The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854-60): Finding Faith Amidst Race in Victorian Painting

By Madeline Hewitson

William Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854-60) holds a lofty position in Pre-Raphaelite scholarship as one of Hunt’s key Protestant-motivated biblical paintings and his stylistic embrace of ‘on-the-ground’ ethnographic research which he conducted during several visits to the Holy Land and Egypt. Although the painting depicts a New Testament scene from the Gospel of Luke, it is also a depiction of Jewish worship at the ancient Second Temple in Jerusalem. However, this depiction is undeniably coloured by Hunt’s partisan beliefs. The group of rabbis on the left-hand side of the painting are an anti-semitic caricature, intentionally shown by the artist to represent the backwards, idolatrous ways of the ‘old’ faith. Through their semitic features, which stand in stark contrast to the red-haired, blue-eyed Mother and Child, The Finding of the Saviour encapsulates the privileging and racialising of ‘new’ Christian narratives over other forms of Abrahamic monotheism.

However, at a moment when we are losing museological perspectives on Jewish history and identity in Britain, most recently with the closing of The Jewish Museum in London, is there a productive strategy for understanding Anglo-Jewish history and representations of ‘Jewishness’ in a painting like The Finding of the Saviour? In this brief piece, I’d like to offer a potential avenue for developing new interpretations which refocus attention on the models in the painting. This approach will reveal new stories about the Jewish community in Victorian Britain and map out a future for this historical painting’s display in the modern-day museum.

As Keren Hammerschlag has noted, the Victorian Anglo-Jewish community was perceived as a religious and racial hybrid; at once, ancient and modern, Oriental and Occidental, familiar and othered. These unfixed categories were contested across Victorian society as Jewish people emerged as influential actors in civic institutions, cultural circles and imperial politics. The painting reflects Hunt’s search, and the broader cultural compulsion, to find a Jewish ‘type’ that reconciled these binaries.

Hunt’s frustrations at finding models while painting in Palestine and Egypt is an often-cited piece of self-published lore. However, his pursuit of models in London was far more successful. Instead of using ‘Jews of the soil’ in Palestine, Hunt used his connections to the Anglo-Jewish community to populate his painting. A constellation of Anglo-Jewish identities appear in The Finding of the Saviour, from the wealthy Sephardic families of West London to working class and immigrant children of the East End. These faces reveal the unique and shifting definitions of ‘Jewishness’ in mid-nineteenth century London.

Mary Ada Mocatta served as the model for Mary, an invited guest rather than hired worker. She was married to Frederick David Mocatta, the scion of the bullion broker firm Mocatta and Goldsmid, who himself had helped Hunt secure male models in Jerusalem along with one of the most senior figures in Anglo-Jewry, Moses Montefiore. The Mocattas were one of the elite Sephardic Jewish families of London and although Mary was affected by rheumatism for most of her adult life, she was a philanthropist and benefactor of several major hospitals, like many others in her circle. The Mocattas were also deeply involved in the development of the Jewish Free School in Spitalfields and likely facilitated Hunt obtaining several male students to pose as the young boys stood behind the rabbis.

Amongst this group of youths but yet to be identified is John Bergheim, the son of an Anglican convert mother, as well as a ‘Hungarian Israelite’ who was brought to Hunt through Reverend Haim Herschell, a Jewish-born High Anglican priest who proselytised in Jewish-immigrant dense East End of London.

Clive Kennard also contends that the figure of Jesus resembles an 1859 self-portrait of Simeon Solomon, who Hunt knew during this period. Hunt was also in correspondence with Simeon Solomon’s brother, Abraham Solomon for help in finding the mantle covering the torah held by the blind rabbi – two more artistic nodes in a network of Anglo-Jewish presence in The Finding of the Saviour.

Research into models, particularly those from minority backgrounds, has proved to be a fruitful strategy in recent exhibitions such as The Rossettis (Tate Britain, 2023) in order touncover new stories and redress imbalances in collection histories. Could knowing more about Mary Ada Mocatta, John Bergheim and the Jewish Free School boys help to break the orientalising stereotypes that have permeated the Jewishness of this painting thus far?

Dr Madeline Hewitson is a research assistant at the Ashmolean Museum where she most recently curated the exhibition 'Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design'. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British Orientalism and its intersection with the Old Testament in Victorian visual culture.