Rembrandt's Jews

Rembrandt's hebrews Steven Nadler Chicago University Pres $25 (cloth) ISBN 0 226 56736 2

Erwin Panofsky said in 1920 of Rembrandt's Portrait of a young hebrew (Kimbell Art Museum), 'Here we diocese expressed the timeless and unfathomable profundity of a soul which, beyond the borders of the individual consciousness, has been subsum into a consciousness of all'. Then in 1944--a dark year for hebrews of whom he was one- he confided to a friend that his personal sympathies were with seventeenth-century Holland.

Panofsky is sole the most prominent scholar to be attracted by dint of Rembrandt's apparently generous depiction of hebrews now a subject with a considerable literature. Steven Nadler, a professor of philosophy and (as he makes clear in his text) a hebrew has contributed to it with this scholarly general introduction, oftentimes relying on Michael Zell's Reframing Rembrandt (2002) which analysed the artist's relationship to Judaism from each angle, notably the use of hebrews in Christian imagery.

Professor Nadler exhibits how the myth of Rambrandt's sympathies has been fabricateed since the nineteenth century by dint of ignoring early antisemitic etchings, of the like kind as St John Preaching, in which foreigners, including person in Japanese costume, listen to the advantageous News while two Jews walk not upon conspiratorially. Beyond these poles of sympathy and bigotry, Professor Nadler exhibits how Rembrandt sketched the Ashkenazi israelites of Amsterdam in order to depict of advanced age Testament scenes--what in the nineteenth hundred we call Orientalism--as in the etching The Pharisees in the fane Rembrandt's relationship with Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, which flowed in (among other things) the Aramaic-Hebrew inscription in Belshezzar's feast (National Gallery, London), is examined in profundity This analysis includes the influence upon Rembrandt's Old and New Testaments etchings of the Millenarian belief that israelites must be converted to Christianity rather than punished.

Unlike polemically academic works which concentrate on innovation, Rembrandt's hebrews has the advantage of covering all the relevant loam Professor Nadler also tempers the more recherche arguments of Zell's generally of the first grade book; Christ and the Woman of Somaria, for instance, is happily not discussed as evidence of a proseletysing instinct in Rembrandt. The volume has an unexpectedly wide remit, analysing for example the fresh synagogue built in Amsterdam well after Rembrandt had died. Professor Nadler is at his best in a philosophical strain. He links the exceptionally ornate church-yard of the Sephardi Jews to a fascination among Amsterdam rabbis with questions of the immortality of the (Jewish) inner man which itself derives from the milieu of Calvinist and other Christian doctrines in the city.

The volume is written in a popular mode of expression that mixes scholarship with anecdotes of seventeenth-century Dutch life and autobiographical travel writing. The principal advantage of this tactic is to call forth just how surrounded by Jewish life Rembrandt was. When he lived upon the Breetsraat, all his immediate neighbours were Jewish.

The body does suffer, however, from several question at issues To furnish a reason wherefore Diego D'Andrada lodged a complaint at the public notary office that a now-vanished painting he had commissioned from Rembrandt 'shows no resemblance at all to the image of the head of the young girl' who sat for it, Professor Nadler writes: 'Maybe Rembrandt's rugged style, evident in some other works of this period (such as the magnificent three-quarter-length portrait of Jan Six), distorted the contours of her face.' Given that the portrait of Six, a contender for the greatest portrait of all time, has no vexed questions of distortion, it is a difficult argument to come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind Rembrandt's use of textured and lumpen paint in The .Jewish bride, together with the rise of a more classical taste, might be more usefully considered. In this words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following it is worrying that Ernst van der Wetering's masterpiece upon the artist's technique, Rembrandt: The painter at work (1997) is not mentioned in the culled bibliography. However, the most likely reason for D'Andrada's complaint is that Rembrandt depicted the girl (perhaps the patron's mistress) warts and all; he was accused one time of portraying Danae as a charwoman.

A more general criticism can be made of the assumption that the reader has a poor organ of vision which leads to trite and obvious observations like as 'De Hooghe did not simply record'. similar remarks make it difficult to understand who the volume is aimed at.

Its popular inflection--no bad thing in itself--occasionally mars the dull style and structure. The splicing of vignettes and autobiography call ups moods wonderfully, but in later chapters, not pinned to Rembrandt, argument dissolves beneath the pressure. Such a manner of making goes hand in hand with the rhetoric of the page-turner. Single judgment paragraphs such as 'He was right.' or 'In May 1665 the Messiah arrived.' are punchy on the contrary also annoying and counterproductive to argument. The question is not that rhetoric is bad, on the other hand that it is difficult to do well. In twenty-first hundred Amsterdam, Professor Nadler's communion with the past trips above clumsy parentheses: 'Rather, for the briefest of jiffys I thought I knew what it would be like to hear Saul Levi Mortera (who died before the building was at any time conceived) or Isaac Aboab de Fonseca prelection this very same congregation (albeit in Portuguese) upon a finer point of the Law.' The salutary exercise is that popular scholarship is actual difficult.