Customer Reviews

Rembrandt's Jews

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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.

This engaging and beautifully written book, on one level, tells the story of how the artist Rembrandt van Rijn interacted with his Jewish neighbors, many of whom were clients and/or served as models for his Biblical paintings. So it is in part about his art, but more importantly, it offers an intimate look at Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, and conveys how the Jewish communities there lived and worked and interacted with the larger Christian population.

The book design is lovely, the text charming, and the illustrations quite remarkable. Not too long, not too short; it is just right.

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.

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

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.

"Rembrandt's Jews" is a carefully researched history of the influences on the Dutch painter as he made his home in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam. It is true that Rembrandt often painted the faces he saw around him, and I believe that as an artist he was fascinated by the exotic appearances of his Jewish neighbors as contrasted with the plain Dutch faces that he observed everywhere else.

Rembrandt was entranced by light and shadow; his chiaroscuro paintings of the faces of elderly Jewish men testify to the delight he took in the play of light and darkness on facial planes. His treatment of Jewish subjects and themes is always respectful; one even senses a certain awe on his part. His paintings of the local Jews are somber most of the time, the faces staring out from their frames present an alien race, patient, stubborn, mysterious, dignified, and solemn. Rembrandt's own turbulent life is well-documented in the book but by far the most interesting aspect of his life remains these sensitive portraits of Jewish faces, a legacy to the world and a worthwhile study in their own right. The author also goes the extra step in explaining the background of some of the Biblical paintings, for example, Belshazzar's Feast, for a reading public that may not be all that familiar with the Hebrew Bible.

Altogether this is an excellent book for the serious student of history, art, or Judaica.

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.