Rembrandt's Jews
by Steven Nadler
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"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 show more Rembrandt's relationship to Jews and Judaism. In his elegantly written and engrossing tour of Jewish Amsterdam - which begins in 1633 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."--Jacket. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Perhaps it was my recent trip to Amsterdam or perhaps because I have ancestors who were Dutch Jews - both Sephardic and Ashkenazic - but I found this book profoundly involving. The combination of art and history seemed to humanize what might otherwise have been a relatively dry story and made it come alive. I enjoyed the book immensely.
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This study is a thoughtful, lively, and wide-ranging discussion of Amsterdam’s Jews – as they appear in Rembrandt’s art, as they had business dealings with the artist, and as they lived as new arrivals settling in Holland in the seventeenth century. The author . . . makes accessible to the non-art historian many of the fascinating aspects of Rembrandt’s art and life that concern Jewish show more subjects. Nadler has brought together a great deal of material that contextualizes the relationship between Rembrandt and the Jews of Amsterdam. He has examined Rembrandt’s affinity for the Jews, and implicitly, he has contributed to the Jews’ affinity for Rembrandt. show less
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Author Information
37+ Works 1,904 Members
Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His many books include Rembrandt's Jews, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Spinoza: A Life, and (with Lawrence Shapiro) When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves show more (Princeton). show less
Awards and Honors
Awards
Common Knowledge
- Dedication
- LJCRS Book Fair Selection 5768
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Statistics
- Members
- 112
- Popularity
- 289,995
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.50)
- Languages
- English, Italian
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
