The Character and Sources of the Anti-Judaism in Bach's Cantata 46

Extract

And never be joyful, save when you look in love upon your brother.

—a probably authentic saying of Jesus recorded in the now lost Gospel of the Hebrews

On the east wall of the south balcony in the St. Thomas Church of Leipzig, one of the principal churches where J. S. Bach worked as musical director from 1723 to 1750, there hangs in memory of one Bartholomæus Helmut a large, anonymous sixteenth-century painting now known by the title Gesetz und Gnade (“law and grace”) or Gesetz und Evangelium (“law and gospel”).A badly mangled reproduction, with many important elements cut off from all four edges, can be found in Herbert Stiehl, “Das Innere der Thomaskirche zur Amtszeit Johann Sebastian Bachs,” Beiträge zur Bachforschung 3 (1984) 91; a serviceable one in Ernst-Heinz Lemper, Die Thomaskirche zu Leipzig: Die Kirche Johann Sebastian Bachs als Denkmal deutscher Baukunst (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1954) 213; and a good one in Landesamt f¨r Denkmalpflege Sachsen, ed., Die Bau-und Kunstdenkmäler von Sachsen: Stadt Leipzig, Die Sakralbauten (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1995) 1.280. The picture presents a powerful series of theologically conventional contrasts of type with antitype. At the far left Moses is shown on his knees at the edge of a precipice receiving stone tablets—the law—from a pair of hands sticking out of a cloud; at the far right, in a roughly parallel position, Mary, with wavy blonde hair, is shown receiving a cross-bearing baby Jesus—the gospel—from a fully visible God. At the left, further below, humanity's Fall is depicted: Adam and Eve break God's law by eating of the forbidden fruit (from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil), and are shown thus bringing death into the world; at the right, divine redemption is depicted: Jesus, with heavenly rays beaming from his head, suffers on the cross (a sort of tree), and is shown conquering death. Likewise at the left is found the bronze serpent amid exodus encampments of the Hebrew people in the wilderness;See Num 21:4–9; cf. 2 Kgs 18:4. at the right is a large church of Christian worship amid the established city of God, the New Jerusalem.