The elephant was originally – fun oneheyb on – not Jewish. In fact, it fought against the Jews. It became Jewish only as the trophy of its Jewish conqueror, and later even became an explicitly Jewish emblem.
The elephant was one of thirty-two with which Antiochus V, the Seleucid king, and his commander-in-chief Lysias, together with one hundred thousand infantrymen and twenty thousand cavalrymen, set out against the Maccabean kingdom of Judea in 162 BCE. Judas Maccabeus awaited them at Beth-Zechariah with the Jewish army. In the battle, Judas’s brother Eleazar spotted an elephant adorned with royal trappings. To save his people, he bravely cut his way through the enemy lines, crawled beneath the elephant, and stabbed it from below. The huge animal collapsed on Eleazar, killing them both.
“When the king heard of this, he was angry and summoned his trusted advisers, the commanders of the army and cavalry. Mercenary forces from other countries and from the islands of the sea joined him. His forces numbered one hundred thousand infantry, twenty thousand cavalry, and thirty-two war elephants. They marched through Idumea and encamped before Beth-zur. They besieged it for a long time, using siege engines. But the defenders sallied out and burned them—they fought manfully. Judas withdrew from the citadel and encamped near Beth-zechariah, opposite the king’s army. Early the next morning the king marched his army swiftly toward Beth-zechariah.
They drew up in battle formation and sounded the trumpets. They put grape juice and mulberry juice in front of the elephants to incite them to battle. Then they distributed the animals among the troops. A thousand men clad in coats of mail and wearing bronze helmets were assigned to each elephant. In addition, five hundred picked cavalrymen were assigned to each animal. These men had long been trained with the animals and followed them wherever they went; they never left them. Each elephant carried a strong, covered wooden tower, secured to it with straps, containing three soldiers who fought from there, as well as the driver. The remaining cavalry were stationed on the two wings of the army, on the right and left, to harass the enemy and cover their own maneuvers.
When the sun reflected off the golden and bronze armor, even the mountains glittered; they shone like torches. One part of the royal army was stationed on the hill and another on the plain. They advanced confidently and in good order. Everyone trembled who heard the din of the multitude, the rumbling of the army, and the clanking of weapons. It was a mighty and powerful army. Judas advanced with his army to engage them. Six hundred men of the king’s army fell. Then Eleazar, the Avaran, saw that one of the animals was wearing royal purple and was taller than all the others. So he supposed that the king was riding it. He sacrificed himself to save his people and win an everlasting name for himself. He rushed forward bravely into the ranks. He struck right and left, so that the soldiers on both sides fell back. Then he crawled under the elephant, stabbed it from below, and killed it. The elephant fell to the ground, and he too died there. Nevertheless, when they saw the strength of the empire and the fighting readiness of its troops, the Jews withdrew before them.” (1 Maccabees 6:28–47)
The scene became a favorite subject of medieval miniatures, primarily thanks to the popular religious devotional book Speculum Humanae Salvationis, which juxtaposed episodes from the New Testament with Old Testament events that were believed to have prophetically prefigured them. Thus Eleazar Avaran (the Aramaic nickname Chavran חַוְרָן meaning “the piercer”) was regarded as a prefiguration of Christ, who by willingly accepting death saved humanity from damnation.
Medieval illuminators, however, had been no more likely to have seen a real elephant for generations than their Andalusian sculptor contemporary, and so they depicted the beast stabbed by Eleazar as something resembling a gigantic horse, camel, or dog, with the long trunk, ears, and tusks known from literary sources applied to it like a mask.
Bible Historiale, 14th c., BnF Français 5707 fol. 172r
Velislai Biblia picta, 1325–1349, National Library of the Czech Republic, Ms. XXIII.C.124 fol. 151r
Miroir historial, c. 1475, J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig XIII 5, v1, fol. 55
Speculum humanae salvationis, c. 1360, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt Hs 2505 fol. 45r
Speculum humanae salvationis, 1462, Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, ms. 0245 144r
Bestiary of Anne Walshe, 15th c., Kongelige Bibliotek, Gl. kgl. S. 1633 4º fol. 6v
Brixen Cathedral cloister, c. 1400
The situation changed when Portugal acquired possessions in Southeast Asia in 1510, in the land of the Asian elephants. Living elephants soon began making their way from there to Europe, sent by the Portuguese king as gifts to European rulers—the first elephants Europe had seen alive since Roman antiquity.
In 1514, Manuel I sent the first elephant to Pope Leo X in Rome. The elephant, named Hanno, became the pope’s favorite, and a separate palace was built for him in the Vatican gardens. However, faithful depictions of this animal circulated only at the papal court, especially in Raphael’s circle. His workshop depicted him in the Creation of the Animals scene in the Vatican Loggias, on the elephant fountain at Villa Madama, and in the war elephants of Raphael’s pupil Giulio Romano. When Hanno died, the grieving pope commissioned Raphael to paint a life-size portrait of him on the wall of the Vatican gatehouse, beneath an elegy composed by the pope himself. Although the painting has been lost, Raphael’s preparatory sketches for it have survived.
The second elephant, which John III and his wife, Catherine of Austria, gave in 1551 to their nephew, the future Emperor Maximilian II, King of Bohemia and Hungary, had a much wider afterlife. The elephant, named Suleiman in order to humiliate the Ottoman enemy, travelled together with the prince and his retinue from Valladolid to Barcelona, by sea to northern Italy, across the Alps to Innsbruck, and from there by boat to Vienna. Numerous depictions of it were already made along the way, such as on the wall of an inn at the foot of the Alps, renamed “Würthshaus zum Helepfanten” in its honour, where it deigned to stay for two weeks, or in Linz, where the mayor, Jörg Hutter, had a house on the main square decorated with stucco featuring wild men and an elephant to mark the occasion of the visit.
Numerous drawings and paintings of the elephant were made in Vienna during its lifetime and later, after its death, when it had been stuffed, and these in turn influenced depictions of the battle of Eleazar.
In the South Bohemian town of Prachatitz/Prachatice, which had become extremely wealthy in the Middle Ages as a centre of the import of salt into Bohemia, the Knížecí dům (Princely House) stands at the corner of the main square. It was rebuilt in 1572–73 in Renaissance style by Jakob Mentschik von Menstein (Jakub Menšík z Menštejna), who held numerous royal and municipal offices, and was decorated with sgraffito scenes. The scenes depict biblical events, each representing a different virtue. Eleazar appears at the beginning of the second row, facing the elephant, which still bears some medieval features, but whose head and its various components have already been rendered much more accurately, thanks to the elephant engravings spreading throughout the Empire. It is quite possible that he followed an engraving by Conrad Gesner, who published his Historiae animalium at the time when Suleiman arrived in Austria.
Perhaps related to the battle of Eleazar is also a Baltic German noble coat of arms in the vestibule of Tallinn’s Niguliste Church (and another version on the wall of Tallinn Cathedral). The coat of arms, which already depicts the elephant realistically, was granted in 1569 to the Leipzig councillor Christoph Helfrich, when Maximilian II, the master of Suleiman, elevated him and his descendants to the imperial nobility in posthumous recognition of the heroism displayed by his son, Christoph Helfrich, during the Turkish campaign of 1566–68. Although the elephant in symbolic representations is in itself a symbol of strength, courage, and steadfastness, the circumstances of the ennoblement may also allude to a heroic deed similar to that of Eleazar.
Christian depictions of elephants did not leave medieval Jewry untouched either, which, surprisingly for a religion that prohibited images, possessed a rich culture of illustrated manuscripts. From the bestiaries they adopted the elephant as a symbol of strength – Marc Michael Epstein’s excellent study “The elephant and the Law: The medieval Jewish minority adapts a Christian motif” (Art Bulletin 1994) even cites Jewish sources that paraphrase the explanations found in Christian bestiaries – and proudly combined it with depictions of the tower-bearing elephant defeated by Eliazar.
Thus the elephant became a symbol of the Torah, as we see in the full-page illustration of a southern German Torah (Duke of Sussex’s German Pentateuch, British Library Add MS 15282 fol. 238r), dating from between 1300 and 1320. Here, instead of a tower, it carries a huge crown on its back, alluding to the familiar motif of the Crown of the Torah found on Torah arks and the tombs of learned rabbis.
The tower-bearing elephant would also become the heraldic animal of the Torre contrada in Siena, the Jewish quarter. We know that the choice of name was inspired by the Hanno craze of 1514, but the tower may have been placed on the elephant’s back from the story of Eleazar, reinforcing its Jewish association.
This silver besamim vessel from the Jewish Museum in Prague, in the form of a tower-bearing elephant, likewise symbolizes the steadfast strength of the Torah. The besamim vessel held fragrant spices that were placed on the table set for Saturday evening; during the Havdalah ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath, their fragrance was meant to comfort the soul at the departure of the Sabbath.
And the tower-bearing elephant as a symbol of the Torah plays a prominent role in a truly extraordinary group of monuments: the destroyed wooden synagogues of Galicia, whose interior paintings frequently featured tower-bearing elephants, especially around the Torah ark.
The Gwoździec synagogue, built in 1640 – today reconstructed in the Polin Museum in Warsaw – and the Khodoriv synagogue, built in 1642 – today recreated in the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv – have on their ceilings, painted in 1714 and 1722 respectively by the itinerant painter Israel ben Mordechai Lisnitsky, a biblical verse on each side of the Torah ark, the Song of the Ark, sung when the Torah is ceremonially taken out and returned: “Whenever the ark set out, Moses would say, ‘Arise, O Lord, let your enemies be scattered, and your foes flee before you.’” (Num 10:35), and “Rise up, O Lord, and go to your resting place, you and the ark of your might. Let your priests be clothed with righteousness, and let your faithful shout for joy.” (Ps 132:8-9). Both are illustrated by a tower-bearing elephant, thus clearly referring to the Torah. Moreover, in Khodoriv the latter is surrounded by four storks, whose Hebrew name chasida חסידה derives from chesed (חֶסֶד), “steadfast love, loving-kindness” (as does the word “Hasid”). Two of them destroy “the Lord’s enemies”, the snakes, while the other two fly toward “his resting place”, like the Torah. These figures allude to the priests mentioned in the verse, and more specifically to the Levites, whom Moses called “the faithful” in the Blessing of Moses (Deut 33:8). The four storks therefore symbolize the four Levites who, according to the prescribed ritual, accompanied the Ark of the Covenant on its journeys.
The Jewish itinerant painters of Galicia also decorated the village synagogues of their fellow Jews who had migrated to Western Europe. Thus Eliezer-Susman ben Solomon of Brody painted an elephant with a tower above the Torah shrine of the synagogue in Horb am Main in 1734–35 (today in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem), and then, in 1738–39, in the wooden synagogue of Unterlimpurg (today in the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum in Schwäbisch Hall).
The Elephant – Helfand, Gelfand, and so on – also became a characteristic Ashkenazi surname, and numerous bearers of the name brought glory to it, such as chess grandmaster Boris Gelfand, mathematicians Israel Gelfand and Alexander Gelfond, astronomer David Helfand, Soviet officer Vladimir Gelfand, whose candid Deutschland-Tagebuch is an important document of the Second World War, or Alan Gelfand, who revolutionized street skateboarding. His Hungarian namesake was Sándor Elefánt, founder of the sawmill in Vișeu de Sus (Felsővisó) in Maramureș and the namesake of its museum.
Medieval Christian bestiaries still regarded Eleazar the Maccabee, the Piercer, as a prefiguration of Christ, the Word of God revealed, because he sacrificed his own life to put an end to the danger that threatened the Jews. Jewish iconography, however, also did justice to the innocent elephant that perished, for, with a little hokhmeẓ, it was transformed into a symbol of the Torah, the bearer of divine revelation.
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