Samson in Gaza and Delacroix’s Massacre in Chios

When you think you’ve said enough,

and the going gets too rough,

think of Delacroix who said

it’s not enough until you’re dead,

or words to that effect, in French.

Too many words can cause a stench,

like death, but saying far too few,

unusual problem for a Jew,

can cast most weirdly a word spell

that can drive Jews into a hell,

as happened to Don Giovanni,

for not repenting with Modeh Ani.

Delacroix’s “Massacre in Chios,”

anticipates the ghastly ghazawa

that Hamas caused, a current chaos

as bad for Jews as one in Gaza

induced by Samson when he smashed

a temple full of Philistines,

with whom the Israelites once clashed.

The Judges’ book does not malign

this Nazirite, imperfect hero,

as far too many malign Jews

for not reducing to a zero

death of their foes, who then accuse

the Jews of killing Palestinians

who act as human shields protecting

the terrorists in their dominions,

yet to their sacrifice objecting,

which Judges did not do when Samson

died killing Philistines, the fate

of Israeli hostages, the ransom

demanded to abate Hamas’s hate.

The final couplet of the first verse recalls that Don Giovanni is condemned to hell having failed to repent for killing one of his victims who had agreed to have dinner with him. The Don refused to confess his criminal conduct which included homicide and rape; he might have repented with the two Hebrew words  מודה אני,  modeh ani,  which mean both “I thank” and I confess.”  These two words are the name of the first prayer every Jew is supposed to say each day:

מודה אני לפניך מלך חי וקיים שהחזרת בי נשמתי בחמלה. רבה אמונתך, modeh ani,  I thank and confess  before you, King living and eternal, for You have returned within me my soul with compassion; abundant is Your faithfulness.

Marin Kramer, historian of the middle east at Tel Aviv University, writes in “Scenes from the massacres,” Times of Israel, Aug 25, 2025:

Exactly 200 years ago, a disturbing painting debuted in Paris, depicting a massacre in a distant corner of the Mediterranean. No other work in the artistic canon speaks more to the events of October 7 than this one.

The painting Scenes from the Massacres of Chios by the French artist Eugène Delacroix was first unveiled at the Salon, the exhibition that defined artistic taste in 19th-century Paris, on August 25, 1824. For the past 150 years, it has belonged to the Louvre Museum in Paris. Millions have seen it over two centuries, and critics, art historians, and Delacroix biographers have analyzed it from every possible angle…..

The subtitle of the work as submitted was “Greek families await death or slavery, etc.,” with the “etc.” serving as a discreet allusion to rape. The painting is centered on a cluster of despairing men, women, and children. Defeat, degradation, and resignation are etched on their faces. The most poignant tableau rises on the right side of the painting: a naked, bound woman is being dragged away by an indifferent Turkish horseman, destined for rape and slavery. Beneath lies the corpse of a dead mother, while her living infant instinctively searches for her bare breast. The bodies of Greek wounded and dead are strewn across a scorched and devastated landscape, where a battle still rages. The impact of the work is magnified by its overwhelming size: the painting is nearly fourteen feet high (over four meters) and almost twelve feet wide (over three meters). It hangs today in the gallery reserved for the largest masterpieces.

It was an unconventional work. The painting referenced contemporary events, not classical history. Delacroix did not portray his Greeks as ennobled, but as ordinary people. Moreover, the work had no redeeming hero. One contemporary critic found it more evocative of a plague scene than a massacre. Art historians have also offered their interpretations. Is the painting a subversive critique of the French regime’s neutrality regarding Greek independence? Is it Islamophobic, positing Islamic barbarity against Christian civilization? Or is the depiction of the Turkish horseman, indistinguishable from a Greek, a deliberate challenge to prejudice?….

The foremost French specialist on Islam and politics, Gilles Kepel, in his new book Holocaustes: Israël, Gaza et la guerre contre l’Occident, has presented October 7 through the lens of its perpetrators, as a ghazwa (razzia in European parlance): a raid deliberately intended to subjugate and dehumanize a non-Muslim adversary. The Prophet Muhammad conducted such a raid against the Jewish tribes of the Khaybar oasis in Arabia in the year 628, establishing the ghazwa as a model of warfare that would be replicated throughout history. At Khaybar, writes Kepel,

cruelty was explicitly embraced as an exemplary punishment of God’s enemies. Men were tortured and put to the sword, women were captured and distributed among the victors’ harems, and children were enslaved, all to the cries of ‘O Victorious One, bring death, bring death!’ (Ya mansûr! Amit, amit!). On October 7, there was an attempt to emulate this feat from sacred history with the ruthless massacre of Jews, the abduction of women and children from border kibbutzim and the attack on ‘the tribe of Nova.’ Videos circulating online showed prisoners being assaulted, paraded as trophies in jeeps, unfortunate women stripped naked on pickup trucks and perched on motorcycles to be transported to Gaza’s tunnels—just as the captives of Khaybar were once carried off on camels.

The line that connects the years 628 and 2023 (with 1824 along the way) is one of traditionally Muslim and now Islamist supremacism. It not only promises victory but seeks to inscribe it upon the bodies of the vanquished.

We cannot bear to see or hear this, which is why the most graphic images and testimonies from October 7 are still withheld. Delacroix, for all the emotion and outrage he wished to stir, likewise did not depict the full extent of the brutality on Chios. But Scenes from the Massacres of Chios came as close as Western art dares. That this canvas from another era still speaks to our moment is a reminder of continuities we would rather forget.