-de-siècle culture, and the impact of an all-pervasive antisemitism on their self-definition, has been convincingly stressed in Vienna studies,” the studies to which she was referring are those indebted to Beller’s historical revisionism.[21] Writing in the late 1980s as a rebuttal to Carl E. Schorske’s canonical book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1979), Beller sought to correct Schorske’s hypothesis that Viennese modernism developed out of a class-based crisis of political liberalism.[22] Instead, Beller drew attention to the various “Jewish dimensions” of modernity that permeated the Austrian capital, observing that over seventy percent of the city’s small upper-middle class was Jewish during the first decade of the twentieth century. As a result, the majority of the bourgeoisie—including non-Jews—were subsequently “affected by being part of the Jewish assimilation” (Beller Vienna and the Jews, 13). These statistics are quite remarkable considering that Austrian Jews comprised only nine percent of the city’s total population in 1900—and the majority of these Jewish families were from the lower and middle classes, not the bourgeoisie. The fact that Vienna’s upper-middle class was largely comprised of wealthy Jews subsequently led Beller to conjecture that any upper-middle-class family living in the Austrian capital at the turn of the century would have been part of “an almost monopolized Jewish experience.”[23] Beller’s contention is supported by the fact that, prior to World War I, Vienna boasted over seventy synagogues and Jewish prayer houses combined, compared to the solitary synagogue that survived the World War II.[24] This insight additionally suggests that fin-de-siècle Viennese art was inextricably “affected” (to use Beller’s word), or “indoctrinated” (to use Kraus’s word from the epigraph), by the Jewish bourgeois majority.[25] Beller concludes, nevertheless, that for however central Jews were to fin-de-siècle Viennese society, they were still regarded as “exotic” outsiders, or cultural Others, by the Austrian (Christian) status quo.[26]

Building on Beller’s findings, art historian Kimberly A. Smith has subsequently clarified that:

the Jewish presence in Viennese art differed from Jewish involvement in other areas of culture. In contrast to the realms of literature, psychology, philosophy, and music, in which Jews were often the producers of new developments, the main movements in modern art were not created but supported by Jews.[27] (Smith, “The Tactics of Fashion,” 137)

Oppenheimer is a notable exception here, though it was principally Klimt and non-Jewish artists affiliated with the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte who benefitted from Jewish patronage.[28] In his 1971 autobiography, Kokoschka corroborates this contention, stating:

Most of my sitters were Jews. They felt less secure than the rest of the Viennese Establishment, and were consequently more open to the new and more sensitive to the tensions and pressures that accompanied the decay of the old order.[29]

As previously stated, Klimt’s career was benefited by numerous Jewish patrons and promoters, both before and after the debacle with the Faculty Paintings. For example, Serena Lederer had commissioned Klimt to paint her portrait in 1899 (fig. 1), and her husband August—a prominent industrialist and well-known Jewish community leader—had purchased Philosophy (fig. 2) in 1907. The Lederers were the second richest family in Austria by the early 1900s, and each had spent a portion of their considerable wealth patronizing contemporary artists, including Klimt and Schiele.[30] August later acquired Klimt’s The Beethoven Frieze (1902) in 1915 from Carl Reininghaus (1857–1929), who, at that time, was one of Schiele’s major non-Jewish patrons.[31] Medicine and Jurisprudence were purchased in 1911 by the (non-Jewish) Jugendstil artist Koloman Moser (1868–1918), who, in 1897, had formed the Secession with Klimt and others, and who, in 1905, had married Editha Mautner von Markhof, a fellow artist from a wealthy assimilated Viennese Jewish family.[32] Similar to their acquisition of The Beethoven Frieze, the Lederers eventually purchased Jurisprudence from the Mosers in 1938. Like the Lederers and the Mosers, the celebrated cultural critic and theater director Hermann Bahr (1863–1934, who was not Jewish), the writer Ludwig Hevesi (1843–1910; born Lajos Löwy to Jewish Hungarian parents), and the journalist Berta Zuckerkandl (1864–1945; née Bertha Szeps to Galician Jewish parents) rallied behind Klimt during the much-publicized controversy, and it is thanks to their documentation of the diatribe surrounding the “Klimt Affair” that the details of the saga are known today.[33] Sadly, all three of the Faculty Paintings were confiscated by the Nazis in 1943, and subsequently burned by retreating SS troops in 1945.

Returning once more to Kraus, it was he, after all, who had argued in May 1900 that one of the chief problems with le gôut juif and Sezessionstil was the inherent valorization of “art for art’s sake” over the promotion of ethical/moral art (Kraus, Die Fackel 2, no. 41, 22). Even more interesting is the fact that Kraus had been raised in an affluent Jewish family, but renounced Judaism the same year he formed Die Fackel, which had quickly become the primary outlet for his (and his followers’) incessant attacks on the “immoral” art of Klimt and the Secession.[34] One fellow detractor of Klimt’s Philosophy analogously published an anonymous critique in the May 1900 issue of the Deutsches Volksblatt (German People’s Paper), stating that the canvas was a blatant example of “Jewish effrontery” that had become a “poison to the population” (Bahr, Gegen Klimt, 36).[35] The prevalence of these latent and blatant antisemitic attitudes in the fin-de-siècle Viennese press led Blackshaw to more recently conjecture that the young Austrian artist Richard Gerstl (1883–1908), who came from a “mixed” Jewish family, may have deliberately distanced himself from Klimt and the Secession precisely because Kraus and his interlocutors were so negatively—and unabashedly—aligning Klimt’s orbit with le gôut juif.[36]

For conservative Austrian critics—especially Catholics who may or may not have been antisemites—Freemasons, and their association with the “Otherness” of Judaism and the Kabbalah, were similarly regarded as outliers to mainstream Austrian culture. The first Viennese Masons reportedly began practicing in the city three years after Pope Clement XII (1652–1740) officially condemned Freemasonry and forbade all Catholics from joining the Order. Despite the papal bull, Count Albrecht Joseph Hoditz (1706–78) infamously opened Aux Trois Canons (Three Cannons Lodge) in 1741.[37] Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80), a staunch Catholic, closed Three Cannons in 1742, but it is known that her husband Francis I (1708–65) was admitted as a Freemason at the Hague in 1731, and as such, members of Vienna’s Aux Trois Canons were “permitted” to meet in secret without persecution.[38] Additional Viennese lodges were formed between 1754 and 1783, and in 1784 the National Grand Lodge was established under the auspices of Emperor Joseph II (1741–90) who succeeded his mother, Maria Theresa, as ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.[39] Francis II (1768–1835)—Joseph II’s nephew and the first Emperor of Austria (reign: 1804–35)—was contrastingly distrustful of the “secretive” Masons, and officially banned all lodges by imperial edict in 1795; this notwithstanding, a few clubs enjoyed brief resumptions in 1805, and from 1809 to 1812, when the city was occupied by the French. These revivalist periods aside, Viennese lodges remained illegal societies throughout the nineteenth century and, following the conclusion of the Austro-Prussian Civil War (which formed the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867), Austrian lodges did not reopen as they had in neighboring Hungary. Rather, Viennese Masons could only officially meet across national borders until the formation of the Grand Lodge of Vienna in 1918 (Gould, A Concise History of Freemasonry, 377–78). Prior to 1918, “border lodges” (or Grenzlogen) were established in Hungary, while affiliated associations were created in Vienna as non-political, humanitarian organizations. These included the Viennese Humanitas Association (1869)—which later became Humanitas Border Lodge in Hungary in 1871—followed by the Future Lodge/Association, Socrates Lodge/Association and Pioneer Lodge/Association in 1874, and Kosmos Lodge/Association in 1907.

Throughout much of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918), the Viennese Masonic magazine Der Zirkel (The Compass, 1871–1919) circulated in and around Austria, despite the national ban on Freemasonry. The Compass, the title of which derived from the draftsman’s compass in the Masonic emblem, was the brainchild of Franz Julius Schneeberger (1827–92), who served as the magazine’s founding editor.[40] Moritz Amster (pseudonym Moritz von Buchland, 1831–1903) and Heinrich Glücksmann (1864–1947) followed Schneeberger as editors of The Compass, and it is not insignificant that all three of these men were Jewish Masons.[41] In fact, many of the Austrian Freemasons leading up to the turn of the century were, according to historian Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Jewish businessmen and merchants.[42] Hoffmann’s argument is corroborated in a letter by Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria (1858–89) sent on January 13, 1883 to his friend and confidant, the Jewish political journalist and newspaper owner Moriz Szeps (1835–1902), who was, incidentally, Berta Zuckerkandl’s father. In his correspondence, Rudolf—who was writing to Szeps from Prague—noted that Jews “now outnumber” Christian members in Masonic lodges throughout the empire.[43] More recently, Peter Lanchidi has investigated the special relationship between Judaism and nineteenth-century Freemasonry, arguing that “Jewish Kabbalah could not only provide legitimacy for Jews to become full-right members of Masonic lodges, but also could offer respectability and pride on a personal level” Lanchidi, “Between Judaism and Freemasonry,” 198). Lanchidi’s assertions possibly clarify why the Expressionists would have adopted and then transferred the exclusivity of Masonic-Kabbalistic signs onto the hands of their erudite Jewish and non-Jewish sitters, all of whom moved within, or around, the “Jewish” art scene that constituted fin-de-siècle Vienna.

To this latter point, both Bahr and Hugo Heller (1870–1923), each of whom championed new modes of Viennese art in the early 1900s, were members of the Masonic Order.[44] Bahr, who was not Jewish, was a life-long defender of Klimt and an enthusiastic advocate of the Expressionist style, which he praised in his book Der Expressionismus (Expressionism, completed in 1914, published in 1916).[45] Heller was a prominent Jewish publisher and art gallerist, whose celebrated bookstore at Nr. 3 Bauernmarkt in Vienna’s historic Innere Stadt hosted readings and salon-style gatherings with illustrious intellectuals like Altenberg, Mann, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), and Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951). Within this abbreviated list of individuals, Altenberg, Freud, Schnitzler, and Schönberg were all from Jewish families, and von Hofmannsthal’s paternal grandfather was an assimilated Jew. Schönberg—who had been a member of the Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group, 1909–12) with Kokoschka, Oppenheimer, and Schiele—had, however, converted to Christianity in 1898, in part to distance himself from increasing attacks by antisemites.[46] The fact that a number of these prominent Jews and acculturated Jews were part and parcel to the development of artistic, literary, and medical modernism(s) in fin-de-siècle Vienna, returns us to the notion that artists wishing to attract attention to their style by creating a visual language that could speak to the “chosen” few, would have been shrewd to employ the Shin and the “M” signs in their respective artworks.
 

Talking Hands: Locating Iconographic Sources for the Shin and “M” Signs

Prior to their exploration of esoteric gestures in painted form, all three Expressionists had received formal artistic training: Oppenheimer and Schiele had both attended the illustrious Academy of Fine Arts Vienna—Oppenheimer from 1900 to 1903, Schiele from 1906 to 1909—and Kokoschka completed his studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule (now the University of Applied Arts Vienna). In 1909, Oppenheimer, Schiele, and a few of their classmates broke from the Academy’s “conservatism” to form the short-lived Neukunstgruppe, which, as the name implied, aspired to be a twentieth-century Secession.[47] As founding members of the group, Oppenheimer and Schiele were already friends by 1909, and shared a studio in Vienna the following year. Kokoschka later joined the Neukunstgruppe, but following the success of Oppenheimer’s first solo exhibition in 1911 at the Moderne Galerie Thannhauser in Munich, he (jealously) accused Oppenheimer of plagiarism and, with the considerable influence of Kraus, Loos, and Herwarth Walden behind him, lambasted Oppenheimer in the Berlin and Viennese presses.[48] Equally envious of Schiele’s growing reputation in the Germanic art world, Kokoschka distanced himself from the Expressionist “triumvirate” by 1911/12, settling instead with the Kraus-Loos-Kokoschka Clique. By contrast, Oppenheimer and Schiele remained close allies, and completed portraits of one another in 1910/11, nearly all of which incorporate esoteric hand or finger gestures, especially Oppenheimer’s portrait of Schiele, which showcases both the Shin and “M” signs (figs. 8–9).

Given the ubiquity of these gestures in their paintings, and considering the fact that these signs have been of interest to critics for over a century, it is significant that no scholar has suggested that they may have been constructed to speak a language of modernity through Masonic-Kabbalistic symbology. By contrast, art historians have been somewhat reticent to ascribe conclusive meanings to the iconography or semiotics of gestures that appear in Schiele’s oeuvre, specifically. For example, both Itzhak Goldberg and Patrick Werkner have argued, respectively, that it would be an impractical undertaking to assign any definitive interpretation to the artist’s hand signs. Werkner, in particular, states:

the expressive features of the face and the attitude of the hands become the transmitters of a body language, in the stylization of which a large number of recurrent form motifs are to be observed. However to try to extract from this a canon of symbols that may be used to interpret Schiele’s paintings would seem to lead us in the wrong direction.[49]

Akin to Werkner’s assessment, Goldberg similarly posits that this new body language “played an often-incomprehensible role” in the history of Viennese Expressionism.[50]

Johann Thomas Ambrózy is one notable exception within the secondary literature on Schiele, given that he (like myself) argues that finger gestures in Schiele’s paintings carry decisive meanings. More precisely, Ambrózy contends that the “V-gesture” in Schiele’s Die Eremiten (The Hermits, 1912, fig. 10), which should not be confused with the W-shaped Shin, or the upside-down “M” sign, reinforces the artist’s interest in “historical, religious art,” especially the V-shaped gesture in the Mosaic of Christ Pantocrator in the Church of the Holy Savior in Chora (now Istanbul, Turkey).[51] While the majority of Schiele scholars have argued that the two figures in The Hermits represent Schiele (left) and Klimt (right), Ambrózy alternatively asserts that the bearded figure was a likeness of Schiele’s deceased father, Adolf Eugen Schiele, who succumbed to syphilis in 1904/05 (Ambrózy, “Das Geheimnis der ‘Eremiten,’” 23). This contention is imperative to Ambrózy’s thesis, given that he believes the V-gesture was meant as an allegorical reference to Adolf’s Evangelisch (that is, Lutheran/Protestant) faith, and thus to Martin Luther’s larger protest against the hypocrisy of Catholicism during the Reformation. Ambrózy thus reads the “M” not as a Masonic sign, but rather as the double V-gesture found on numerous statues of Luther throughout Germany (33–34). In end effect, Ambrózy’s thought-provoking analysis of The Hermits posits that Schiele’s esoteric signs should be read as “religious,” just not Jewish or Masonic-Kabbalistic.

Even though my overall argument differs from Ambrózy’s claims, I am particularly drawn to the assertion that Schiele’s double V-gesture (that is, the “M” sign) may have carried anti-Catholic connotations. Such sentiments would have ostensibly appealed to the artist’s interest in the exclusivity of “forbidden” Freemasonry in Catholic Austria. In line with this assertion, the “renegade” Schiele had notoriously been arrested in April 1912 on indecency charges, which claimed that his “immoral” art (and behavior) had endangered conservative (Catholic) life in the village of Neulengbach, where he was then living with his lover, Wally Neuzil (1894–1917).[52] Three years after his imprisonment, Schiele married Edith Harms (1893–1918), a middle-class Protestant woman. Collectively, then, the Freemason’s Kabbalistic “brand” of spiritualism, his arrest, and his wife’s and father’s shared Protestantism may have provided Schiele with a language of protest against the status quo (that is, Catholicism)—an outlook that he likely held even prior to his incarceration, or non-Catholic marriage.

In terms of firsthand knowledge, Oppenheimer may have been the catalyst behind the initial appearance of these specific gestures in Viennese Expressionist art, given that he (unlike Kokoschka or Schiele) could have readily observed the Nesi’at Kapayim during Shabbat services, and then introduced the Shin to Schiele and Kokoschka when the three men were still on speaking terms. The fact that Kokoschka ostensibly produced only one image that showcases a modified Shin or “M” gesture—made in 1910, and thus prior to his departure from the Oppenheimer-Schiele dyad—seems to corroborate this theory (fig. 3). Given that Kokoschka’s portrait is that of Kraus, it may also stand to reason that Kokoschka was visually confronting the Jewish stereotype of “talking with one’s hands” by having the assimilated Kraus “speak” a new language through the lithograph. If this were the case, then there may be an intriguing double entendre at play in Kokoschka’s print, for Kraus had repeatedly staked his career on his ability to communicate precisely—and clearly—in the German language, even though he was often misunderstood and misquoted by his readers and detractors, who he accused, in turn, of perpetuating convoluted prose.[53] Perhaps Kokoschka was therefore illustrating the idea that while he and Kraus knew what the critic was saying with his hands, their general viewership was too ignorant to grasp the precise meaning of Kraus’s esoteric “words.” An implicit irony might also have been conveyed to Kokoschka’s viewers, especially those who were already familiar with contemporary theater feuilletons penned by Kraus prior to 1910. In these reviews, the critic argued vehemently that an actor’s use of dramatic gestures should be confined to stage plays (or Bühnendramen, like vaudeville theater, or performances by traveling acting troupes), while serious literary dramas (Buchdramen) should avoid superficial gestures in order to give primacy to acoustic effects, such as to the actor’s voice and, by extension, the playwright’s written word.[54] This explains why, in 1916, Kraus formed his own Theater der Dichtung (Theater of Literature), in which he gave public readings of “true” literary dramas by William Shakespeare and Johann Nestroy, which he believed had been mishandled by modernist directors, choreographers, and costume designers at the new Viennese Burgtheater (National Theater).[55]

Returning to Oppenheimer, it must be noted that it is not known if he actively attended temple or Masonic meetings, as no extant evidence exists to corroborate whether or not he had firsthand knowledge of how these signs were being performed in actual ceremonies. The answer to this historical question is, however, largely immaterial given that iconographic sources for the Shin and “M” signs were readily available to the Expressionists by 1909/10. The best-known of these printed images were lithographs by Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874–1925), a successful Austro-Hungarian Jewish illustrator at the fin de siècle. Lilien’s Jugendstil images had been embraced by the Vienna Secession in the late-nineteenth century, and subsequently appeared in the August 1899 volume of Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring, 1898–1903), the Secession’s monthly journal.[56] During his period, Lilien likewise created a number of Zionist illustrations of the Nesi’at Kapayim between 1902 and 1912, including his Vorsetzblatt mit Birkat Kohanim (Flyleaf with Birkat Kohanim), which appeared in the 1902 German edition of Morris Rosenfeld’s Lieder des Ghetto (Songs from the Ghetto, originally published in Yiddish in 1898) (fig. 6).[57] Lilien had also collaborated with the (non-Jewish) German poet Börries Freiherr von Münchausen on an illustrated book of Jewish poems, simply titled Juda (1900).

Following the success of these two book projects, Lilien embarked on his own collection of biblical imagery, which resulted in three volumes collectively known as Die Bücher der Bibel (The Books of the Bible, 1908–12). According to Lilien scholar Lynne Swarts, these biblical illustrations were specifically marketed throughout the early twentieth century to Jews and non-Jews alike, and were popular among religious and secular viewers, especially those interested in artistic and literary modernism (Swarts, Gender, Orientalism and the Jewish Nation, 137–89). Although Lilien never studied or lived in Vienna, the German edition of Songs from the Ghetto had been printed by the Berlin- and Vienna-based publisher Benjamin Harz, so copies were readily accessible throughout the Austrian capital by 1902. It is also known that Hugo Heller mounted an exhibition of Lilien’s prints in September 1909 at his bookstore/art gallery, where works by Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele were later shown. As such, it is highly likely that the Expressionists saw Lilien’s illustrations hanging on the walls of Hugo Heller & Co. in the autumn of 1909, and thus just prior to their own exploration of the Shin gesture in their respective works.[58]

During this period, Lilien did not only produce images of the Nesi’at Kapayim, but similarly created lithographs that showcase the “M” sign. This gesture features most prominently in Der jüdische Mai (Jewish May, 1902) from Songs from the Ghetto, but was additionally present in Juda and The Books of the Bible (fig. 11). In Jewish May, the “M” sign is noticeable on both of the subject’s hands, which he raises toward the city of Zion and a yet-to-be established Judenstaat (Jewish State). Yigal Zalmona has recently noted that Lilien may have become a Freemason around this time, given that he had received a commission in 1904 to design stained glass windows for the B’nai Brith Masonic Lodge in Hamburg, Germany, and was consequently attracted to the fraternity’s long history of accepting Jews.[59] It is therefore plausible that Lilien learned of the Masonic use of the “M” gesture while in Hamburg, despite having already equated this sign with Jewish mysticism and Zionism in Juda and Songs from the Ghetto.

Although Masonic hand gestures were initially intended to serve as secretive, historic “gang signs,” some of these esoteric gestures circulated openly throughout European visual culture in the early twentieth century. This point is best illustrated alongside a satirical British postcard from 1908, which depicts a caricature of a Mason displaying the upside-down “M” on his right hand (fig. 7). It is unclear, however, if the card was meant to function as a recruitment tool, or to conversely serve as a parodic indictment of the Masons’ not-so-secret signs. Regardless of its purpose, such ephemera does attest to the fact that Lilien’s work was not the only print culture available to modernists, but instead, one of several visual sources accessible to the young Expressionists. In other words, even if these artists had never personally witnessed these gestures performed in real life by Jewish individuals, practitioners of Freemasonry, or members of both groups – such as Heller – it is alternatively conceivable that printed sources served as the iconographic inspiration for the Expressionist Shin and “M” signs.

My desire to trace the ubiquity of Jewish and Masonic-Kabbalistic gestures in Lilien’s non-Expressionist works at the fin de siècle helps to establish an alternative avenue by which these signs may have entered the Viennese art world of circa 1910. That having been said, it is additionally conceivable that the Expressionists were looking farther back into the history of art, especially to devotional Christian imagery, as previously posited by Ambrózy in relation to The Hermits. Akin to Ambrózy’s examination of the V-gesture in Schiele’s painting, Davide Lazzeri, Fabio Nicoli, and Yi Xin Zhang have similarly examined the historiography of the “M” sign in Old Master paintings. In their review of the literature, they investigate a number of interpretations, including Ralph Oppenhejm’s belief that the “M” served as a secret gesture among crypto-Jews (called Marranos) in sixteenth-century Spain, as well as the contention that this gesture was an enigmatic sign for “Masonic membership” and “ occult secrets.”[60] Lazzeri, Nicoli, and Zhang readily dismiss these claims, including the idea that the “M” symbolized Satanism, or was specifically invented as an emblem for the Italian De’ Medici family and their inner circle. One this latter point, however, one might consider the striking use of the gesture in Portrait of a Young Man (1530s, fig. 12) by the Italian Renaissance artist Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano, called Bronzino. Lazzeri, Nicoli, and Zhang conclude (rather disappointingly) that “several members of the Renaissance and later movements used this unnatural depiction of the fingers following an artistic trend . . . [yet it] should be considered an artistic device or a symbolic hallmark without any conveyed meaning” (Lazzeri, Nicoli, and Zhang, “Secret Hand Gestures in Paintings,” 532). As such, their findings essentially parallel Goldberg’s and Werkner’s assertions that Schiele’s painted signs are “transmitters of a body language” that confounds the viewer who seeks answers where none can be found.

In contrast to these contemporary assessments of hand gestures in Renaissance or Expressionist works, the Viennese artist and writer Albert Paris von Gütersloh (1887–1973)—who was also a member of the Neukunstgruppe, and whose portrait Schiele painted in 1918 with Shin-like hand gestures—postulated in 1911 that Schiele’s early paintings were deliberately constructed around the artist’s interest in semiology. Gütersloh wrote: “alongside one sense of . . . a figure, a line, or a gesture, lies another deeper meaning like a cipher or a system of symbols.”[61] Even though Gütersloh did not offer a legend to decode Schiele’s cipher, he did postulate that the “grotesque” bodies in Schiele’s portraits and self-portraits might be explained through the artist’s firsthand “knowledge of pathological nomenclature” (Gütersloh, Egon Schiele, 4). Gütersloh was likely referring to the fact that, in 1910, Schiele had befriended Dr. Erwin von Graff, a medical doctor and gynecologist, who allowed the young artist to sketch female patients at the University of Vienna’s Frauenklinik (Women’s Clinic) (Blackshaw, “The Pathological Body,” 392). Building upon Gütersloh’s enigmatic words regarding sign systems in Schiele’s paintings, I have previously argued that bodies and hands in paintings by Kokoschka and Schiele might be situated within the language of “hystero-theatrical gestures,” or the manifestation of theatrical movements inspired by clinically hysterical bodies, which were then adopted by Austrian artists as markers of modernity (Timpano, Constructing the Viennese Modern Body, 4). The use of these gestures, in turn, was meant to visually codify the new, modern body—that is, the “pathological” body—which was being constructed through an expressive language of signs. Building upon these findings, which, incidentally, examine the pathological body alongside antisemitic notions of the Jewish body in turn-of-the-century Vienna, I want to now turn to specific case studies by Oppenheimer and Schiele that incorporate the Shin and “M” gestures. Because the sheer volume of such images is too extensive to reproduce in the pages of this essay—especially among Schiele’s self-portraits—I am limiting my investigation to an abbreviated selection of artworks. The curious reader will, nevertheless, identify countless more.

Signs of the Time, or A Language of Modernity

Despite the antisemitism that permeated fin-de-siècle Viennese culture, Kimberly Smith’s previous assurances that Jews were still the major patrons of the visual arts in the early twentieth century appears to offer the first clue as to why the Expressionists, particularly Oppenheimer and Schiele, incorporated Jewish and Masonic symbology into their portraits. Unlike Gerstl, who sought to distance himself from any further antisemitic slander, Oppenheimer and Schiele may have conversely adopted Jewish and Masonic-Kabbalist gestures in order to intentionally subvert antisemitic rhetoric and stereotypes in the hopes that these signs might speak a secret language of modernity to their sitters, their supporters, or one another. Given the exclusivity of these gestures within Freemasonry, and their specificity within Jewish Kabbalah, it stands to reason that these signs would have served this clandestine purpose nicely. It also stands to reason that the Jewish stereotype of “talking with one’s hands” would have been known to Viennese Jews, acculturated Jews, and non-Jews alike, and thus common ground for establishing an esoteric language that reached beyond religious, ethnic, and cultural boundaries.

With these notions in mind, let us consider a number of visual examples, beginning with Oppenheimer’s Franz Blei (1910–11, fig. 4). The non-Jewish sitter, Franz Blei (1871–1942), rose to prominence as part of Vienna’s notable literati by the early 1900s. During his lifetime, Blei served as a critic, translator, and publisher, and infamously edited the pseudo-pornographic journals Die Opale (Opals, 1905–06, printed in Leipzig) and Der Amethyst (Amethyst, 1907, published in Vienna), which regularly reproduced erotic poems and illustrations.[62] Despite Blei’s sometimes prejudicial treatment of Polish Jews in his writings, he became a fervent and early supporter of the Jewish Bohemian writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924), whose works Blei first published in 1908.[63] During this period, Oppenheimer began work on the non-commissioned portrait of Blei, finishing the canvas during the winter of 1910/11.[64] The painting was subsequently displayed in Oppenheimer’s 1911 Munich retrospective.[65] The catalog for the exhibition indicates that the work was still in Oppenheimer’s possession at the time, so one can only presume that the artist created the portrait as a tribute to Blei’s support of modern art and literature, or was hoping the editor would eventually acquire the painting for his private collection. Regardless of Oppenheimer’s intentions, he purposefully supplanted the “M” sign on Blei’s right hand, despite Blei being neither a Mason, nor a Jew.[66] This apparent conundrum may suggest that the “M” sign (and, for that matter, the Shin gesture) had, by 1911, come to symbolize a language of modernity that was merely informed by Jewish and Masonic symbology, but was not necessarily meant to supplant the original meaning of these gestures onto the body of the respective sitter.

The success of the Munich retrospective was due, in large part, to the generosity of Oskar Reichel, who had lent nearly half of the exhibition’s works to Thannhauser’s gallery (Michel, Max Oppenheimer, 53). Among the paintings borrowed from Reichel’s personal collection were Oppenheimer’s Heinrich Mann (1910) and Mutter und Sohn (Mother and Son (Malwine and Raimund Reichel), 1911) (53, fig. 13, fig. 14).[67] Before delving into an exegesis of these two works, it is interesting to note that Reichel, Oppenheimer, Mann, and Blei were all acquaintances, if not friends, by 1910. Mann, like Reichel, was one of Oppenheimer’s earliest supporters, and the latter three men were regular contributors to Franz Pfemfert’s Berlin magazine Die Aktion (The Action, 1911–32), which had published Schiele’s Neukunstgruppe manifesto in 1914.[68] As previously mentioned, Reichel was an acculturated Jew, Pfemfert (1879–1954) was Jewish, and, in 1914, Mann had married his first wife, the Jewish Czech actress Maria “Mimi” Kanová (1886–1947).[69] In 1905, Heinrich’s younger brother—the celebrated German novelist Thomas Mann (1875–1955)—had similarly married an assimilated Jew, Katia Pringsheim (1883–1980), who came from a wealthy and secular German-Jewish family.[70] The Mann brothers’ marital connections to Judaism had, moreover, attracted the attention of the antisemitic literary critic Adolf Bartels (1862–1945), who, in 1907, argued that they were “likely” Jews themselves, given that their decadent texts were “essentially Jewish,” that they had both married Jewish women, and that one could not disprove that their German-Brazilian mother was not at least partially Black or Jewish.[71] Like Thomas, Heinrich was also a novelist who focused on social and political allegories, such as those explored in his novels Der Untertan (The Patrioteer; also Man of Straw, 1905) and Professor Unrat (The Blue Angel, 1905), which exposed the ills of fascism and antisemitism in German culture prior to the rise of National Socialism. It was Bartels’s dislike of these works, and others, that likely contributed to his persistent falsehoods about the Manns’ “questionable” genetics and “Jewishness,” despite their repeated, published remarks to the contrary.[72]

Bartels also derided Oppenheimer alongside the Mann brothers, stating in one review published on January 1, 1913 that: “Thomas Mann’s portrait etching by Max Oppenheimer (an assimilated, racial-Jew) in Cassirer’s Gallery says it all: here is a Jew; Jewish marks very clearly trace the half-breed’s face.”[73] As a brief aside, it is worth noting that Paul Cassirer (1871–1926) was another prominent and pivotal German-Jewish art dealer and modern art promoter in early twentieth century Berlin, who was similarly (and regularly) condemned by Bartels’s pen. Given that the critic was attacking both Oppenheimer and the Manns for being Jews, it is not farfetched to presume that Oppenheimer could have “marked” the non-Jewish body in Heinrich Mann with the Shin gesture to call attention to the fact that Mann was an outspoken detractor of totalitarianism and xenophobia, as well as an intellectual gentile familiar with Jewish traditions. Likewise, in Mother and Son, which was commissioned by the Reichel family, Malwine’s hands conspicuously form two modified “M” signs that join in the middle of the composition to envelope (perhaps even protect) the body of her young son. The joining of her middle three fingers is so conspicuous that it is nearly impossible to imagine that these forms were not deliberately constructed by the artist to convey some hidden meaning. As such, Malwine’s hands “speak” these secrets, since her mouth—which is largely obscured by her son’s profile—cannot.

When these paintings by Oppenheimer are compared to Schiele’s portraits of Jews and assimilated Jews, particularly Bildnis Erich Lederer (Portrait of Erich Lederer, 1912), the lexicon of their esoteric, Expressionistic signs is, I believe, more fully realized (fig. 5). For example, the left hand in Portrait of Erich Lederer shares strong affinities with the “M” signs in Oppenheimer’s Franz Blei, The Painter Egon Schiele, and Mother and Son (Malwine and Raymond Reichel) (fig. 4, fig. 8, fig, 14). Schiele had been introduced to Reichel through his friend and promoter, the writer Arthur Roessler (1877–1955), but it was Klimt who connected Schiele with the Lederers. Both relationships proved fruitful for the young Expressionist, who sold numerous paintings to Reichel via Roessler, and who completed more than twenty portraits of the Lederer family, including several images of Erich Lederer (1896–1985), the eldest son of August and Serena.[74] Erich eventually became a patron to Schiele in his own right, though it was his parents who first commissioned the artist in December 1912 to paint their fifteen-year-old son at their estate in Györ, Hungary (Kallir, “Patronage and Portraiture,” 75).[75] Schiele finished the portrait in January 1913, but dated the work “1912,” during which time he also completed a number of sketches and drawings of the young Lederer.

The three-quarters pose and hand gesture in Schiele’s Portrait of Erich Lederer also strongly resemble those in Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man, so it is interesting to wonder if it was Schiele, or the Lederers who decided to stress the “M” sign in Erich’s portrait, particularly since the Lederers would have been aware of Schiele’s penchant for the Shin and “M” gestures in his earlier self-portraits: works like The Hermits, Die Selbstseher (The Self-Seers I, 1910), Kniender männlicher Akt mit erhobenen Händen (Selbstbildnis) (Male Nude Kneeling with Raised Hands (Self-Portrait), 1910), Selbstbildnis mit gespreizten Fingern (Self-Portrait with Splayed Fingers, 1911), and Selbstbildnis mit schwarzem Tongefäss und gespreizten Fingern (Self-Portrait with Black Clay Vase and Spread Fingers, 1911) (fig. 12, fig. 10, fig. 15). Often regarded as an important early canvas, Self-Portrait with Black Clay Vase and Spread Fingers is another prime example of a painting of a non-Jewish, non-Masonic sitter that prominently displays a Jewish ritualistic hand gesture—a device that visually affirms Schiele’s self-interest in marking his own body as the purveyor of a special language of signs. The simple fact that additional, non-commissioned paintings by Schiele that incorporate the “M” and Shin signs were being acquired at this moment by the Lederers, Reichel, and others, affirms the idea that Schiele, like Oppenheimer, was utilizing esoteric gestures as a means of communicating modernity to his erudite viewers.[76]

As a final case study, I want to consider a photograph of Schiele taken in 1914 by the non-Jewish, Austrian-born Czech photographer Anton Josef Trčka (pseudonym “Antios,” 1893–1940) (fig. 16). In the image, Schiele poses in front of his large-scale canvas titled Begegnung (Selbstbildnis mit der Figur eines Heiligen) (Encounter [Self-Portrait with Saint]) (1913), where he “performs” the “M” sign on both hands. It is thus clear that Schiele was invested in the purposeful construction of his identity in the photograph, especially through his invocation of the “M” gestures that so nicely mirror the left hand in Portrait of Erich Lederer. To “read” the photograph through this symbology, one might presume that Schiele was not only co-opting Masonic-Kabbalistic signs for his painted portraits (whether of the self, or of others), but was similarly prone to enact these gestures in real life to members of his inner circle, regardless of their religious identity, or Masonic standing. This reading seemingly also applies to the appearance of esoteric signs in Oppenheimer’s portraits of literary modernists, such as Blei and Mann, as well as in Schiele’s portraits of non-Jewish/non-Masonic modernists, including his Portrait of Erwin Dominik Osen (Mime van Osen) (1910), Portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh (1918), Dr. Viktor Ritter von Bauer (1918), and Portrait of Karl Otten (1917, fig. 17).[77] Otten (1889–1963) and his wife Ellen (née Kroner, 1909–99) had been advocates for, and pioneers in, the preservation of German-Jewish culture and literature prior to, and following, the World War II, which may explain why Schiele placed the Shin gesture on Otten’s right hand in an image that soon graced the cover of the November 3, 1917 issue of Die Aktion. Given that the magazine was devoted to Expressionist art and literature, and thus to languages of modernity, it appears that Schiele was cleverly suggesting that both he and Otten spoke a language of clandestine signs.

Schiele’s Encounter (Self-Portrait with Saint), along with other self-portraits from this time—including Selbstporträt als Heiliger Sebastian (Self-Portrait as Saint Sebastian, 1914/15)—reveals, I think, yet another, deeper spiritual side to the artist that transcends denominations or religious groups. Two poems composed in 1909/10 offer interesting insights into the artist’s personal musings on spirituality at roughly the same time that the Russian-born, Munich-based Expressionist Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was composing his now-famous essay/book Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art, completed in 1910/11, published in 1912).[78] In the first poem, a work titled “Skizze zu einem Selbstbildnis” (“Sketch for a Self-Portrait”), Schiele states:

The highest sensation is religion and art. Nature is raison d’être; but there is God, and I feel him strongly, very strongly, the strongest. I believe that there is no “modern” art; there is only one art, and it is everlasting.[79]

The other poem, an untitled piece, offers similar sentiments, but with considerably more stylistic flourish, and interestingly replaces the concrete notion of “religion” with the more nebulous idea of “spirituality.” Here, Schiele muses:

For who among the spiritually gifted believes nature to be a challenge to the sacred arts? Would they believe that this art is the product of human hands? The artist is above all the most spiritually gifted, possessing the most expressive ideas of the possible phenomena in nature.[80]

Both poems place art in the realm of religion/god/spirituality, but the second text very clearly conveys the idea that “god” might work through the artist’s hands to produce spiritual gifts – that is, art that is neither old or new, but everlasting. Could it be, then, that the development of a secret, Expressionistic sign language was just another way the modern artist could express his ideas about the role of spirituality in art? Or, more conceptually, was Schiele positing that “god” worked through his human hands to show Viennese viewers the language of godly knowledge? And if so, was this language of Judaic and Masonic-Kabbalistic signs thus meant to represent the “word” of god/Yahweh as a silent language of spiritual truth(s)? The search for higher meaning might have propelled Schiele to repeat these signs in his many (self-)portraits, and may have likewise resonated with acculturated Jews, who would have understood that his painted sign language could offer them a voice in a cultural milieu that still regarded them as the social Other, even if they were already assimilated.

In this essay, I have endeavored to contextualize the quizzical hand gestures that materialize in several Expressionist portraits created by Kokoschka, Oppenheimer, and Schiele. I have aimed to demonstrate that one fruitful line of inquiry is the possibility that Oppenheimer, Schiele and, to a lesser extent, Kokoschka, were cannily employing the esoteric language of the Nesi’at Kapayim and the Masonic Kabbalah to “speak” a secret (yet learned) lexicon of signs (akin to contemporary “gang signs”) to their patrons and members of their inner circles. While these gestures likely derived from the Aaronic priestly blessing, and thus from the symbolic language of Judaism, or the mysticism of Masonic-Kabbalistic rituals, these signs were ultimately utilized by the Expressionists to read as “exclusive” or “esoteric,” and thus as conveying the “higher truth” of avant-garde art in a manner similar to how some critics were perceiving “the Jewish taste” as synonymous with the Secession’s dominant brand of modernism. Because Oppenheimer and Schiele were taciturn about the possible meanings ascribed to these gestures, it appears that they successfully invented a clandestine language that vexed viewers who were not “in the know”—perhaps Catholics or liberal Christians—but also the academicians and art-world aficionados who failed to embrace the modernist vision of the Secession, the Wiener Werkstätte, or the Neukunstgruppe. If this were truly the case, then it is exciting to surmise that these talking hands were, in fact, capable of speaking a language of modernity precisely because they were imbued with the richness of Jewish culture, rituals, and spirituality. By secularizing these gestures, then, Oppenheimer and Schiele thus created a unique system of signs that opposed the old Viennese Establishment, and embraced the new goût juif.

Notes

I wish to thank several individuals who helped refine my manuscript in perceptive ways, including Sander Gilman, Anna Hirsh, Jonathan Kaplan-Wajselbaum, Peter Lanchidi, Vicky Schinkel, David Slucki, Lynne Swarts, Colette Walker, Devin Zuber, Susanne Zuber, and especially the two anonymous reviewers for Modernism/modernity, whose thorough and thoughtful comments greatly contributed to the restructuring of my essay. My gratitude also extends to Paisley Conrad, for her keen eye and deft editing. Various portions of this essay were delivered in 2019 at the Graduate Theological Union/University of Berkeley, and at the 2020 annual conference of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine.