Rembrandt's Jews

Steven Nadler

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226360614
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

There is a popular and romantic myth about Rembrandt and the Jewish people. One of history's greatest artists, we are often told, had a special affinity for Judaism. With so many of Rembrandt's works devoted to stories of the Hebrew Bible, and with his apparent penchant for Jewish themes and the sympathetic portrayal of Jewish faces, it is no wonder that the myth has endured for centuries. Rembrandt's Jews puts this myth to the test as it examines both the legend and the reality of Rembrandt's relationship to Jews and Judaism. In his elegantly written and engrossing tour of Jewish Amsterdam—which begins in 1653 as workers are repairing Rembrandt's Portuguese-Jewish neighbor's house and completely disrupting the artist's life and livelihood—Steven Nadler tells us the stories of the artist's portraits of Jewish sitters, of his mundane and often contentious dealings with his neighbors in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and of the tolerant setting that city provided for Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe. As Nadler shows, Rembrandt was only one of a number of prominent seventeenth-century Dutch painters and draftsmen who found inspiration in Jewish subjects. Looking at other artists, such as the landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael and Emmanuel de Witte, a celebrated painter of architectural interiors, Nadler is able to build a deep and complex account of the remarkable relationship between Dutch and Jewish cultures in the period, evidenced in the dispassionate, even ordinary ways in which Jews and their religion are represented—far from the demonization and grotesque caricatures, the iconography of the outsider, so often found in depictions of Jews during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.Through his close look at paintings, etchings, and drawings; in his discussion of intellectual and social life during the Dutch Golden Age; and even through his own travels in pursuit of his subject, Nadler takes the reader through Jewish Amsterdam then and now—a trip that, under ever-threatening Dutch skies, is full of colorful and eccentric personalities, fiery debates, and magnificent art.

Graven Images

TWO

DIEGO D’ANDRADA WAS deeply disappointed. What he had asked for was not that difficult: a simple portrait of a young girl—probably his daughter—that he could hang in his home. It would be something for him to remember her by, since she was soon to leave Amsterdam. He had paid Rembrandt seventy-five guilders up front, with the balance due when the painting was delivered. D’Andrada, a “Portuguese merchant,” must have been doing quite well, since he had sought out Amsterdam’s preeminent painter for the commission. A charming piece in the Dutch style was what he had in mind. At the very least, he expected the picture to bear a reasonable likeness to its model. Surely the celebrated artist was capable of this much (although it is clear, too, that d’Andrada was suspicious from the start).

In the end, what the Jewish patron got was not at all to his liking. When he lodged his complaint in February 1654, at the public notary’s office, he insisted that the portrait, still unfinished, “shows no resemblance at all to the image of the head of the young girl.”¹ Maybe Rembrandt’s rough style, evident in some other works of this period (such as the magnificent three-quarter-length portrayal of Jan Six), distorted the contours of her face. Perhaps his growing penchant for shadow hid too many of her features. D’Andrada seems to have been familiar with the tone of Rembrandt’s work, because he said in his deposition that he had given the artist “sufficient warning beforehand.” No doubt he told Rembrandt to keep it simple and not lose sight of the purpose of the painting. D’Andrada now wanted Rembrandt “to alter and retouch the painting or portrait before the departure of the young girl, so that it will be her proper likeness.” Otherwise, he had no interest in it. Rembrandt would have to keep the painting for himself and reimburse d’Andrada the advance.

Rembrandt refused. Not out of any sense of pride or artistic integrity, but only because he would not do a thing to the painting until “the claimant pays him the balance due or guarantees full payment by giving a security.” Rembrandt would be happy to finish the work and even retouch it, but only if he was certain that he would be paid for his efforts. Besides, it was his word against d’Andrada’s as to whether the portrait looked like the girl. Better to submit it to a panel of neutral observers, the board of the city’s St. Luke’s Guild—the painters’ guild—for their judgment. He would change it if they decided there was no resemblance. Then, if d’Andrada still did not like the painting, Rembrandt would agree to keep it for auction at his next sale of paintings.

We do not know what happened to the painting.

. . .

The year 1654 was not a good one for Rembrandt in his dealings with his Jewish neighbors. But the remarkable thing about his dispute with d’Andrada is not that it occurred in exactly the same month that he was arguing with Daniel Pinto over who had to pay for the construction materials in their houses and that Eleasar Swab was stealing things from his basement. Rather, it shows that the relationship between the owner of No. 4 Breestraat and his neighbors went beyond the usual mundane affairs that engage homeowners on the same block and entered into the domain of his art. Rembrandt did not just happen to live among (and bicker with) the Sephardim and Ashkenazim around him—renting out his cellar to them, rejecting their demands for reimbursement, and mingling among them in the casual way that neighbors are wont to do. He also painted, etched, and drew them. Sometimes they even paid him to do it. And, despite d’Andrada’s decidedly negative judgment, he did it better than anyone else of his time.

One must be careful here. There is a temptation to romanticize things with Rembrandt—his genius, his passion, even his bankruptcy. It would be easy to construct a legend of Rembrandt the philo-Semite, a man so enamored of his Jewish neighbors—their ancient religion, their exotic customs, their foreign looks—that it forever changed his art. This would be Rembrandt the preeminent, even anointed, painter of Amsterdam’s Jews, motivated not just out of convenience and financial gain but genuine feeling. “Rembrandt,” writes H. W. Janson, whose textbook survey of the history of art has become a classic and standard fare on most college campuses, “had a special sympathy for the Jews, as the heirs of the biblical past and as the patient victims of persecution.”² Another scholar suggests that “for Rembrandt, the Jews in their picturesque variety must have held a peculiar interest,” and his paintings of them “undoubtedly reflect the spiritual disposition of the painter.”³ After all, is not the warmth of his depictions of Old Testament characters evidence of a deep rapport with the Jews of Amsterdam? It has even been claimed that Rembrandt delighted in finding on Breestraat “a naturalistic depiction of Old Testament stories in real life.”⁴ Rembrandt’s portrayals of Jews are supposed to express an unprecedented empathy between artist and subject and a remarkable emotional tenderness. He understood these people as had no European artist before him. Their history, their legends, and especially their faces were recurring and important themes in his art. This is why he, nearly alone among non-Jewish artists, is so often featured in illustrated surveys of Jewish art.

He did, it is true, paint, etch, and draw a remarkable number and variety of stories and figures from the Torah and other Jewish biblical writings: Abraham, Hagar, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Benjamin, Moses, Samson, Hannah, Samuel, Saul, David, Bathsheba, Mordecai, Esther, Haman, Balaam, Tobit, Daniel—the list goes on and on.⁵ He often turned to many different episodes in the life of an individual—David and Uriah, David at Prayer, David Playing the Harp to Saul, David Presenting the Head of Goliath to Saul, The Reconciliation of David and Absalom—and some incidents are represented several times (there are two painted versions of Joseph accused by Potiphar’s wife, as well as an etching). Many of the paintings are moving, deeply felt works. They come across not merely as illustrations of Old Testament scenes, but as highly humanized, even personal portraits drawn from a deep familiarity with Hebrew literature. While other artists painted the Bible, Rembrandt painted Jewish Scripture. The faces in the paintings are often supposed to belong to his Sephardic and Ashkenazic neighbors, while his interpretations of some stories are said to come from later rabbinic writings that he learned about from his Jewish acquaintances. (Even his depictions of Jesus, it is sometimes claimed, were modeled by young members of the Portuguese community.)

Holland’s greatest painter, then, was a friend of the Jews. They owe him “an enormous debt of gratitude,” writes the Dutch-Jewish historian Moses Gans, for “there has never been another non-Jewish artist—sculptor, painter, or writer—to depict this rejected group of people who, in his own eyes, despite everything, remained God’s people in exile, as truthfully as did Rembrandt.”⁶ He made it possible to portray Jews as they are, and not as they appear in the vicious and venomous sermons of their enemies. And he did so because of a heartfelt respect for their traditions that arose from his personal encounters along Breestraat. Rembrandt collaborated with the community’s rabbis, sought their advice on the depiction of Hebrew inscriptions, and even owned a copy of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. What more do we need to know?⁷

Not everyone who accepts this legend thinks it reflects well on its subject. Some of Rembrandt’s contemporaries, in particular, were very critical of the attention he gave to things Jewish. The painter Gérard de Lairesse, the author of De Groot Schilderboek (The great book of painting) published in 1707, had a good deal of contempt for this master whose paint “runs down the surface of his canvas like shit [drek]”—a reference to Rembrandt’s preference for thick impasto and crusty surface work. De Lairesse, according to Simon Schama, also loathed Rembrandt’s taste in subjects: beggars, actors, and, worst of all, Jews, all unfit for representation in the high art of painting.⁸ Compared to the elevated themes in Rubens’s grand canvases and the history paintings of such Dutch competitors as Jan Lievens and his former students Govaert Flinck and Ferdinand Bol, Rembrandt was accused—like Caravaggio before him—of bringing art down into the street, if not the gutter.

One way to deflate a legend is to personalize it, to reveal the motives of its propagators. Franz Landsberger, a historian of Jewish art and, in the middle of the last century, a strong promoter of the touching picture of Rembrandt smitten by the Jewish culture around him, concedes that this particular way of looking at the artist is based entirely “upon conjecture and not upon any available evidence.” And yet, writing, as he says, “in this era of European Jewish tragedy”—his book, Rembrandt, the Jews and the Bible, was published in 1946—he confesses that he finds great comfort in the legend. For “here was a man of Germanic ancestry who did not regard the Jews in the Holland of his day as a ‘misfortune,’ but approached them with friendly sentiments, dwelt in their midst, and portrayed their personalities and ways of life.”⁹ Perhaps, Landsberger allows, his own need for consolation in the face of the horrors of the Holocaust led him to see in Rembrandt’s paintings more than the extant documentation and even the paintings themselves will support.

Or we can cast our suspicion upon the motives of Rembrandt himself. The art historian Shelley Perlove does this when she suggests that much of Rembrandt’s interest in Jewish themes in his art arose out of a conversionist persuasion that he shared with a circle of patrons and friends—that is, out of a desire to see the Jews repent the errors of their ways, convert to Christianity and thereby hasten the return of Christ the Redeemer. A number of his paintings and prints, she insists, were directed at a Dutch Protestant audience eager to see the Millennium brought one step closer. The etching Triumph of Mordecai (ca. 1642; see figure 1), for example, with its hero playing the allegorical role of pious patriot, is supposed to evoke the prophesy of the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem through the Second Coming and the establishment of “a utopia of political justice, religious unity and universal salvation.”¹⁰ Another scholar, Michael Zell, has argued that it is not just Rembrandt’s depictions of Jews and Old Testament subjects that need to be considered in a “Jewish” context, but especially his later works drawn from the New Testament. Zell claims, for example, that a number of prints from the 1650s can be understood only in the light of Rembrandt’s contacts with contemporary philo-Semites and their conversionist messianism that sought a rapprochement between Jews and Christians.¹¹

FIGURE 1. Rembrandt, The Triumph of Mordecai (drypoint), 1641, Louvre, Paris. Photo by Gerard Blot, © Réunion de Musée Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.

Finally, one can deny the legend outright. But then there is a danger of moving too far to the other extreme. Gary Schwartz, a prominent Rembrandt scholar, insists in Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings—apparently with reference both to Rembrandt’s personal relationships and to the themes and inspirations of his art—that “Rembrandt did not penetrate deeply into the Jewish community.” Yes, he lived among them on Breestraat; and yes, there was the occasional collaboration and portrait commission. But, Schwartz implies, to move from these scattered and infrequent projects to an active engagement with Amsterdam’s Jews and a deeply philo-Semitic mindset requires a wild leap of biographical imagination.¹²

The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between the extremes. It should be possible to construct a sober and realistic picture of Rembrandt and his artistic relationship with his Jewish neighbors, but this will involve reassessing a good deal of what we, through long familiarity, have come to take for granted, as well as putting some restraints on the romantic fantasy.

What makes the question so hard to resolve is that it is impossible to know whether all of those paintings and etchings by Rembrandt that are purportedly “Jewish”—whatever that might mean with respect to works of art not directly related to a liturgical purpose—really are so. Forget the Bible stories. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel of God, Joseph fleeing Potiphar’s wife, Jacob blessing the sons of Joseph, and even Moses carrying the tablets of the Law are common themes in Western art. The number of times an artist depicts these subjects means little. Besides the obvious fact that Christians, too, lay claim to Hebrew Scripture, paintings and prints of biblical characters and stories were particularly important in the Dutch republic. Seventeenth-century Calvinist culture was, in self-conscious contrast to Catholic society, deeply oriented toward a direct, personal encounter with The Book. People were expected to read and know the stories themselves. And despite the general (and sometimes violent) opposition to images in places of worship, the Dutch appreciated the role that visual representations played in the edification and enjoyment of Reformed citizens. There was a demand for Bible paintings—for pictures of patriarchs and their progeny, heroes and villains—and, for the most part, their production had nothing whatsoever to do with the artist’s feelings toward the latter-day representatives of the people of Israel.

Nor are details here and there of any help. Rembrandt’s Moses, descending from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Gallery
• Acknowledgments
• One. On the Breestraat
• Two. Graven Images
• Three. The Unhappy Rabbi
• Four. Esnoga
• Five. The World to Come
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes
• Index