In 1989, R. B. Kitaj published his First Diasporist Manifesto, a terse, personal, and playful treatise in which he muses about what it means for an artist to create from the position of being an outsider, in particular that of a Jew. Equally important, he ruminates about the dynamic relevance of figurative art today as well as the modernist artistic and literary sources that continue to inspire him. Modern Jewish history-especially related to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust-is of paramount importance for Kitaj's textual and visual explorations. Dubbing his artistic movement "Diasporism," he deploys this shrewd terminology to underscore the paradox of his outsider condition.

Eclipse of God continues the artist's obsession with historical antisemitic imagery that he began years earlier with the impressive and monumental painting The Jewish School (Drawing a Golem), of 1980. Eclipse of God also connects with his practice of reinterpreting Old Masters painters in contemporary artistic vocabulary. While the earlier work draws its racist imagery from a nineteenth-century popular print, the source Eclipse of God deploys is a predella panel from Paolo Uccello's Renaissance altarpiece Miracle of the Profaned Host (1467-68), commissioned for a church in Urbino. Uccello's original shows Christians breaking down the door to a Jewish family's home to rescue a host (a Eucharist wafer or bread) that had allegedly been purchased by the Jews, thrown into a fire, and begun to bleed. The 'guilty" Jewish merchant and his family were ultimately burned at the stake for their alleged crime against Christianity. Strong religious and political motivations underlie Uccello's imagery, part of an anti-usury campaign that sought to replace Christian dependence on Jewish moneylenders with a new Catholic agency. Thus it portrayed Jews as heretical and faithless.

Kitaj carefully inverts the meaning of Uccello’s work through his clever reformulation of details, drawing attention to the venomous hatred - the anti-Semitism - of the Renaissance original as well as the conflicting visual traditions that divide Judaism from Christianity. At the same time, Kitaj refers to opposing traditions within modern art in transforming Uccello's Jews into sympathetic characters through his expressionist handling of the figures. Against this, he opposes the pathos of the Jewish figures with calculating, geometric abstractions that delineate the angry Christian mob. The neck of the figure in the dark red coat with its back toward the viewer bears the word "god." Located on the side of the painting that depicts the Christians barraging the Jewish household, Kitaj's portrayal of God's back creates an ambiguous tension as it reveals his keen awareness of the Jewish interpretations banning representation of the deity. The inspiration appears to be the passage from Exodus 33:23 in which that author, speaking for God, mentions that He will never show His face, but can only be seen from behind. Kitaj's title Eclipse of God also acknowledges Martin Buber's eponymous text. By interpolating Buber's Eclipse of God, we realize that Kitaj uses this historical image as an exegesis about the absence of God during historical moments when the Jewish community's existence was threatened.

Kitaj often calls such a picture a "midrash" or a "responsa" to articulate the roles played by Jewish thought and traditions of interpretation in his art. He characterizes his diasporic works as: "[p]arable pictures-[with] their dissolution, repressions, associations, referrals, and sometimes difficulty, their text obsessions, their play of differences, their autobiographical heresies, their skeptical dispositions, their assimilationist modernisms, fragmentations and confusions, their secular blasphemies." Thus Kitaj paints a lively textual picture of the ever shifting, yet ever present connections between word and image, and between his use of literary and historical themes and their formal, painterly aspects.