In 1938, three years before the annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry, Marc Chagall painted a crucifixion.

Not a Christian crucifixion. A Jewish one.

The central figure in White Crucifixion wears a tallit. A menorah burns beneath him. Torah scrolls are desecrated. Synagogues are in flames. Refugees flee with bundles over their shoulders. A boat crowded with the displaced drifts without destination. The canvas is dated 1938—after Kristallnacht, before industrialized mass murder.

The painting hangs today at the Art Institute of Chicago. Visitors encounter it as universal suffering rendered in pale light. Yet embedded within the right margin is a detail that demands historical attention: two flags.

One is unmistakable—the Lithuanian tricolor: yellow, green, red. Beside it stands a banner that originally bore a swastika. After Nazi forces captured France in 1940, Chagall painted over the swastika in white before fleeing Europe. The Lithuanian flag remained visible.

The painting predates Germany’s invasion of Lithuania. It predates the mass shootings of 1941. It predates the slaughter of 96.4 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish population. Yet Chagall visually aligned Lithuania beside Nazi Germany before the genocide reached its most lethal phase.

This was not mysticism. It was historical literacy.

Chagall was born in Vitebsk in the Russian Empire. He lived through pogroms. He understood exclusionary nationalism. He understood that antisemitism does not require an external accelerant. In Lithuania, indigenous nationalist movements had spent the interwar decades institutionalizing anti-Jewish economic discrimination, displacing Jews from professions, organizing boycotts, and embedding the framing of Jews as alien within their own society into mainstream political discourse. That process was indigenous, vocal, and structurally advanced before a single German soldier crossed the Lithuanian border. Nazi occupation in 1941 provided infrastructure and acceleration. The will and the executioners were already there. The speed of the killing—and the local participation rates that preceded full German administrative consolidation—confirm it.

Chagall did not need to foresee Nazi Germany reaching Lithuania. He needed only to read Lithuania.

Across Eastern Europe, antisemitism was neither confined to Berlin nor limited to fringe actors. Nationalist movements incorporated anti-Jewish rhetoric and exclusionary politics during the interwar period. Public space narrowed. Boycotts intensified. Jews were framed as alien within their own societies.

When German forces entered Lithuania in June 1941, the killings began almost immediately. In many localities, violence preceded full German administrative consolidation. Auxiliary units and civilian collaborators participated in mass shootings that eliminated entire communities within weeks. The demographic outcome is documented: Lithuania eliminated 96.4 percent of its Jewish population, the highest murder rate in Europe.

Chagall’s canvas does not describe the mechanics of 1941. It identifies the alignment that made 1941 possible.

The Lithuanian flag beside the Nazi banner in 1938 is not decorative. It signals that antisemitism in parts of Eastern Europe had already crossed structural thresholds. The later overpainting of the swastika does not alter the original composition. The pairing remains historically legible.

It was easy for Chagall to “predict” the future because he knew the past.

He had seen how exclusion becomes normalized.

How normalized exclusion becomes sanctioned hostility.

How sanctioned hostility becomes organized violence.

The sequence was not new in 1938. It was accelerating.

What makes White Crucifixion urgent is not only what it captured then. It is what it teaches about escalation now. Antizionism is not a modern political movement. It is the direct ideological descendant of the Nazi-Islamist alliance forged in the 1930s and 1940s. The collaboration between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the Third Reich was not incidental. When the Mufti testified before the Peel Commission in 1937 and was asked what would become of 400,000 Jews living in an Arab state, he answered: “We must leave all that to the future… Time will deal with that problem.”

The Commission members understood the implication. The goal was never anti-colonialism. It was the extension of the Final Solution to the Middle East. That foundation was not dismantled after 1945. It was rebranded. Soviet-era propaganda furnished the operational vocabulary: “colonialism,” “apartheid,” “resistance.”

The synthesis is recognizable. Antizionism functions by utilizing those techniques to rebrand ancient annihilationist antisemitism as a struggle for justice. It erases the Farhud in Iraq, the systematic expulsion of nearly one million Mizrahi Jews from Arab lands, and the continuous Jewish presence in the land documented in the Peel Commission’s own findings. When the Jewish state alone is treated as uniquely illegitimate among nations, the shift is not semantic; it is doctrinal. Anti-Zionism, when it shifts from policy critique to collective delegitimization of Jewish national self-determination, follows the same structural path Chagall identified in 1938: ideology, political tolerance, public hostility, and social permission converging toward violence.

Today, antisemitic incidents have surged across Europe and North America.

Jewish institutions require routine armed security presence. Political discourse collapses Jews worldwide into the policies of the State of Israel. Public hostility toward Jewish communal space has intensified across multiple countries. These are the conditions Chagall documented: rhetoric normalized, exclusion legalized, hostility sanctioned.

Chagall did not wait for extermination camps to conclude that catastrophe was unfolding. He recognized convergence: ideology, political tolerance, public hostility, and social permission. That convergence is what he painted.

Scholars who have documented the structural transformation of antisemitism into antizionism confirm the same pattern.

History does not repeat mechanically. It repeats structurally.

The canvas shows flames before crematoria.

Flight before deportation.

Alignment before occupation.

The record that followed confirmed what the painting already documented.

The question is not whether Chagall foresaw correctly.

The record answers that.

The question is whether we recognize patterns while they are still patterns—or only after they become graves.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)