Wisconsin Public Televsion University Place  Rembrandt's Jews Steven Nadler  1/8/13 UP820  cc >> Welcome to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland. The great 17th century Dutch painter and engraver Rembrandt is famous for his portraits of his contemporaries, including some very frank self-portraits. He's also well-known for his paintings of various scenes around Amsterdam and also some biblical illustrations. Not a few of those by any means. Quite a few. He's well-known also for his empathy for the human condition and for his observation of the Jews of Amsterdam. But how sympathetic was Rembrandt to the Jews in his paintings, and what do the paintings and the stories behind them tell us about Rembrandt and the Amsterdam of his day? My guest is Steven Nadler. He is a professor of philosophy at the UW Madison and the author of the book Rembrandt's Jews. Welcome to University Place Presents. 

>> Thank you. Thank you for having me. >> What got you interested in this topic? >> Sort of leftover, in some ways, from work I'd been doing on a philosopher who also lived in Amsterdam in the same period, Baruch Spinoza, and I accumulated, in the course of writing a biography of Spinoza, a lot of material on life in 17th century Amsterdam, and especially Jewish life in 17th century Amsterdam. And I noticed that there were a lot of images produced by Dutch artists of Jewish themes and Jewish individuals and Jewish sites in Amsterdam and in Holland generally. I thought, well, this is a really interesting story. Why do we have this wealth of images of Jewish themes coming from Dutch artists in the 17th century? I thought that would make an interesting story in its own right. >> Is there a story behind the Jewish population in Amsterdam? Is Amsterdam different from other European cities in attracting Jews? >> It was very different. By the early 17th century, it was generally well-known that Jews were permitted to worship, if not publicly, at least without harassment. Spain, Portugal, France, and England at this time were still forbidding Jews to even settle, much less worship. There were a few other cities, Hamburg, Venice, Rome, and Salonica, in the east which had fairly sizable Jewish populations. 

But the Jews who settled in Amsterdam at this time tended to be refugees or descendants of refugees from the inquisitions in Spain and Portugal, and they had originally settled in Antwerp to carry on their business, but when Antwerp fell at the end of the 16th century and became much weaker, it was clear to these individuals and their families that they could easily set up their businesses in Amsterdam and, at the same time, no longer have to pretend that they were Catholics. So Amsterdam, while it may not have been a city of absolute freedom and toleration, as we're often led to believe, was much more liberal in these matters. They wouldn't Catholics practice openly in Amsterdam, but they would let Jews. >> Now, when we say Jews, that's such a collective, such an all-inclusive word, but were they all one kind of Jew that settled in Amsterdam? >> No, they most definitely were not. In fact, there were two general communities of Jews in Amsterdam by the mid-17th century. One were the Spanish and Portuguese merchants and professionals who tended to be fairly well off, and they bought very nice homes on the major boulevards in Amsterdam. And, again, unlike other cities in Amsterdam, they were not required to wear any special clothing, they didn't have to live in a special part of the city, they were free to come and go and pursue their business as they please. And the other group, and they started arriving in the 1630s and 1640s, came from eastern Europe, and they tended to be Jews of Polish, Lithuanian, and central European origin. They are much poorer, and, in fact, they were a bit of embarrassment to the Spanish and Portuguese Jews. They started settling in more low-rent districts of the city, and at one point there were many of these eastern European Jews who were on the poverty rolls of the Portuguese community. 

And, in fact, it was such an embarrassment, the Portuguese Jews were very sensitive about the way in which they were regarded by the Dutch, and these eastern European brethren were, to them, a poor reflection on the Jewish people. And so the Portuguese sometimes used their charitable collections to send the eastern European Jews back east to get them out of the city. >> One big unhappy family. >> Yeah. There was no love lost between them. In fact, if you were a member of the Portuguese community, you could suffer a serious punishment if you were caught engaging in sexual relations with members of the eastern European community. You certainly couldn't marry somebody from that community. You couldn't even buy kosher meat from an Ashkenazic butcher. >> Amsterdam, of course when we talk about the 17th century, has this incredible burgeoning of the arts, painting in particular, but do we see depictions of Jews before that time in art that comes from Holland, from Amsterdam? >> You see a representation of Jews in lots of art before the 17th century. Dutch art but also German art, Italian art. 

However, before the 17th century and outside of the Netherlands it's not a very pretty picture. And you can see from this slide which is a medieval German painting that the Jews, this is true of a good deal of medieval and Renaissance art, the Jews are often portrayed with a high degree of vilification, caricature distortion. They were demonized. Not just in the literature but also in the art. And so if you look at some of the details of this painting, you can see that Jews are portrayed with large hook noses and large lips and half lidded eyes, a very heavy face. >> Kind of a sinister look there too. >> Very sinister. On the next page you see another, this figure is behind the pilot figure in the painting. >> Pontius Pilate. >> Right. 

You have Pilate presenting Jesus to the crowd, and here's a Jew whispering in Pilate's ear. >> Which implies that there's kind of a collaboration, a kind of cabal of some kind going on here which, of course, would play to the sympathies, or the antipathies I guess you would say, of the Christian communities. >> Right. It was both a reflection of those prejudices and also it reinforced them. And what's remarkable about 17th century Dutch art is that we start to see representations of Jewish individuals or individuals we have good reasons for thinking were Jewish which are extraordinary in their ordinariness. There's not caricature. These could easily in many cases be mistaken as typical Dutch citizens. >> Well, and Rembrandt, as I mentioned earlier, and is well-known, was famous for his depiction of the ordinary, including his own face. >> Right. >> Very unromanticized, every day, take what you get kind of appearance, and that's consistent with these images that we get of some of these Jews. 

>> Right. >> In the paintings of Rembrandt. >> Above all, it's a Rembrandt painting and not a picture of a Jew. In fact, in many of the paintings that are by Rembrandt and now bear the label in catalogs Portrait of a Jew or Portrait of a Jewish Man or Portrait of a Rabbi, there are many of them, we actually have no good reasons for thinking these are portraits of Jews. These are labels that the works got in the 18th century. >> Really? So, do we not have titles for any of Rembrandt's paintings? >> Very few. Many of them came from catalogers a century later. So, for example, the next image is often called The Old Rabbi, but there's not reason for thinking that this is, in fact, a portrait of a rabbi. This is an old man with a beard sitting in a chair. >> Do we have reason to believe, do we have reason to believe that he's a Jew? >> No. 

>> What identifies this figure? No. >> It might be a reflection of 18th century prejudices of what they expected Jews to look like. It may be that in the previous painting the skullcap on the head, the cut of the beard, and sort of the Mediterranean look might indicate that this could possibly have been one of Rembrandt's Portuguese neighbors. But, again, there's not certainty about this matter. >> And to whom was Rembrandt selling these paintings? >> That we don't know either. It could have been to some of the wealthier Portuguese families. They could have been biblical paintings. For example, this one is often called also The Old Rabbi With his Cane, but this is a later title. We have no idea, really, what the subject of this painting is, whether it's even a Jewish theme. It could be a biblical theme. 

Maybe Aaron and his rod or one of Jacob's sons or Jacob himself perhaps. And the owners of these paintings would have been, perhaps, the same audience for many of Rembrandt's biblical paintings. We just simply don't know the providence, the original providence of many of these. We have this drawing of Rembrandt's which seems to be something that he simply threw off while walking down the street in which he lived. And you can see the figure on the left here is very similar to the figure we saw in the previous painting. And these very well could be Jews walking in the street, in the neighborhood in which Rembrandt lived. He lived right in the middle of Amsterdam's Jewish district, but not because he was somehow enamored of the Jews that wanted to live in the shtetl but, rather, what became, by the mid century, the Jewish quarter, was, in fact, originally the art district of Amsterdam. This is where painters and dealers lived. And so if you were an artist and wanted to make your name in the Amsterdam art world, it would be a good idea to move into this particular neighborhood. >> Well, one remarkable thing about Amsterdam, I don't know how typical this is of other European cities at the time, but the meticulous record-keeping. 

We know so much about when houses were built, what was paid for, when they were repaired, and even some of the quarrels between and among homeowners. What was Rembrandt's experience living in the Jewish art quarter of Amsterdam. >> It was very typical. As you said, there were quarrels. He apparently was not a very easy person to get along with. This is an etching that he did which is often called The Jews and the Synagogue, but, again, we have no idea who these people, what the real theme of this is. It could very well have been his intention to represent some biblical theme. We do have very good notary records of disputes Rembrandt got into with his neighbors. And, in fact, one of his neighbors, Daniel Pinto, lived right next door, and Pinto was doing repairs on the common wall to their two houses, which was apparently disturbing Rembrandt, and he also wanted Rembrandt to pay for some of the repairs, and they took this to court. We also know who lived in all of these houses along what's now called the Jodenbreestraat, the Jews' Broad Street. 

And if we look at the records of the time, most of the homes were either owned or lived in by artists or Jewish families. And the red arrow there indicates the house that Rembrandt lived in. The house right next to him on the corner was owned by a Jewish family, and almost every other house on that particular block was owned by a Portuguese Jewish family. >> Do we have a sense from the record as to what Rembrandt's relationships with the Jews in his neighborhood were? >> Not really, except for these individual disputes that may have ended up in notary's office. But we don't know whether he had Jewish patrons. We know that in a couple of cases there are early Jewish owners of the works of art, but these sorts of records are few and far between. >> We do know, I gather, that Rembrandt had this chronic need for money, that he tended to overspend what he had? >> He did. He was not very careful. And by the mid to late 1650s he was bankrupt and he had to sell that house he was living in. It was much too expensive a house for him. 

He shouldn't have bought it. >> But we have a sense that he would have drawn or painted artworks that would have somehow appealed to specific people? >> In cases in which he was working on commission or directly for a patron, there would have been very clear directions about the kind of work that this individual wanted. The trouble is we don't know how many of these works were actually painted specifically for patrons or who the patrons were. We do know that there are a couple of cases where a patron was very unhappy with the resulting work. We have one instance where the person who commissioned the portrait of his daughter thought that the painting Rembrandt produced didn't look like his daughter at all and refused to pay for it and took Rembrandt to court. >> And Rembrandt probably said something to the effect of, well, I painted it, you pay for the rest of it. Something like that? >> I painted it, therefore it looks like her. [LAUGHTER] >> You wonder what happened to that one. >> We don't really know. We think he ended up selling it on the open market. 

We do know that the original patron ended up not paying for it. >> What made Rembrandt different from painters that came before him? >> That's a good question. In some ways, it's a very subjective one. There's a sort of depth of feeling in many of Rembrandt's portraits where you don't get a very static, dry rendering of what an individual looked like, but in some respects you get a very deep sense of mood. But you also have action. Even in those portraits where the sitter is sitting still, there's something about a Rembrandt portrait which is not a stock portrait. It's not a set pose. >> In terms of technique, is he different from predecessors? >> If you asked any of his contemporaries, they would say he was sloppy. And some of his contemporaries were able to appreciate this. There's a certain roughness to a Rembrandt painting that we can all recognize, and some of his contemporaries said that they were unfinished or that the paint dripped down the canvas like excrement. 

>> These are other painters though, right? >> Other painters, yes. >> Professional jealous ego in there? >> But, on the other hand, there was a clear, a good degree of appreciation for this. Not just Rembrandt, Frans Hals, who was another 17th century painter, had that same rough technique. He saw that as his signature style. And I think there was a way in which this sort of rough style where you see the paint being handled, it's not very finely finished, it's not a smooth canvas, was a painter's way of calling attention to his technique and a way of showing off, and people tended to appreciate that, or some people tended to appreciate it in the works they bought. >> How many Rembrandt's do we know of? Paintings and etchings and drawings? >> That's a very contentious question. Some years ago, well, some decades ago, there began what's called the Rembrandt Research Project, and their goal was to finally come up with a definitive tally and identification of Rembrandt paintings. That project seems to have fallen apart, both as a matter of disagreement about which paintings belonged and which didn't but also disagreements about principle, how are we going to go about identifying. In fact, what really is our goal in this project? >> There isn't a way of definitively identifying Rembrandt's? >> It really comes down, in some cases, just a matter of connoisseurship. A good eye sees a Rembrandt and can distinguish it from a copy or an imitation. 

>> But wasn't there an example long attributed to Rembrandt, in fact one of his more famous, allegedly, paintings, The Man in the Golden Helmet, which turned out, fairly recently, not to be a Rembrandt at all? >> Or so it's been argued. >> So it's been argued. We don't know for sure. >> Yeah. I think I'm persuaded by some art historians who insist that the whole project of coming up with the definitive corpus of Rembrandt paintings is misguided. Especially because so many of the paintings that appear to be by Rembrandt and have been taken to be by Rembrandt were, in fact, not later copies, that would be easy to determine, but contemporaneous copies either coming from his workshop or from other artists who were copying his works and style. >> Yeah. So I suppose the closer you get to Rembrandt himself in a copy, the harder it is to determine that it's a copy. >> You can't use a dating technique because the dating won't distinguish it. And the workshop method whereby Rembrandt had a number of apprentices doing paintings in his studio really complicates the idea that we can attribute a painting to a single hand. 

>> Are we talking about hundreds, multiple hundreds of Rembrandts? We don't even know that. >> Could be. I think the tendency is for a smaller number, that is to be very conservative in paintings that we're willing to attribute to Rembrandt himself. >> Well, let's assume this next one is a Rembrandt. >> Yes. I think people generally agree that it is. >> It's an intriguing painting if for no other reason than the text there, the Hebrew text, which Rembrandt seems to want us to see first. The way the composition of the painting works with the man and the, I'll call it a turban, with the light striking it and his all frame this burst of light with text. What's going on here? >> Well, the man in the turban is Belshazzar, the Babylonian king, and he, in the middle of a banquet, saw the writing on the walls, so to speak, and it's actually an Aramaic text, and nobody at the banquet could interpret it. And he was told that, in fact, there is somebody in the court, one of the exiled Jews living in Babylon who, and this would be Daniel, who could interpret the text for him. 

So Daniel was brought in, and he read the text. He said yes it says -- and the meaning is your days are numbered. >> You've been weighed and found wanting. >> Right, that's another way of putting it. Because a mina is a unit of measurement and a shekel is a half of a mina, and so these are decreasing units of measurement. The interesting thing about this painting is that Rembrandt seems very confident and bold in his use of Aramaic characters. This is not something you often see in medieval Renaissance and early modern art. Very often an artist will make a few scrolls pointing in the right direction and block letters, and if it looks sufficient Hebraic, it's Hebrew. But Rembrandt went to a good deal of trouble to figure out how exactly the writing would have appeared on the wall to Belshazzar, and he has a very good sense of what, or a very good sense of what one interpretation of the story from the Book of Daniel would have looked like. >> And would Rembrandt's contemporaries know immediately what this represented? >> Yes. 

This was a very biblically literate society, at least in certain circles. And here again we have, in the case of this painting, which is Moses with the Tablets of the Law, Rembrandt, I want to say very carefully making sure that he got the Hebrew right. Although, there are some mistakes with the Hebrew in this text. But there's a certain boldness and forthrightness with which he was willing to deal with the Hebrew. He obviously was consulting with somebody because there's no reason for thinking that Rembrandt knew Hebrew. And if we compare this with the next image, we can see that other artists really weren't so fastidious. This is a drawing also from the 17th century by a Dutch artist. And the writing that we see here could very well be physics for all we can tell. It's just a bunch of blocky looking shapes. So I think this really does distinguish Rembrandt not from all other artists, but it does distinguish him from a good many artists who really didn't take the care to get the Hebrew right. 

And this testifies a kind of familiarity on Rembrandt's part, at least with some aspects of Jewish culture. >> It makes him a bit of a journalist, doesn't it? >> I suppose so. The care for accuracy. >> Yeah, for accuracy. And in terms of art history and art styles, is it not right to call him a realist? >> It depends what you mean by that term.  >> Attention to detail. Attention to real detail. >> In that sense, but detail would also have to include emotional detail. It would have to include expressiveness and not just some kind of mapping of what it was you'd see with your eyes. The interesting question about that Belshazzar painting is where did Rembrandt get the confidence to do Hebrew in that way? And where exactly did he get the idea that that is how the Aramaic appeared to Belshazzar because there's nothing in the biblical text that says how the message was written. 

>> Right. >> He did it in a very specific way. Why didn't Belshazzar understand the text? Well, in some rabbinical writings there's a debate about whether the words appeared in code or whether they were written backwards, and one rabbi suggests, well, they were written from right to left, as Aramaic is, but rather than horizontally, they were written in vertical columns. And that's exactly how it appears in Rembrandt's painting, in vertical columns from right to left, which would have made it difficult even if somebody knew Aramaic to figure out that's what was going on. So what we want to know is, why did Rembrandt portray the letters in his painting in that particular manner? And the answer is almost certainly because he knew this person here, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel who was one of the four main rabbis in the Portuguese community. On the top here we have a portrait of Menasseh by the 17th century Dutch artist Jan Lievens, and below that we have a drawing by Rembrandt which is supposed to be a portrait of Menasseh but it probably is not. The interesting thing about Menasseh is that he wrote a book in which he explicitly addresses the question of how did the words appear to Belshazzar in the Book of Daniel. And he doesn't discuss alternative versions. He says here's how it appeared. >> It was definitive. 

>> Definitive. And if we look at his text, we can see that's exactly how it appears in Menasseh's own work, in vertical columns from right to left. >> So here's another look at the Rembrandt painting, and then this will, if we look more closely at the characters and this takes us to the original text. >> Right. That's exactly how it appears in the Rembrandt painting. So I suspect that Rembrandt walked down the street, Menasseh lived on the same block as he did, and said, can you give me a hand with this painting? >> What do we know about Rembrandt's subjects for his paintings? Did he do, as I suppose some contemporary paintings would do today, just have sort of a collection of costumes and props and invite the person next door or somebody who had an interesting looking face to come in and pose? >> That seems to be the way he did it. If you go into the Rembrandt House Museum today, you can see they've recreated what it was like when he was living there, and you can see all of the costumes and objects that he used in his paintings. Some of the paintings, many of the paintings are, in fact, portraits of identifiable individuals. For example, the famous portrait of Jan Six. These were commissioned portraits of people who we know who they were and I'm sure Rembrandt worked directly for them. 

A lot of the portraits are what are called tronies which are sort of genre portraits. Not necessarily portraits of identified individuals done on their commission but having people pose for a certain kind of pseudo portrait. >> So what kind of subjects would he go for? What was his selection? >> Biblical subjects. >> Biblical? >> Biblical, military, anything from poor merchants to wealthy professionals. He seems to have had a very broad view of the gamut of humanity, at least in Amsterdam. >> Wasn't his wife one of his favorite models? >> She was. Saskia. >> What sort of poses and guises did he paint her in? >> A good variety. Sometimes she served as a model for a biblical figure. Susanna, for example. 

And sometimes he dressed her up and capture various moods. She was one of his favorite subjects. >> Now, if we're talking about biblical subjects of the Old Testament, wouldn't most of those characters, wouldn't most of those characters be depictions of Jews? >> In a literal sense yes because if you're depicting individuals from Hebrew scripture, you're depicting Jewish individuals. >> Right. >> It doesn't follow, though, that the individuals whom Rembrandt had sit for him were themselves Jews. It's been a commonplace in much older Rembrandt scholarship to believe that any time Rembrandt painted a figure from Hebrew scripture he must have gone to the Portuguese or Ashkenazic Jews in the neighborhood and said I need a Jew. There's no reason for thinking that that was the case. >> Didn't make that distinction there. >> No. And we also have some images here I see of some interior shots of various buildings to be associated with Jews in Amsterdam. 

>> Well, in the book I wanted to broaden the theme because Rembrandt wasn't the only artist who seemed interested in Jewish themes and Jewish sites. And one of the interesting genres of painting in 17th century Dutch art is the portrayal of an architectural interior. This is a portrait of the interior of a church by Pieter Saenredam who made a brilliant career, a very meticulous career of painting with geometrical and perspectival precision the interiors of churches. And so you could tell this is certainly not a Catholic church just from the ostentatious plainness of the walls. There are no paintings or crucifixes here. Emanuel de Witte was another painter who made a career out of painting architectural interiors. He wasn't as concerned with geometrical rigor as Saenredam but more with capturing the color and the atmosphere of the  interior. And this is the interior of a Calvinist church that he painted. De Witte also painted the interior of the Portuguese synagogue that was built in 1675 in Amsterdam, a synagogue which still stands. And this is the painting, one of three versions of the Portuguese synagogue that he painted. 

Only two extant now. One of them was last seen during World War II and was lost somewhere in Germany. If you go back and forth between this painting and the previous one, you can see that de Witte treats the interior of the Jewish synagogue just as if it's another ordinary architectural interior. >> Right. >> And, in fact, if I didn't tell you that that was a synagogue, you would think here's another Christian church. This is the Christian church but if you look architecturally in terms of the chandeliers. >> Right, the arching. >> Yep. The Portuguese Jews did commission a Dutch architect for the interior. I suspect they wanted this to look like just another religious building in Amsterdam, although it happened to be one that would serve as a synagogue. 

Again, it's the ordinariness in the treatment of a Jewish site which distinguishes this tradition in Dutch art from earlier caricatures and demonizations of Jews and Jewish themes. >> So, again, it's just kind of every day quality. Whether it's a church or a synagogue, it's a place in Amsterdam today. >> Exactly. And in fact the synagogue was a very popular place in Amsterdam. It was on the typical tourist itinerary if you were an English person or French person since you wouldn't have synagogues openly in your country, and if you're passing through Amsterdam, it was a popular thing to go and watch the Jews pray on the -- in Amsterdam. >> Here's another image of a synagogue. This from another painter. >> This is from Romeyn de Hooghe, and this is, actually it's the interior of the same synagogue, and it's an engraving that de Hooghe did on the day of the inauguration ceremony in 1675 of the synagogue. You can see the great deal of celebrating there, and they're not just Jews. 

Everybody who's anybody in Amsterdam was there for this grand event. >> That does give you a fascinating image of a city, doesn't it? Of the, well, say for lack of a better word, the communal nature of this city where everything was pretty much open and interesting. Not unlike Amsterdam today I might say. >> Well, like Amsterdam today, it was a small city. You had to mix. And these Portuguese Jews mixed socially and in business ways with their Dutch neighbors. There was no separation. >> Those walls, yes, those buildings with the common walls were very close together, weren't they? >> Yep. Yeah. This is an image of the earlier Portuguese synagogue, which by the late 1650s or '60s the community had outgrown. 

>> It looks like more of a wooden structure? >> Yeah, much more modest. In fact, this was originally a warehouse, two warehouses that were combined to form a synagogue. >> Now we're going to go outdoors? >> Right. >> And what's taking us there? >> Well, again, the same theme about the way in which Dutch art normalizes Jewish themes. So this is a landscape by the Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael. A typical Ruisdael landscape. You have this wandering road leading toward a little village in the background, lush vegetation, and these incredibly rich Dutch skies. It seems to be the drama in a Dutch landscape is always up in the air. >> A lot of flat ground. >> Right. 

And then clouds. >> Right. >> Which if you go to the Netherlands, that's the way it is. You look at that sky and from one minute to the next it's always changing. And then one day in the 1650s, Ruisdael went to Aldekerk, which is about 10 kilometers outside of Amsterdam, and they did some sketching from the Portuguese cemetery that Amsterdam's Portuguese Jews had been able to purchase some years before. This is where all the great members of the community were buried. >> It strikes me as a strange subject for an etching somehow. And I don't see any human figures in it either. >> There are none. This is clearly just a preparatory drawing. 

He did two drawings that we know of at this point in Aldekerk, both of the same set of graves but from different angles. So this is one drawing and you can see the Aldekerk, the old church in the background. And then in the next drawing you see the same graves from a different side. And you can see that Ruisdael was not as concerned with Rembrandt as actually getting the Hebrew writing. He's just got some scribbles on the stone there. And so then Ruisdael went back to his studio and he created a number of paintings, which now bear the title The Jewish Cemetery, that incorporates these drawings, the drawings of these tombs into a much more fantastic site. So, if we go to the next image, this is one of the paintings that Ruisdael did incorporating those drawings from the Jewish cemetery. This is not what the cemetery Aldekerk looks like. It doesn't have these rocky outcroppings. There are not church ruins on the grounds. 

This is an imaginary picture, but, again, it's the ordinariness with which Ruisdael is willing to treat what would obviously be known to contemporaries as a Jewish burial site. Again, the Jewish cemetery at Aldekerk is transformed into a typical Ruisdaelian landscape just like the synagogue is transformed into a typical de Witte architectural interior. This is one of the other paintings that we have from Ruisdael of the Jewish cemetery. >> It gives it mystique, I'll have to say that. The other is ordinary. >> Yeah. >> The other drawings, the preparatory sketches, but by the time you get to the finished product, and it was so, I don't know if chiaroscuro is the right term here, but the contrast between the white cube in the middle, lower middle of the painting and the rest of it is a dramatic contrast. >> It is a very dramatic painting. Even much more so than the other one which has a much brighter landscape. And you can see in this painting all of the typical Ruisdaelian themes. 

You have the very lush greenery, but at the same time this dying birch tree in the foreground. This is something that appears, if we go to the next image, that appears in many of Ruisdael's landscapes. >> And this landscape also strikes me as being unusual for the time in that you have, in fact it's called, probably by one of those 18th century guys, Landscape with Blasted Tree, and it sounds like something you would see in the early 19th century rather than the middle of the 17th. >> It's very romantic. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> What sense do we have from Ruisdael or other contemporaries of Rembrandt's in terms of their attitude towards Jews? It's one thing to paint a cemetery. >> Right. >> But it's another to actually depict Jews. >> It's hard to say. 

We don't want to read too much into this. Who know what Rembrandt really felt about Jewish people or what de Witte or Ruisdael did. But I think one of the lessons is that regardless of what may have been their personal opinions, there was, at least in the art, a reflection of this notion that the Jews are not so demonic. They're not the enemy within. There were, of course, elements in Dutch society that would have like to have seen the Jews expelled. But for the most part, this was a very tolerant nation that also saw the Jewish communities as essential to the economic flourishing. There was no way that the Dutch were about to expel the Jews the way in which the Spanish did a century and a half earlier. They realized that this would be an economic disaster. >> I gather the main concern about the Jews in Holland was, in terms of theology, was just that, oh, what if they convert our Christian children. >> Right. 

And there were very serious penalties imposed both within the Jewish community and from the Dutch community forbidding theological discussions between Jews and Gentiles. It would be taken very seriously if a Jew were caught attempting to convert a Gentile. >> Now, speaking of things that do have people in them, Jews in them, we have here a ceremony of some kind. >> Right. This Romeyn de Hooghe again, and this is his drawing of obviously a very wealthy Portuguese Jewish family celebrating the bris. So you have the grandfather in the middle holding the child. The mother is still in bed to the right. Off to the left you see the father who's looking very uncomfortable with the whole thing. What's interesting about this painting is not just that we got a good sense of the wealth of these Jewish families, you can tell from the draperies in the windows, the very expensive looking rug on the floor, but if you look up on the walls, you can see that these Portuguese Jews also spend a good deal of money buying art. One of the themes of the book is what accounts for the richness of Jewish themes in 17th century Dutch art. 

And I think one of the explanations is that the Jews themselves must have been buying it, and we see from this image that they were perfectly willing to give a wink to the second commandment and put, those are very expensive paintings on the walls of this house. Those are big history paintings. So, it may be that a lot of the images we're looking at, perhaps the paintings of the Jewish cemetery or the paintings of the synagogue were done for Jewish patrons. >> We have to get back to the marketplace. It's one thing to be a great painter, albeit unrecognized by many, but you do have to make a living with those paintings. >> Right. >> And the only way to do that would be to sell them. And, of course, you have to sell to the market. >> That's right. >> You have to sell where the demand is. 

>> I think the demand went be on the Jewish community, though. We know that there was a really deep taste for Jewish themes, not just among the Jews but also among Dutch Gentiles. One of the themes of Dutch history, and especially the way in which the Dutch saw themselves, was as God's new chosen people. Amsterdam was a new Jerusalem, and just had the Israelites had been liberated from the idolatress Egyptians by God's providence, so the Dutch were liberated with God's providence from the idolatress Spanish Catholics. >> They had been under the control of Spain. >> Right. And so they saw their own history as a reflection or as a latter-day retelling of the history of the ancient Israelites. And that gave the Dutch a certain fascination with Jews and Jewish history, and especially stories like the Book of Esther. So, Esther's great virtue was the she was able to, while keeping her Jewish identity a secret for a long time from her husband, King Ahasuerus, finally revealed herself as a Jew in order to save her people. And so the Book of Esther and the courage that Esther showed was a very popular theme among Dutch artists, and you see it portrayed much more often in Dutch art than you do in other national arts. 

>> That's intriguing how that escape from the Egyptian bondage keeps reverberating in the way, certainly it was reverberated in this country with the African Americans. >> Right. >> They made the same analogy, but the Dutch, that's a little bit of a less known analogy that was made. >> And if you look at the literature of the time, we see plays devoted to the same biblical themes, especially with the Book of Esther. This is a painting by Jan Steen, who's famous for these very messy Dutch interiors with broken things all over the place. But this is one of his paintings from the Book of Esther. If you look at the drama of the period, the poetry, there's a very nice fascination with Israelite history and the ways in which Dutch contemporary events or recent events are evidence that God's favor now shines on a new chosen people. >> Well, but again, the emphasis, as you seem to be saying, Steve, was on the emotional value in the painting. We see that in painters other than Rembrandt at this time? >> We do. I think painters like Hals, Frans Hals, there's one trend in scholarship in 17th century Dutch art which emphasizes what this author calls the mapping impulse, that 17th century Dutch art is about is mapping the world, giving us as accurate and scientific a representation as possible of what we see around us, landscapes, buildings, and people. 

But I think that's too empty, emotionally, but also to empty it intellectually. There's a kind of moralizing going on in 17th century Dutch art. There's a symbolic way of reading a lot of these paintings, but I think there's also a very emotional richness to this art, which we don't want to lost sight of that in emphasizing their obvious representational virtues as well. >> It's a distinction that's sometimes made in music a little bit later in the 18th century between a Handel and a Bach. Bach was interested in the religious value of music to a great extent. Of course, those were his, in effect, patrons. Whereas, Handel was more interested in the dramatic and the theatrical. Although the themes might be the same, the expression of them came out differently, and it's as if, you mentioned drama, Dutch drama of the 17th century, it's as if there was this really keen interest in the dramatic, whether it's onstage or in a painting. >> I think we have to let a hundred tulips bloom. [LAUGHTER] As interesting and important it is to investigate the representational skills, the mapping skills of a lot of these works, I don't think we should ignore the symbolic, the moralizing, and the emotional elements in a lot of Dutch art as well. 

>> So, that was going on at the same time that Rembrandt was doing the more emotional paintings? >> Yeah. I'm not sure I would say Rembrandt was doing the emotional and they were doing the mapping. But I think if we go, a lot of the paintings of Jan Steen they have that beautiful representational precision, but at the same time, there's definitely a kind of moralizing going on. And we see in emblem books from the period where images are coordinated with certain moralizing themes. >> When we talk about the purposes of art in the 17th century as opposed to paintings, which presumably would be for hanging on a wall somewhere, the etchings and the engravings or the drawings would more likely have been used as actually illustrations in books, or would they also have been framed? >> Illustrations in books but also just for mass dissemination of images. Especially paintings. A lot of the etchings that we have were done after paintings because a painting can only go to one person, but many artists worked with engravers and produced, created reproducible images of their paintings for broader dissemination. >> So, when we look at the big picture, finally we come back to square one where we started with this, Rembrandt's relationship with Jews and his depictions of Jews in paintings, there seem to have been two extreme schools of thought over the years. That he was either very sympathetic on the one hand, or that, no, he actually had some ulterior motive on the other. >> Some scholars have argued that that hidden motive was conversional. 

That he was trying to appeal to the Jews to get them to convert to Calvinism. >> While selling them paintings. >> Right. I think there's no evidence, there's not sufficient evidence for either one. I think we have to avoid mythologizing Rembrandt. It's very tempting to do because his paintings seem to speak to us in such subtle and emotional ways, and it's easy to get caught up in the myth of Rembrandt the philosemite or the myth of Rembrandt the millenarian conversionist. I think we have to let the works and the documents speak for themselves. >> And, as you say, there's always a lot of room, ultimately, for the subjective. >> Yeah. >> That your interpretation is as good as mine, and the next person's might be completely different. 

>> Yeah. I wouldn't want to say that that's universally true. I'm willing to concede that there are scholars out there who know, I'll defer to scholars who have spent lifetimes studying Rembrandt, and I wouldn't say that in front of a Rembrandt painting what one person sees is as good as what another person sees. I do think that there are boundaries, there's scholarship to be done, and I think we should take relief in that, but at the same time, we should be somewhat suspicious even of scholars who attempt to co-opt Rembrandt from one camp to the other. >> The bottom line would seem to be that Rembrandt was very much a man of his time and place and was very much connected to his surroundings. >> Right. I think that's a very important point. We tend to want to take a genius outside of his or her time, and there were artists and then there was Rembrandt, and Rembrandt is eternal or transcends but that's nonsense, of course. >> Well, it's been a fascinating conversation. Steve Nadler has been my guest. 

I'm Norman Gilliland. Thanks for joining us, and I hope you can be with us the next time around for University Place Presents.