Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (review)

The relationship between Rembrandt and the Jews and Judaism has long been the object of interest, indeed of fascination. That the painter's interpretation of biblical themes lavishes a remarkable and, for its time, uncharacteristically sympathetic attention on his Old Testament protagonists is acknowledged in the vast literature that his work has inspired, while his unknown but markedly patriarchal old men, scholars in their studies, or street beggars have often been thought to be depictions of Jews, as the titles given to them in books and museum labels indicate. Such is the case of the much-admired double portrait known as The Jewish Bride (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), whose subject remains conjectural. Certain facts of the painter's biography do give some substance to what one surmises to have been more than an incidental contact with the Jewry of his time. When, in 1631, he moved from his native Leiden to Amsterdam, he established himself on the main thoroughfare that traverses the Jewish Quarter, the center of an initially modest but thriving Sephardic community, where eight years later he purchased the imposing house that still bears his name. He would thus have been in a good position to observe the people of his surroundings, in whom he perhaps saw an authentic embodiment of biblical Jewry, and to interest prominent members of the community in his services. Evidence of such contacts are the four engraved illustrations he provided for the publication in 1655 of Menasseh ben Israel's messianic tract Piedra gloriosa, an etched portrait of the physician Ephraim Bonus (Bueno), and an earlier etching of a man in half-length sometime thought to represent Rabbi Menasseh. Of his personal religious persuasion, nothing reliable is known. His parents appear to have been affiliated with the established Dutch Reformed Church, but he never seems to have been an active or demonstrative member of that body, while the whole tenor of his art and imagery suggest, as has been generally assumed, that he shared the ideals of a dissenting, more evangelical spirituality.

The opening chapter of Michael Zell's book, a revised version of his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, investigates the role of Amsterdam Sephardi Jews as patrons and collectors of art. This discussion largely duplicates the evidence assembled and considered in the initial pages of Richard I. Cohen's Jewish Icons (Berkeley, Calif., 1998) and it might be judged to be somewhat tangential to the author's larger theme. But if the topic makes only a small contribution to the project of "reframing Rembrandt," it documents a major shift of attitudes among Jews toward the plastic arts and their entry within the circuits of production and consumption of artistic goods in this cosmopolitan milieu. Wealthy Jews acquired paintings of Old Testament subjects for their homes and commissioned portraits of the eminent and the learned. The magnitude of the change is best measured among the surviving images by the significant number of likenesses of rabbis, which might have aroused the greatest objection.

Zell addresses next, and in perspicuous fashion, the attention lavished on Jews and Jewish subjects by Rembrandt and the painters among his contemporaries, evidenced, for example, by images of the Amsterdam Sephardi synagogue and of the Jewish burial grounds at Ouderkerk outside the city. Rembrandt, he notes, was primarily interested in the human figure rather than in architecture, but he and painters of his circle "were attracted to the otherness embodied by the city's Jewish residents and captured features of dress and appearance contemporaries recognized as signs of Jewish difference" (pp. 40–41). Readers with some familiarity with the Rembrandt literature of past generations will be uncomfortably aware of the frequency of its uncritical appeal to essentializing physical traits and gestural habits by which Jews in Rembrandt's paintings might be recognized. In line perhaps with now-prevailing sensitivities concerning racial and ethnic categorization, Zell's Jewish "types" possess no marked physiognomic features or particularities of deportment, and only sartorial marks of...