One striking motif in Ephraim Moses Lilien’s art is his use of thorns to represent oppression.
Here is this motif in the border of his 1908 “Balaam and the She-Ass.”
“East and West, 1903″
“May Our Eyes Behold Your Return to Zion,” 1901.
What’s creepy is how easily confused it is with the barbed wire of the ghettos.
Sure, barbed wire did exist since the 1870s or so, but it was for cattle on the American plain; as a tool of war it only really gets used in the obscure Combat of Magul by the Portuguese colonial army, the Boer War, and then by the Russians in their war with Japan in 1905; it doesn’t really enter the psychology of Europe until World War One. Eerily prescient.
