Home > News > The Jewish Love Affair with Rembrandt
October 1, 2011 in Library Corner
By Robin Jacobson.
No one really knows what the Dutch Protestant artist Rembrandt von Rijn (1606-1669) thought about the Jews. A provocative exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is rekindling interest in the topic, which has tantalized scholars for generations.
Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus reunites seven small paintings of Jesus and proposes that the model for the soulful bearded figure was Jewish, possibly a man from Rembrandt’s Amsterdam neighborhood. Curator Lloyd DeWitt says that Rembrandt may have been the first in the history of Christian art to portray Jesus as ethnically Jewish.
The new exhibition is likely to burnish Rembrandt’s image as a friend to the Jews. Rembrandt had a “Jewish soul,” declared Rabbi Abraham Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Palestine, voicing a popular sentiment reflected even in Israel’s municipal maps. In Tel Aviv, Rembrandt Street runs proudly adjacent to streets honoring Jewish artists Modigliani and Soutine and the biblical craftsman Bezalel.
Why did the Jews embrace Rembrandt? Historian Simon Schama offers a pithy explanation: “Michelangelo’s Moses has horns; Rembrandt’s does not.” Rebelling against artistic convention, Rembrandt portrayed Jews as ordinary human beings, not fiendish caricatures. For many years, scholars read into Rembrandt’s art a deep empathy for the Jews. Noted British art historian Kenneth Clark wrote that Rembrandt saw in Jews “ancient wisdom and an unchanging faith, and found in their faces a look of melancholy, as of one who remembers a far-distant past and foresees an uncertain future.”
According to legend, Rembrandt’s affinity for Jews began as neighborhood camaraderie; he lived in an area of Amsterdam populated by Jews and artists. Scholars analyzing Rembrandt’s unusual inclusion of Joseph’s wife in Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (see illustration) conjectured that Rembrandt learned from rabbis about a midrash placing her at the scene. Others speculated that Rembrandt switched to a darker palette in the 1650s while mourning the harsh Jewish censure of his supposed friend, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Contemporary experts, however, contend that tales of Rembrandt’s close friendships with Jews display more wishful thinking than hard evidence. The “Jewish” Rembrandt, a 2006 exhibition sponsored by the Amsterdam Jewish Historical Museum, found no documentary evidence that Rembrandt had deep connections to the Jewish community.
To the contrary, of the six known instances of Rembrandt’s associations with Jews, three of them ended in contentious litigation. Many of the so-called “Jewish” portraits and studies attributed to Rembrandt were either not of Jews or were created by other artists. It remains to be seen whether the Philadelphia exhibition will significantly alter scholarly opinion.
Even if it is but a romantic myth, the story of a philo-Semitic Rembrandt reveals a remarkable historical truth about 17th century Amsterdam. In other European cities, Jews lived in ghettos, separated from the Christian population by gates and walls and by humiliating identifiers – like conical hats and yellow badges – that marked them as pariahs. Compared to most of Europe, says Professor Schama, “the Dutch Republic was a paradise of toleration and security.” Only this safe haven could have inspired a believable story (where factual or not) about the special friendship between Jews and the artistic genius of the age.
For more about Rembrandt and the Jews, try these books in our library:
Landsberger, Franz, Rembrandt, the Jews, and the Bible
Morgenstein, Susan (ed.), The Jews in the Age of Rembrandt
Nadler, Steven, Rembrandt’s Jews
