How the incomer’s eye sees identity

A re-invigorated art gallery highlights synergies between ancient texts and current issues.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A painting depicts a round table in a room. Those sitting around it rise up as a Christ figure enters.

Horace Brodzky, Supper at Emmaus.

Ben Uri Gallery and Museum.

Ben Uri was founded in 1915 in London’s Whitechapel and was named after Bezalel Ben Uri, the craftsman who designed and built the Ark of the Covenant.

Originally it was an art venue for Jewish immigrant artists who were unable to gain access to mainstream art societies at that time. Today it has been reimagined and relaunched, becoming an expansive digital platform designed to be the first stop for information on Jewish, refugee and immigrant artists, designers, dealers and scholars who have made significant contributions to the rich and diverse British cultural mosaic.

In 2023, I curated an online exhibition for Ben Uri exploring migration themes in Biblical images drawn from their Collection.

Themes of identity and migration feature significantly in both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and images from these Bibles are a substantive element of the Ben Uri Collection. As a result, the exhibition that I curated, Exodus & Exile: Migration Themes in Biblical Images, includes a range of Biblical images from the Collection. This is in order to explore migration themes through consideration of the images, the Bible passages which inspired them and the relationship between the two. The images are presented broadly in the order that the stories on which they are based appear in either the Hebrew or Christian scriptures.

The combination of images and texts I selected from the Ben Uri Collection enabled a range of different reflections, relationships and disjunctions to be explored. These include the aesthetic, anthropological, devotional, historical, sociological and theological. The result is that significant synergies can be found between the ancient texts and current issues. In this way, stories and images which may, at first, appear to be describing or defining specific religious doctrines can be seen to take on a shared applicability by exploring or revealing the challenges and changes bound up in the age-old experience of migration. This was important in writing for an audience including people of all faiths and none, and in writing for an organisation which seeks to surpass ethnic, cultural and religious obstacles to engagement within the arts sector.

“Most of what we’d today call migration is in the Bible, and it’s through migration, not in spite of it, that revelation occurs.”

Sam Wells

Engaging in a dialogue between images and texts and with an audience made up of people of all faiths and none, can be revelatory for all involved, particularly those doing the writing. In an essay related to the exhibition, about which I will say more shortly, I discuss the impact of émigré artists, many of whom were Jewish, who contributed artworks that greatly enriched British culture and churches. Another example of someone impacted by the insights of those from another faith community is that of Lord Maurice Glasman, who has written of the part played by Catholic social thought in restructuring his politics, ethics and orientation of thought. He writes that: “It established the Common Good – a negotiated settlement between estranged interests – as the ultimate end of politics. It is Catholic social thought that has guided me through the 2008 crash, Brexit and now the coronavirus. It has been my inspiration and I will be eternally grateful to Catholics and the Church. It was a very generous gift. In the darkest moments, it lights the way.”

Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, argues that the Bible itself is founded on six journeys, all of which have a bearing on themes of migration: “Jacob and his entourage migrate to Egypt in the midst of famine. This is an economic migration, but really it’s a journey of survival. Moses and the children of Israel migrate from Egypt to the Promised Land. They leave as refugees to flee slavery. They take 40 years to reach their destination, and, when they get there, they face a very hostile environment indeed. Judah loses a battle and is displaced 500 miles to Babylon. There, as Daniel shows, exiles play a vibrant role in public life, and bring unique qualities, represented by the ability to interpret dreams. Jesus travels from Galilee to Jerusalem. He’s living during the occupation by an invading power, Rome. Finally, Paul migrates from Jerusalem to Rome. He’s searching for legal protection in an empire where citizenship transcends geography.” His conclusion is that “most of what we’d today call migration is in the Bible, and it’s through migration, not in spite of it, that revelation occurs”. As a result, we don’t get Judaism or Christianity without migration.

Many of these artists were part of a remarkable generation of refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe who contributed artworks that greatly enriched British culture and churches.

Wells’ approach is one that I adopted in exploring migration themes through Biblical images in the Ben Uri Collection and many of the journeys he mentions feature in the exhibition images. The images I chose, begin with an L. Michèle Franklin watercolour of Adam and Eve. In her image they are naked with heads in hands, lamenting their loss, as they leave Eden. This is an archetypal image of forced migration, with those who have become migrants mourning the loss of the home they loved. The creation stories contained in the Bible quickly lead to a founding act of exile as Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden. One reading of this story suggests that we are all migrants, outside of a truly harmonious relationship with the world we inhabit but looking to return to our harmonious origins.

The exhibition ends with Horace Brodzky’s 'Supper at Emmaus', an image which comes at the end of a journey and depicts the moment of realisation that the one who had been lost and mourned had in fact been with the travellers throughout their journey. As a result, the realisation comes that what we seek may be with us on the journey or Exodus we undertake, rather than awaiting us at the end. This realisation results in a new journey for the exiles and a return to their people and purpose.

In between come stories of migration in the lives and experiences of the artists who created the images included in the exhibition, with aspects of those stories becoming entwined with the Biblical narratives depicted. Attention is drawn to René Girard’s mimetic theory, whereby imitation of one another gives rise to rivalries and violent conflicts that are then temporarily solved by scapegoating others. Some artists of Jewish origin included in the Collection addressed their experience of persecution through crucifixion imagery and, thereby, played their part in exposing and subverting this scapegoating mechanism.

Many of these artists were part of a remarkable generation of refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe who contributed artworks that greatly enriched British culture and churches. After the Second World War, there was an almost unprecedented expansion of the number of church buildings containing works of art, as churches were repaired or built with new work installed in them. This was a time of impassioned artistic activity, in which the catalyst for the Church was, to a significant extent, émigré artists, many of whom were Jewish. I explore the contribution made by this group of artists in a related essay called Debt Owed to Jewish Refugee Art which is also available through Ben Uri Online.

Will Hutton, writing in The Guardian in 2015, noted that refugees “are, as migration specialist Ian Goldin characterises them, ‘exceptional people’”. He continued: “Over centuries, as [Goldin] painstakingly details, it has been immigrants and refugees who have been part of the alchemy of any country’s success: they are driven, hungry and talented and add to the pool of entrepreneurs, innovators and risk-takers. The hundreds of thousands today who have trekked across continents and dangerous seas are by any standards unusually driven. They are also, as Angela Merkel says, fellow human beings. To receive them well is not only in our interests, it is fundamental to an idea of what it means to be human.” The history of émigré artists in the twentieth century, and the part of that story I explore in this essay and exhibition, reiterates and demonstrates the continuing relevance and significance of that message.

In relation to the story told in my essay, it is a story in which the Church is at the heart of welcome and hospitality, combined with awareness of the immense contribution that refugees make to the culture and economy of their host countries. Our current lack of appreciation for that story, these artists, and their works, is, perhaps, symptomatic of the place in which our nation’s conversation about immigration is currently stuck. My hope is that this exhibition and essay can play a small part in changing that situation.

View the Exodus & Exile: Migration Themes in Biblical Images exhibition.

Review

Books

Culture

Politics

9 April 2025

4 min read

Is it OK to pray for the death of a dictator?

What happens when the mighty lose their thrones.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Bullet holes on a wall and white paint outlines mark the site of an execution

The wall where Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were executed.

NPR.

The end, when it comes, can be nasty, brutish and filmed.

Muammar Gaddafi, self-styled Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution, spent the last moments of his life cowering in a Libyan sewer after an air strike on his convoy. On discovery, a mob subjected him to some ghastly final abuses before death – the kind of ending he had mercilessly condemned thousands to. It was almost biblical in its parabola, and it was recorded on a wobbly camera.

But it was not the first of its kind in this generation. On Christmas Day 1989, the disfigured face of Nicolae Ceausescu was broadcast on TV following his summary execution by hastily assembled opposition forces in Romania. Only days previously, he had been an unassailable dictator.

Vladimir Putin has spoken about Gaddafi’s ending, and it clearly troubles him, but perhaps Ceausescu’s death is lodged in the dark recesses of his mind because it was the one bloody end of all the communist leaders of eastern Europe.

Being a dictator is an all-consuming job. Too many domestic and foreign enemies are made along the way for the dictator to drop their vigilance. And their downfall often comes at the hands of those closest to them; by definition, these people know the dictator’s movements and weaknesses better than others and are best placed to exploit them. The military must be equipped to suppress dissent, but give it too much power and the generals pose a risk to the dictator. Yet if the military lacks the hardware, control of the population becomes harder. Many dictators surround themselves with specially trained loyal guards to defend against the military, but the rule of terror means no-one speaks the honest truth and so risks appear everywhere. No wonder dictators are usually paranoid and themselves racked with the fear that a culture of capricious violence induces in everyone.

These and other theories are explored by Marcel Dirsus in his compelling book How Tyrants Fall (John Murray, 2025). Dirsus notes how dictators require money, weapons and people to survive in office and for the elites around them to believe these goods will remain in place. They also need to immerse the surrounding elites in blood guilt, so that their fate becomes entwined with the dictator’s; Saddam Hussein compelled others to join him in the murder and execution of opponents.

For Dirsus, there are two ways to topple a tyrant. The most direct is to take them out, but this is rarely straightforward. Coup attempts are often shambolic in their planning and even well-orchestrated ones usually fail; the consequences for those implicated are always horrendous. The second route is patient and pragmatic, looking to weaken the tyrant, strengthen alternative elites and empower the masses. External powers often have minimal influence unless, like the US in Iraq, the country is invaded and the tyrant deposed. Sanctions often fail to hurt the elites; a state’s geographic proximity to the tyrant’s nation can be useful, as it gives a base from which opponents of the regime can work.

Modern technology is changing the face of political action, making it easier for large groups to mobilise against regimes, as seen in the short-lived Arab Spring. It also enables dictators to track opponents more successfully than even the feared Stasi in East Germany. Right now, it feels like the tyrants are ahead in this game.

Shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a friend said to me that he was praying for Putin’s death or downfall. I asked him how sure he was that the person who replaced Putin would be better. If the pragmatic route for toppling a dictator involves strengthening different elites and empowering the masses, the likelihood is that the elites will take over, not the masses. Dictators never allow the components of civil society to form; democratic institutions take decades to build. And they rarely anoint successors in advance, for fear alternative power bases are created. When dictators fall, it usually leads to initial chaos and violence before another elite can establish itself from which a new dictator will emerge.

In her inspired song of praise at the news she would give birth to the long-awaited Messiah, Mary observes how God ‘has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly’. It is a role reversal typical of St Luke, recorder of Mary’s song, a gift of eschatology many want realised today, not just in the world to come. When the powerful are brought down from their throne today, they are typically replaced by the next most powerful person, and if the throne remains vacant or is contested, what follows often feels like the spirit that went out of a person in Matthew Gospel returning with seven other spirits more evil than itself, meaning ‘the last state of person is worse than the first’.

This need not be a counsel of despair, but a call to informed intercessory prayer which is short on controlling advice for God’s geo-political strategy, and long on the wisdom and patience of the one throne that endures.

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