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The ways in which the female Jewish body types are represented in 19th century art and theatrics provides a more in depth look into the work of Sarah Barnhardt as a modernising force of Jewish representation. Specifically, the role of Salome shapes the way the female body is admired and viewed by audiences. The famous paintings of [[Gustave Moreau]] embody this admiration of Sarah Bernhardt, Salome, and the female Jewish body.{{fact|date=July 2021}}
Moreau's paintings, popular in the late 1870s offered origins of a new female Jewishness and Jewish femininity that embodied notions of stereotypical Jewish identity. Based on the figure of [[Salome (play)|Salome]], Moreau created three famous paintings devoted to the subject, In which they attracted enormous crowds of more than 500,000 people.Moreau's paintings represented an eroticized Jewish body, one that made [[Salome (play)|Salomé]] into a slender adolescent, the portraits transformed the image of the Jewish woman at large. The idea of Jewish femininity shifted away from the maternal and womanly features and instead led in the direction of the slender, lean, and girlish figure. As such, the effect is to foreground and frame an entirely different model of female beauty than that on offer in Orientalist representations of the Jewish woman.<ref name=Transformations>{{Cite journal|last=Freedman|first=Jonathan|date=January 1, 2013|title=Transformations of a Jewish Princess: Salome and the Remaking of the Jewish Female Body from Sarah Bernhardt to Betty Boop.|journal=Philological Quarterly|volume= 92| issue = 1|pages=89|via=EBSCOhost}}</ref>
Sarah Bernhardt, whose rise to prominence paralleled Moreau's Salomé portraits, and whose career intersected when she accepted the lead role in [[Oscar Wilde]]'s play in as [[Salome (play)|Salome]] in 1894. Bernhardt was linked with a quality of thinness. This quality was persistently foregrounded in the multiple representations of her proliferating in art, caricature, and photography. "Her thinness is really quite remarkable," wrote Henry James of Georges Clarin's 1876 Portrait of Sarah Bernhard, on display at the same salon where Moreau's Salomés made their debut." These arguments to her thinness, fed in with a general sense that as a Jew, Bernhardt was sickly, malnourished, diseased—perhaps syphilitic or tubercular, as Sander Gilman has argued.<ref name=Transformations/>
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