Rembrandt's Jews

by Steven Nadler

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Editorial Reviews

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.

Customer Reviews

Light Reading, 2007-09-01
by Fredrick L. Millner (Trenton, NJ USA)

Very interesting book; fast reading. Strays from the subject at the end. Casual touch of tourist viewpoint fits in with the general mood. It referred me to Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches, which was HEAVY.

Rembrandt's Jews, 2007-01-09
by Frederick D. Zigler (Cincinnati, OH USA)

Nicely written and only fairly illustrated, it opened up for me more questions than it answered. I would have liked more illustrations and more discussion of the art of painting in 17th century Holland, but you can't have everything in a relatively short book. The one important point that Nadler touches on is the way the Dutch painters and print makers saw the Jew and the Jewish community and portrayed them in their work. The fact that the Jew was portrayed in the art of an earlier period in Europe as ugly, twisted and dark, gives us an idea as to how the Jews were depicted and thus how this helped to spread anti-semitism among the populations of Europe. Unfortunately, art as well as literature played a role in developing and spreading anti-semitic feelings and beliefs throughout Europe. These Dutch painters break with an older ugly tradition and paint the Jew and his community in a better light. One simply has to look at the paintings and prints to see the sensitivity of the Dutch artists and their desire to capture the Jewish culture of their time.

Spanish and Portuguese Jewry...and Rembrandt, 2006-12-20
by Sam (Bend)

The Spanish and Portuguese Jewry in Rembrandt's Amsterdam is the ultimate paradigm of Sephardic rebirth. It was realized at the heels of the demonic relentlessness, notoriously known as the "holy office" of Spanish Inquisition. However, in Amsterdam the doors were open to members of the Portuguese Nation to reinvent themselves, to live in relative peace amongst their correligionist. These merchants and their families brought with them strong ties to overseas commerce but most important of all, the unyielding need to shed the dark cloak of Christianity, and worship in their ancient way. Many brought with them the noble bearing of the Hidalgo, With it's love for the better things in life such as; art, literature, and fine dress. Yet, besides bringing Iberian refinement to the Netherlands, together with the need to pursue a better economic life, their greatest achievement was that they built from the ashes of persecution, a lasting memoire, of Sephardic survival. It is From Amsterdam that the spark of Judaism branched out to England and the Americas, The Spanish and Portuguese Jews being historically speaking, some of the first Hebrews to bring Judaism west of Europe.
This testimony of Sephardic grandeur survives within the confines of Art and literature. Here we see Rembrandt in a sense, inadvertently chosen, to be a chronicler of the survival and rebirth of a proud and prominent people.
In Nadler's book we read this episode in Sephardic history unfolding in a very eloquent way. Nadler's research into this perplexing Jewish phenomena is noteworthy and I enjoy reading Nadler's account of interaction between The Spanish and Portuguese Jews and their Protestant neighbors from Amsterdam, specifically Rembrandt, who I have an artistic affinity towards. My only complaint being that Nadler could have given us more color plates to appreciate and mull over, while turning the pages.

Shmuel Fuentes Hazzan

Readable and Entertaining History, 2005-09-16
by The Happy Artist (Northern New York)

Part Art History, part Jewish history, and with beautiful illustrations, this book tells the story of the Jews who were expelled from the Catholic countries of Southern Europe, and how they were fortunate to find a home in Holland for the 400 years up until the Nazis. Rembrandt did quite a few Old Testament paintings and had Jewish neighbors and patrons, thus the connection. This is more a Jewish history than a Rembrandt biography.

Disappointing, 2004-07-23
by artlover1009 (USA)

After having enjoyed Michael Zell's book on Rembrandt and the Jews, I looked forward to the release of Nadler's publication. While Rembrandt's Jews is well-written and at times touching, I found it to be a pastiche of other books I have read on Dutch Jewry. What Nadler has done, albeit in an engaging way, is combine other scholars' ideas about Dutch tolerance of the Jews and Jewish life in seventeeth-century Holland (Yosef Kaplan and Miriam Bodian, for example), while throwing in a few works of art for illustration.