"His sun set at noon". Verbal and pictorial representations of death on Jewish headstones in Poland in the 13th-20th c.

Abstract

The article discusses verbal and pictorial representations of transience and passing away found on Jewish headstones in Polish territories from the 13th to the 20th c. (before the Holocaust). The analysis includes inscriptions, decorative motifs and forms of gravestones. Hebrew gravestone inscriptions avoided direct references to death, which resulted in using many euphemisms and periphrases. The author notes 57 verbal and four nominal expressions of this type. The former group includes several different verbal roots referring to each of the following concepts: ‘going away’, ‘leaving’, ‘fading away’, ‘tearing out’. This multitude of expressions was connected on the one hand with the Jewish tradition of avoiding direct mentions of death and mitigating literal reference to drastic experiences, and on the other with the deve-lopment of Hebrew epitaph poetry and the revival of the Hebrew language in the 19th c. The analysis concerns traditional epitaphs, leaving aside inscriptions from the graves of Jews assimilated in Christian culture, since this was a separate phenomenon, which started in the mid-19th c. The ornamentation of matzevahs had not included vanitas motifs until the 19th c.; only then did they start to be introduced, in consequence of the Jewish enlightenment and processes of acculturation and assimilation, in two ways. One way was to modify the widely used traditional images, e.g. plant motifs (trees or flowers) representing the tree of eternal life: their cutting, cleaving or withering acquired a new symbolic signifi cance. A fl ower, a twig and a tree became symbols of individual existence, of its transience and of death. Other common motifs were: a broken or extinguished candle, a forlorn fl ock of sheep or birds, a setting sun, an upturned crown. The other way was to adopt motifs (and gravestone forms) from non-Jewish sepulchral culture, e.g. an extinguished torch, a broken pillar, an urn covered with a pall, a coffi n on a catafalque, an hourglass, an ouroboros, a butterfl y, a poppy. Since the 19th c. both ways of representing death were used on headstones, but the co-occurrence of consciously chosen converging inscriptions and images was uncommon.