Christ's Racial Origins: Finding the Jewish Race in Victorian History Painting

Abstract

What was the race from which Christ sprang? Victorian artists, ethnographers, and theologians were preoccupied with locating Christ’s racial origins. Evidence of this religiously motivated genealogical search can be found in portrayals of the so-called Jewish race in nineteenth-century paintings of biblical scenes, such as William Holman Hunt’s 'The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple' (1854–55) and Edward Poynter’s 'Israel in Egypt' (1867). A close examination of these artworks, along with the theological and scientific texts that informed them, uncovers an image of Christ as a temporal and racial hybrid, standing at the uneasy juncture of the Orient and Occident, Judaism and Christianity, the Semitic and Anglo-Saxon races.