Job and his Three Comforters: Panel from the Knesset Menorah
Artist Benno Elkan
Accession number 2018-30
Following Hitler's accession to the Chancellorship and the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation in Germany, Benno Elkan and his wife emigrated to London in 1933. In his absence his work was included in the notorious 'Entartete Kunst' ('Degenerate Art') exhibition launched in Munich in July 1937. The late art historian Brian Sewell, who originally owned this piece, suggested that Elkan's experience of exile pushed him into becoming “essentially, a Jewish sculptor of historic Jewish subjects”. This maquette of the Old Testament Job and his three comforters is one of the series of bronze reliefs depicting the struggles of the Jewish people that Elkan modelled for a Menorah, for the Knesset and presented as a gift from the Parliament of the United Kingdom on April 15, 1956, in honour of the eighth anniversary of Israeli independence.
Job experiences what many migrants experience, the loss of all that they have. He also experiences something that many migrants also experience, people, who may include friends, telling them that they bear responsibility for their losses. In this relief, Job is surrounded and overshadowed by his supposed ‘comforters’, yet he is not looking at them but beyond them to God, from whom he pleads support and to whom he pleads his cause. In the story of Job, it is the supposed ‘comforters’ that are revealed as false guides and it is Job, who maintained his innocence and argued with God, who is commended and who has his original prosperity restored. One way in which such a turnaround occurs in our own day and time is with those migrants who are inspired and driven to succeed in a new country in contrast to those born within that same country whose expectation is for support to be provided rather than earnt.
