Rembrandt and the Jews, a two-part symposium, examined Jewish themes in Rembrandt's art and aspects of his life related to the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam where he lived. The symposium took place on December 5; the first session ran from 3:30-5:30 p.m. and the second session from 7:30-9:30 p.m., both in Room L160 Elvehjem Museum of Art, 800 University Avenue, Madison. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, this event was free and open to the public.
Two art historians and two historians spoke about Jews and Jewish themes in Rembrandt's art, life, and times. Living for a time in Amsterdam's Jewish quarter, Rembrandt came into regular contact with Portuguese, Spanish, and eastern European Jews who had fled to the Netherlands to escape religious persecution. He collaborated and had business dealings with his Jewish neighbors. He also produced paintings, drawings, and etchings of them. He used Jewish models for figures in his Bible paintings and consulted with rabbis on how best to represent Jewish themes in his art. The symposium explored these and other aspects of Rembrandt's relationship to Jews and Judaism.
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Miriam Bodian |
Miriam Bodian offers a slide-presentation on "Protestant Bible-Reading and the Image of the Jews." Her lecture discusses how the Protestant style of Old Testament reading, de-emphasizing Christology and emphasizing hearth and home and story-telling, contributed to a changing image of Jews. Bodian is associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University and author of Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, a study of Amsterdam's Sephardic Jews in the seventeenth century.
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Shelley Perlove |
Shelley Perlove's talk, "Breaking Challah: Rembrandt's Supper at Emmaus (1648) and the Jews of Amsterdam," examines how Rembrandt's painting reflects the attitudes and strategies of a group of Christian reformers in Amsterdam centered around Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel who sought a rapprochement with Jews. A professor of art history at the University of Michigan at Dearborn and a prominent Rembrandt scholar, Perlove has published widely on the intersection of art, politics, and religion.
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Larry Silver |
Larry Silver, professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, specializes in painting and the graphic arts of the Low Countries. His lecture, "New Jerusalem: Rembrandt, Jews, and Christians," considered Rembrandt's concern for Christian-Jewish relationships. Silver argues that despite Rembrandt's regular contact with Jewish neighbors, his art most often stresses traditional contrasts between Jewish law and Christian grace, possibly signaling Rembrandt's hope for Jewish conversions to usher in a millennial epoch during the 1650s.
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Daniel Swetschinski |
Historian Daniel Swetschinski speaks on "The Biblical Imagination of Rembrandt's Portuguese Jewish Neighbors," a comparison of Amsterdam's Portuguese Jews' use of the Bible and Rembrandt's biblical works. Swetschinski is the author of Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam, which won the National Jewish Book Award.