Rembrandt鈥檚 Jews
Rembrandt’s Jews examines both the legend and the reality of Rembrandt’s relationship to Jews and Judaism. 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 Aterdam, and of the tolerant setting that city provided for Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews fleeing persecution in other parts of Europe. 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.
