The Aesthetics of the Moroccan Jewish Woman in the Paintings of French Orientalists during the 19th Century: Between Reality and Fiction
https://doi.org/10.56989/benkj.v6i8.2047
Keywords:
Moroccan Jewish women , French Orientalist art , visual representations , aesthetics , Romantic imagination , Moroccan identity , Moroccan mellahs , traditional dress , European imaginationSustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Abstract
This study investigates the aesthetic and anthropological dimensions of the representations of Moroccan Jewish women in nineteenth-century French Orientalist art, a period that witnessed a profound transformation in the European vision of the East due to colonial expansion and growing scholarly curiosity. It examines the intersection between the ethnographic reality observed within Moroccan mellahs and the Romantic imagination shaped by prominent painters who addressed Moroccan themes, notably Eugène Delacroix, Alfred Dehodencq, and Charles Zacharie Landelle, alongside the Belgian artist Jean-François Portaels, who moved within the same Parisian artistic milieu. The central problem is based on the hypothesis that Jewish women were not merely incidental artistic subjects; rather, they constituted a distinctive visual medium that enabled Orientalist artists to penetrate the cultural and social veils imposed by conservative local society. Their depiction in painting thus became a complex blend of precise documentation of dress—particularly the keswa el-kbira—and biblical and aesthetic projections that served the Western imagination in search of the “pristine Orient.” The study adopts a comparative analytical approach linking the historical and political context of the Jewish community during the nineteenth century to the visual language of paintings—colours, lighting composition, and the semiology of space—highlighting the role of these works in shaping a long-lasting visual memory of Moroccan identity and femininity in the European imagination, while critically examining the travel accounts that paved the way for this artistic vision.
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