Sargent's truncated 'Triumph': art and religion at the Boston Public Library, 1890-1925 - painter John Singer Sargent

151. Singerman (as in n. 145), 116.

152. Higham, 54.

153. It is important to note here that Jews, too, occasionally opposed the new immigrants as social and economic threats; Higham, 105.

154. Higham, 46; see also 45-47. This is not to say that color was insignificant - simply that a sort of color indeterminacy emerged from late-nineteenth-century assessments of Jewishness. Racialists located Jews in a number of different places on a scale purported to register complexion from light to dark; some claimed that Jews were "white," some that they were "black," and most that they were somewhere in between. See Tamar Garb, "Modernity, identity, Textuality," in Nochlin and Garb, 22, 25: and Bryan Cheyette, "Neither Black nor White: The Figure of 'the Jew' in Imperial British Literature," in Nochlin and Garb, 31, 39. Higham argues that anti-Semitism was remapped according to race during these years. Renan's categorical terms were Indo-European (Aryan) and Semitic. Most Americans, if they discriminated in this fashion, tended to separate Anglo-Saxons or Nordics from everyone else, Jews included (Higham, 150). For some, however, the perceived racial distinctiveness of Eastern European Jews (as "nonEuropean," "non-Caucasian," "Asiatics") provided grounds for restricting immigration. During the first twenty years of the twentieth century, racialists came to perceive this group as so distinct that they believed its constituents would never assimilate. Unrestricted immigration, from this perspective, thus threatened the unity of American culture. "True" Jews, "biblical" Jews, on the other band, facialists maintained, were assimilable. Singerman (as in n. 145), 103-28, esp. 110, 118-20. See also Holmes (as in n. 149), 1-2.

155. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917, Chicago, 1995, 28. It was only with the modern period that Jewishness had become a matter of race rather than religion; see Garb (as in n. 154), 22.

156. Bederman (as in n. 155), 159, sheds light on this cultural evolutionary discourse of civilization and its relation to race and class in the United States; see esp. 27-.30, 201-2, and 279 n. 103. See also Kathleen Pyne, "Evolutionary Typology and the American Woman in the Work of Thomas Dewing," American Art, Fall 1993, 13-29; and idem, "Resisting Modernism: American Painting in the Culture of Conflict," in American Icons: Transatlantic Perspectives in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century American Art, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Heinz Ickstadt, Santa Monica, Calif., 1992, 288-317, esp. 296-97.

157. Coffin, 172. Erica Hirschler notes the use of racial terms in contemporary interpretations of Edwin Austin Abbey's Quest of the Holy Grail; see Hirschler, "A Quest for the Holy Grail: Edwin Austin Abbey's Murals for the Boston Public Library," Studies in Medievalism, VI, 1994, 47.

158. Brinton (as in n. 116), 284. Comparing Sargent's portraits of Jews with Rembrandt's portraits of Jews, Brinton asserted (283) that "as a painter of Semitic types [Sargent] has scarcely had an equal since the day their greatest interpretor lived and suffered in the garrets and pot-houses of Amsterdam." See also Leila Mechlin, "The Sargent Exhibition," American Magazine of Art, XV, no. 4, Apr. 1924, 172-73.