Editing Marc Chagall (section)

====Nazi campaigns against modern art====
Not long after Chagall began his work on the ''Bible'', [[Adolf Hitler]] gained power in Germany. Anti-Semitic laws were being introduced and the first concentration camp at [[Dachau concentration camp|Dachau]] had been established. Wullschlager describes the early effects on art:

{{quote|The Nazis had begun their campaign against modernist art as soon as they seized power. Expressionist, cubist, abstract, and surrealist art—anything intellectual, Jewish, foreign, socialist-inspired, or difficult to understand—was targeted, from Picasso and Matisse going back to Cézanne and van Gogh; in its place traditional German realism, accessible and open to patriotic interpretation, was extolled.<ref name=Wullschlager/>{{rp|374}}}}

Beginning during 1937 about twenty thousand works from German museums were confiscated as "degenerate" by a committee directed by [[Joseph Goebbels]].<ref name=Wullschlager/>{{rp|375}} Although the German press had once "swooned over him", the new German authorities now made a mockery of Chagall's art, describing them as "green, purple, and red Jews shooting out of the earth, fiddling on violins, flying through the air ... representing [an] assault on Western civilization".<ref name=Wullschlager/>{{rp|376}}

After Germany invaded and occupied France, the Chagalls remained in [[Vichy France]], unaware that French Jews, with the help of the [[Vichy government]], were being collected and sent to German concentration camps, from which few would return. The Vichy collaborationist government, directed by Marshal [[Philippe Pétain]], immediately upon assuming power established a commission to "redefine French citizenship" with the aim of stripping "undesirables", including naturalized citizens, of their French nationality. Chagall had been so involved with his art, that it was not until October 1940, after the Vichy government, at the behest of the Nazi occupying forces, began approving anti-Semitic laws, that he began to understand what was happening. Learning that Jews were being removed from public and academic positions, the Chagalls finally "woke up to the danger they faced". But Wullschlager notes that "by then they were trapped".<ref name=Wullschlager/>{{rp|382}} Their only refuge could be the US, but "they could not afford the passage to New York" or the large bond that each immigrant had to provide upon entry to ensure that they would not become a financial burden to the country.