Rembrandt—The Jewish Connection?

“J’aime les juifs!” Holland’s foremost painter shouts as he moves through seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s busy streets. The scene, in Charles Matton’s 1999 film Rembrandt, unwittingly recalls another, from the film of the same name made fifty-eight years before by German director Hans Steinhoff. Already well known for his Hitlerjunge Quex, about a Hitler Youth murdered by Communists, Steinhoff had arrived in Amsterdam in 1941, bringing with him the German actors, set designers, cameramen, and costume directors supplied by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. No expense was spared. Rembrandt’s purpose, after all, was nothing less than to show the freshly conquered “Land of Rembrandt” that the artist who represented its highest achievement was, in Hitler’s words, “a true Aryan and German.”

There were two problems. First, Rembrandt was not German. Second, he was famously associated with Jews. An emphasis on the essential “racial” unity of the Dutch and the Germans could take care of the first. The second was trickier. Three centuries later, Rembrandt’s friendships with Jews caused uneasiness in the highest circles of the Reich. Steinhoff’s script therefore directed “drei Männer jüdischen Aussehens“—three men who looked like greasy, greedy Semites— to ruin the heroic Aryan, causing his bankruptcy and plunging him into the oblivion in which he died.

Still, as Goebbels and Steinhoff found, the problem with turning Rembrandt into an emblem of Germanic racial superiority was that he, more than any other artist, was popularly and enduringly remembered as a friend of the Jews. Nobody cared what Vermeer or Rubens thought of the Jews, or whether Velázquez or Caravaggio were covert anti-Semites. But the issue was central to the legend of Holland’s greatest artist, which was fully formed by the early nineteenth century, and according to which he painted them; he lived among them; he befriended their great figures.

Even rabid anti-Semites took this for granted. France’s leading nineteenth-century Jew-baiter, Édouard Drumont, editor of La France Juive, claimed that “one must look at Rembrandt if one really wants to see the Jews.”

Erwin Panofsky, the German-Jewish art historian, took a special interest in Rembrandt’s connection to Jews. About a picture thought to be painted from a Jewish model, he commented, “the way Christ gestures with his arm undoubtedly has something Jewish about it.”¹ During the Holocaust, which they called the Great Sadness, Dutch Jews also clung to the memory of the artist. In a wartime poem, a deportee described the country he was leaving: “Farewell, good land, our thoughts strengthen us/of our ancestors’ old havens,/of the proud city where Rembrandt’s friends worked/ and of the quiet town, where Spinoza once thought.”²

This long tradition makes “The ‘Jewish’ Rembrandt,” a recent exhibition at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam—and the accompanying catalog, which is to be released in an English translation this spring—all the more noteworthy. The curators of the show systematically examined every aspect of the legend, and found almost all of it open to doubt. Scholarship rarely triumphs over deeply rooted myths. Even so, it was hard to imagine, upon exiting the exhibition, that anyone will ever again film Rembrandt on the Jodenbreestraat saying “J’aime les juifs!”

That street itself, it turns out, is a central part of the legend. The name means “Jewish Broad Street,” and it was here, in 1639, that Rembrandt van Rijn, one of the city’s most successful young artists, bought the mansion now known as the Rembrandt House Museum. “Much of what we think about Rembrandt and his art stems, ultimately, from his decision to live there,” in the heart of the Jewish Quarter, Steven Nadler writes in his book Rembrandt’s Jews.

Yet Rembrandt’s move to the neighborhood was in no sense a decision to live among Jews, according to the curators of “The ‘Jewish’ Rembrandt.” When he arrived, the area was new, and thus attracted many new residents, including Jewish immigrants. The street was then called the St. Anthoniesbreestraat, or Breestraat for short: Jodenbreestraat came later, after Rembrandt’s time. It was, among other things, a painter’s quarter, in which important artists such as Paulus Potter, Govaert Flinck, and Bartholomaeus van der Helst lived and worked. Pieter Lastman, Rembrandt’s early teacher, was a neighbor, and Rembrandt’s relative the art dealer and painter Hendrick van Uylenburgh lived there too. Like Rembrandt, none of them was Jewish.

So Rembrandt didn’t come to be near Jews. He came for the art world: for the painters, patrons, and dealers. Yet despite the presence of all these other artists, according to the catalog, “only in Rembrandt’s case is it emphasized that he lived in the Jewish Quarter.” The reason, however, is easy enough to understand. To take the examples the catalog cites, Paulus Potter was a painter of animals; Flinck and Van der Helst portraitists; Lastman a specialist in mythological and historical scenes; and Van Uylenburgh mainly a merchant. Only Rembrandt, a tireless observer of the world around him, might have been expected to portray Jews, just as he painted dogs and jesters and beggars and cattle, people arguing and people asleep and people making love. Besides, Rembrandt was drawn to the exotic. The strange people recently arrived from locations as far-flung as Podolia and Pernambuco, with their odd dress and colorful rituals, might have caught the master’s eye.

But did they? The exhibition’s organizers coolly appraise the many Rembrandt pictures reputed to depict Jews. “What these paintings almost without exception have in common,” they dryly write, “is that their subjects possess a beard and a head covering.” In fact, among the paintings that have been identified as Rembrandt’s Jews are some that are neither by Rembrandt nor of Jews. Take the Head of a Jewish Rabbi, a work in Dublin traditionally attributed to Rembrandt. It bears the signature of his pupil Willem Drost—and the “rabbi’s” necklace has two large crucifixes in its chain.

Abraham Bredius’s 1937 catalogue raisonné of Rembrandt’s work included 140 portraits of men. Of these, no fewer than 37, or 26 percent, purportedly showed Jews. Not all are as easily discredited as the crucifix-wearing rabbi. But improved research techniques have discarded many earlier attributions to Rembrandt. And even those he surely did create do not often picture Jews. For example, a painting formerly thought to picture Saul Levi Morteira, the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, turns out to show the Czech Protestant Jan Amos Comenius. The curators, like so many others, also raise questions about The Jewish Bride, the well-known picture at the Rijksmuseum—not dismissing the possibility that it shows a Jewish couple but also noting the suggestions of other writers that it may depict an episode from Golden Age drama.

Following their meticulous examination, the curators conclude that no more than three male portraits by Rembrandt are pictures of Jews. And they even have their doubts about two of these. A single picture stands unchallenged, the only one whose sitter has been identified: a small oil sketch of Ephraïm Bueno, a prominent Sephardic doctor, preserved in the Rijksmuseum. The work shows just how easily art historians have been misled by their eagerness to spot a Jew behind Rembrandt’s beards or odd costumes. There is nothing in Bueno’s countenance or clothes to separate him from any number of Rembrandt’s Christian sitters. There is, however, much that separates him from Rembrandt’s Jewish neighbors: namely, the very existence of the portrait, in at least two and possibly three versions.

In Rembrandt’s Jews, Steven Nadler notes that members of Amsterdam’s Jewish community, who were largely of Portuguese origin, were notably reluctant to have themselves painted. There are only seventeen known portraits of Jews dating from 1620 to 1680, the height of the Golden Age. When we consider how many thousands of Dutch portraits have come down to us from that period, and how many Portuguese Jews belonged to the wealthy, cultivated class that was a source of clients to Amsterdam’s painters, it seems odd that so few of them commissioned portraits. The reason seems to be an interpretation of the Second Commandment, which forbids the manufacture of images that could be worshipped as idols.

Strict interpretation of this law, and others, was especially important to the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam. This was because, paradoxically, most of them had settled in Holland in order to openly become Jews. When they arrived from Portugal in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they were frequently uncircumcised, knew little or no Hebrew, and had only a vague knowledge of Jewish law and ritual. What they had was an awareness of themselves as Jews, and a desire to practice their ancestors’ faith undisturbed.

This awareness had been secretly preserved in Portugal since 1497, when its Jews were forcibly baptized. This was in marked contrast with Spain, from which the Jews had been expelled in 1492, and where a vigorous Inquisition kept watch on the religious practices of large numbers of people. In Portugal there was no effective Inquisition until the 1580s, which meant that the country’s “New Christian” population could discreetly practice their religion, as long as they remained publicly professing Christians. Rembrandt’s neighbor Spinoza (it is uncertain that the two ever met) pointed out that in his ancestors’ Portugal, unlike in Spain, Jewish converts were barred from honors and offices. This had the effect of strengthening the Jewish identity of the group the Portuguese state wanted to eliminate, which chafed at this discrimination.³ When Portugal was annexed to Spain in 1580 and the more robust Spanish Inquisition arrived, many New Christians began to depart.

Lacking a rabbinate, an educational system, or Jewish books, they came to Amsterdam to learn. But even as these Portuguese émigrés were becoming Jews again, they did not lose the habit of fraternizing with Christians, among whom they had lived as Christians in Iberia, not only in business affairs but in their relations with the upper echelons of learned society. An important argument for admitting Portuguese Jews to Holland was their usefulness as teachers of Hebrew. Although the Reformation was viciously anti-Semitic (especially in its Lutheran version), Protestant theologians also emphasized the close study of the Bible’s original texts. And for that, it was hard to avoid Jews.

In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, there was, then, considerable contact between Jews and Christians. Steven Nadler’s engaging book gives a succinct overview of these relations, and the Amsterdam Jewish community in Rembrandt’s time, from its origins at the end of the sixteenth century through the construction of the two great synagogues at the end of the Breestraat a century later. One of these, the Ashkenazic synagogue, today houses the Jewish Historical Museum; the other, the Portuguese, was for many years the largest and most opulent synagogue in Europe. In the late seventeenth century, services were attended by curious Christians and attracted tourists, the brazen practice of Judaism contributing to the city’s reputation for loose morals rather as the red-lit prostitutes and the weed-peddling “coffeshops” do today.

These synagogues were not inaugurated until several years after Rembrandt’s death in 1669. Still, Nadler is right to point out that the seventeenth-century Dutch were interested in Judaism. Indeed, high baroque culture, and not only in the Netherlands, drew almost as much on Old Testament and other Hebraic sources as Renaissance culture drew on the classics. Unfortunately, he does not distinguish as clearly as he might between an academic or theological interest in Hebraic culture and a popular or artistic interest in actual living Jews. For the latter there is considerably less evidence.

In landscape art, there are Jacob van Ruisdael’s sublime pictures of the Sephardic cemetery at Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, and a couple of interiors of the Portuguese synagogue by the architectural painter Emanuel de Witte. Besides these, however, there are almost no other known paintings of Jewish subjects by major seventeenth-century artists. Engravings, drawings, and etchings are equally rare. The examples Nadler gives of pictures of Jewish buildings are either from albums showing the monuments of Amsterdam, of which the Portuguese synagogue was, of course, one; or by Romeyn de Hooghe, an extremely prolific engraver who produced over 3,500 prints and was thus more notable for what he didn’t draw than for what he did.

So while the Dutch, on occasion, drew and painted and etched the Jews who lived among them, they seemed to have had less pictorial interest in them than, for example, in the Africans, Brazilians, or Javanese. There is very little to support the notion that the Dutch had what Nadler calls “a taste for things Jewish.” If the Dutch middle classes had wanted to hang pictures of the despised and battered children of Israel on their walls, thousands of artists would have been willing to oblige them. That so few such pictures have come down to us suggest that they did not.

When Nadler refers to “all this interest among Dutch artists for Jewish themes,” pointing to the enormous quantity of Old Testament scenes those artists produced, he is equally misleading. To compare William of Orange’s miraculous rescue of Leiden to Moses’s leading the Hebrews across the Red Sea, or to use the story of Esther as an allegory of the Dutch triumph over the perfidious Spaniards, was not, as he suggests, to have a “Judaistic self-image.” The notion would probably have seemed preposterous, if not downright blasphemous, to seventeenth century Dutch Christians. These were biblical, and thus Christian, themes. The Republic’s often-reluctant tolerance of Jews and other persecuted minorities did not have much bearing on its taste for art.

If Nadler grasps too eagerly at every scrap of information that can be used to make a case that the Dutch were fascinated by the Jews, the curators of the Jewish Historical Museum exhibition went too far in the other direction. Their research offers valuable correctives, but they strive too zealously to disconnect Rembrandt from the Jews. Take the artist’s reputed friendship with his near contemporary Menasseh ben Israel. A rabbi of continental fame, Menasseh produced twenty-six books written in six languages, founded the first Hebrew publishing house at Amsterdam, and was the principal force behind the readmission of the Jews to England. He was not only one of the leading figures in Amsterdam’s Jewish community but a figure of singular importance in Jewish history. He also lived near Rembrandt.

Proof that Menassah and Rembrandt were not only neighbors but (at least) acquaintances rests on three pieces of evidence: an etching by the artist from 1636, reputedly of Menasseh; an Aramaic inscription in Rembrandt’s painting of Belshazzar’s Feast, from around 1635, which now hangs at the National Gallery in London; and four illustrations in Menasseh’s Piedra Gloriosa o de la Estatua de Nebuchadnesar, published in 1655. Nadler and the Jewish Historical Museum agree that the identification of Menasseh ben Israel as the subject of the etching is at best hypothetical. There is nothing in the etching itself, or in any other source, to identify the sitter as a Jew or a rabbi, much less a specific Jew or rabbi. The other two historical indications are harder to dismiss.

There are questions about the inscription in the enormous, stunning Belshazzar’s Feast, which describes an episode from the Old Testament Book of Daniel. The Chaldean King Belshazzar, the story goes, gave a banquet, and

whiles he tasted the wine, commanded servants to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein.

This brazen sacrilege could not go unpunished; and soon a hand appeared, sketching the cryptic Aramaic words MENE MENE TEKEL UFARSIN into the plaster of the wall. The king’s soothsayers could not interpret them, so the Israelite Daniel was brought before the king. The words, Daniel said, referred to the end of Belshazzar’s kingdom; and “in that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.”

In Rembrandt’s painting, the inscription is illegible partly because the characters are arranged not horizontally and from right to left, as is usual in Hebrew and Aramaic, but in vertical columns. Since the inscription appears in the same way in a diagram or “magic square” in a Latin book by Menasseh, many scholars have concluded Rembrandt took it from the book. Unfortunately for them the book was published around four years after the painting was completed, and the picture has, in Rembrandt’s version, a one-letter spelling mistake which, in a biblical text, a rabbi would never permit.

Yet an X-ray of the painting has revealed that the spelling was originally correct. And though the book cannot have been Rembrandt’s source, its author probably was. The “magic square” is a Talmudic device to explain why Belshazzar’s own soothsayers were unable to read the inscription. And the curators of the Jewish Historical Museum exhibition write that the Talmudic solution “is unknown in any other painting or print of the time.” Rembrandt must therefore have had a Jewish source, and the most obvious solution—that Menasseh himself provided Rembrandt the text before his own book was published—remains the only convincing one.

Still, the spelling and dating are legitimate objections. The same cannot be said of the questions the Jewish Historical Museum raises about the Piedra gloriosa, one of the rarest and most valuable books in the world; its first edition, with four illustrations by Rembrandt, has survived in no more than four copies.⁴ Published shortly before Menasseh’s celebrated 1655 mission to Oliver Cromwell on behalf of the Jews,⁵ the treatise, like Rembrandt’s earlier painting of Belshazzar, borrows motifs from the Book of Daniel. The stone with which David slew Goliath; the stone upon which Jacob rested his head when he dreamed of the angel; the stone which, in a vision of Daniel, toppled a statue of Nebuchadnezzar; and the stone Daniel saw in his vision of the four beasts—all were, Menasseh claimed, one and the same Glorious Stone! To illustrate this book, with its awesome messianic implications, the rabbi allegedly turned to his acquaintance Rembrandt.

Or did he? The curators of “The ‘Jewish’ Rembrandt” suggest that the four Rembrandt etchings may have been created separately from Menasseh’s book. “That Rembrandt had any special interest in the contents of this book or its Jewish author is unlikely,” they write, explaining that in the seventeenth century people often had etchings or illustrations bound into books, independent of the publisher. “Menasseh,” the catalog continues, “had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

This bizarre conclusion seems to be the revenge of the crucifix-wearing rabbi.⁶ The four etchings were created on a single plate and were originally printed on a single sheet, so there is no question that they form a unified series.⁷ It is furthermore unlikely that Rembrandt spontaneously hit upon this arcane subject matter in precisely the same year that his neighbor was composing a book on the topic of the Glorious Stone. Moreover, Menasseh writes in the text of the book itself: “To further clarify my writings, I have ordered, with great propriety, four figures.”⁸ He then goes on to describe, in detail but with some small variations, the four etchings as Rembrandt drew them.

There are similarly suggestions in the etchings themselves that the two men worked closely together on the project. The etchings exist in four successive versions, and in each one, we can see what appears to be Menasseh nudging Rembrandt closer to his own expectations. The first version, for example, shows the statue of Nebuchadnezzar quivering at the legs. The next shows it broken at the ankles, to concord more closely with the biblical text. The first version has no names written on the limbs—the statue was a symbol for the various earthly kingdoms—and the further versions do. And so on. It seems entirely clear that the etchings have been subject to the modifications and specifications of the rabbi who “ordered” them.

Does this mean that Rembrandt and Menasseh ben Israel were friends—or even, as Steven Nadler suggests, “kindred spirits”? It does not. Nor is the Jewish Historical Museum wrong to look at the evidence closely and skeptically. Yet Rembrandt’s association with Jews is not entirely a posthumous myth. We cannot know what Rembrandt “really thought” about the Jews. But at a bare minimum there is no question that he worked with a few of them, knew a few of them, and painted a few of them.

How jarring, then, to see Rembrandt pressed into the service of Adolf Hitler. In another absorbing recent exhibition, the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam chronicled the uses to which the Third Reich put Rembrandt during its occupation of the Netherlands. In those years, the Dutch artist himself was little in evidence, his masterpieces either stolen from their Jewish owners, shipped off to Germany, or stashed in bomb-proof bunkers. What emerged instead was the Aryan genius of Hans Steinhoff’s film.

This unlikely transformation was by and large the work of a late-nineteenth-century German writer, Julius Langbehn, whose turgid anti-Semitic tract Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Educator), published in 1890, was a surprise sensation. The book was eventually reprinted seventy times and made Rembrandt a darling of the Nazis. Rembrandt, Langbehn wrote, unlike the narrow, calculating Jews, was a man of pure energy and strength and feeling, distinguished above all by his Germanic lust for freedom:

Germans want to be free to do things their way and nobody does this more than Rembrandt, and in that sense he should be considered the most Germanic of all Germanic artists.

The Nazis brought this fiction to the occupied Netherlands, hoping that it could submerge Dutch national feeling into a broader pan-Germanism. A strange aspect of the Germans’ occupation strategy was the notion that the Aryan Rembrandt could replace the House of Orange as the Dutch national symbol. Instead of the birthday of the exiled Queen Wilhelmina, the national holiday would be Rembrandt’s birthday; and in the Westerkerk, steps away from the house where Anne Frank and her family were hiding, the NSB, the domestic version of the Nazi Party, held elaborate ceremonies over the painter’s tomb. To spread the new Aryan myth about the artist, there was a Rembrandt opera and Steinhoff’s film.

The Resistance Museum’s show pointed to an odd characteristic of the Nazi program in Western Europe: not content to conquer and subdue neighboring countries, the Reich was determined to appropriate their aesthetic traditions to create a new, and artistic, cultural order. This was especially true in countries that spoke languages related to German—thus the Nazis promoted a cult of Rubens in Flanders, and Viking kitsch in Denmark and Norway. In Holland, the predictable result of such propaganda was increased Dutch resentment of the occupying power. More than ever, Rembrandt became a symbol of the nation’s dignity. “The Rembrandt presented by the Terra film company is not our Rembrandt,” one Dutch critic wrote. “It is a caricature, worse: a monstrosity.”

After the war, the old tradition that Rembrandt was a lover of the Jews reemerged, stronger than before. “It has often proved a comfort for me,” wrote the exiled German-Jewish art historian Franz Landsberger,

in this era of European Jewish tragedy, to dwell upon the life and work of Rembrandt. 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

Landsberger was misled by a popular legend. But Rembrandt remains a symbol of the worldly seventeenth-century Republic: of Dutch cultural achievement, of Dutch tolerance, and of Dutch cosmopolitanism, a counterpoint, in Holland’s greatest moment, to Anne Frank, the victim of its darkest.