Was Marc Chagall really Jewish, or did he just come from a Jewish family?
“His most vital work was made on the eve of World War I, when he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his visions of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent his wartime years in Russia, becoming one the country’s most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avante-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922. He was known to have two basic reputations, writes Lewis – as a pioneer of modernism, and as a major Jewish artist.” “Marc Chagall, born Movsha Shagal, was born in the Belorussian city of Vitebsk in 1887. At the time of his birth, Vitebsk’s population was around 66,000, with half the population being Jewish. A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called “Russian Toledo,” after the former cultural center of the Spanish Empire. As the city was mostly built of wood, little of it survived three years of Nazi occupation and d
