Was Rembrandt van Rijn Jewish? No, of course not. His Protestant beliefs are well known. But who hasn't heard about the great Dutch painter's empathy for the children of Israel, a supposed quality that has led to the claim, time and again, that he really had a "Jewish soul?"

Next July 15 marks the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth, and the museums of Amsterdam are gearing up for the event, each focusing on another aspect of the artist's oeuvre. Examining the relationship of Rembrandt (1606-1669) to the Jews has fallen to Amsterdam's Jewish Historical Museum, which has already taken the bold step of announcing an exhibition, set for next July, entitled "The 'Jewish' Rembrandt." The show will tackle head-on the many romantic and undisciplined notions of a Jewish connection that have affixed themselves to Rembrandt's persona

"We're knee deep in the mythology of the artist's connection to the Jews," explains Mirjam Alexander, the exhibition's project manager, "and we have to set the record straight." For one thing, there's the variety of supposedly Jewish types in his body of work. Rembrandt's canvases range from images with Biblical themes to portraits of "Jewish Bride" as well as others who have been identified as well-known Jewish figures from the artist's day. Then there are the claims that among the artist's friends number many Jews, that he intentionally chose to live among Jews, and that he was a student of Hebrew.

This evidence, which was assembled in the 19th century, pointed in only one direction - toward a romantic notion that Rembrandt had a Jewish dimension to his personality. How else, its
champions claim, could you account for his sympathetic portrayals of a much-despised people?

"The myth of Rembrandt's Jewishness has its own life," says Bob van den Boogert, curator of the nearby Rembrandt House Museum. "It revolves around Rembrandt's so-called special affection for the Jews as a race of long-suffering people, in whose melancholic faces the horrors of humanity are documented," he says. "The truth is that Jewish sitters were used for Old Testament scenes out of a desire for authenticity. Dutch art is basically realistic, and that means using a Jewish model for a Jewish subject. This is an artistic consideration, not a case of philo-Judaism."

How did this myth spring up? "The origins go back to Rembrandt's time," says Edward van Voolen, senior curator of the Jewish Historical Museum. "It is part of a general Dutch affinity for the ancient Israelites, who cast off their oppressors much as the Dutch did in their successful war of independence against the Spanish, resulting in Amsterdam becoming known as the 'New Jerusalem' in 1648." Stories like that of Samson and the Philistines and the Maccabees' victory over the Syrians became popular scenes in 17th-century Dutch art. Furthermore, unlike Catholicism, the prevalent Protestant theological system in the Netherlands, Calvinism, suggests art historian Doron J. Lurie, "made no distinction between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in terms of Scriptural authority. Artists, therefore, had no restrictions on the types of stories they could illustrate."

It was in this extraordinary spirit of freedom and optimism that the artist worked. "Rembrandt was interested in the Jews, but he was equally interested in other 'curiosities' as well, including Persians, Indians and Africans," says Lurie, who is chief curator of 16th-19th century art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, as well as a member of the Amsterdam Jewish Historical Museum's steering committee. Undeterred, the mythmakers, whose numbers over time have included a chief rabbi and a poet laureate, insist on the Jewish dimension of Rembrandt. Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the Land of Israel, claimed that the Dutchman possessed a "Jewish soul." After having seen some of his canvases at London's National Gallery, he is said to have remarked that the artist was a tzaddik, and someone who understood the light of creation.

Israel's national poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik, also believed that Rembrandt had a Jewish soul. In 1907 Bialik visited the Hague for the Eighth Zionist Congress and spent many hours in the Mauritshuis admiring Rembrandt's works. Sixteen years later, he agreed to write a foreword to a monograph on Rembrandt, the first in a series on the Old Masters that was being edited in Berlin by Soviet Jewish artist Leonid Pasternak. Pasternak wrote that he had decided to begin the series with Rembrandt because of the artist's sympathetic portrayal of Jews. Praising Pasternak's decision, Bialik wrote that "Rembrandt, in a wonderful way, had achieved a Jewish soul, and after all the research had been finished on this subject, it would turn out that Rembrandt, more than any other artist, was the best chronicler of the Jews."

Spurred on by such panegyrics, the public imagination has cobbled together a list of reasons for its belief in Rembrandt's deep-down Jewish essence. The first of these is the belief that
Rembrandt had many Jewish friends. "The myths revolving around his Jewish friends are wild," says Mirjam Alexander. "There are even claims that Rembrandt's change in style to a darker palette around 1654
coincided with the excommunication of
his friend Baruch Spinoza.

"The reality, however, is a bit different," she explains with a conspiratorial smile, as if letting you in on a family secret. "Our knowledge of Rembrandt's relationships with Jews comes chiefly through court litigation. He was sued by his next-door neighbor about a common wall; by a client who thought the artist's depiction of his daughter was faulty; and by a collector who purchased sole rights to a Rembrandt copper plate only to find that the artist had flooded the market with etchings from that plate."

Lurie adds that art historians "know of only six instances of Rembrandt's connections with Jews, and three of them ended in court," adds Lurie. "Far from being friendly to the Jews, you could make the opposite argument - that Rembrandt had ample reason to become an anti-Semite," he says, only half in jest.

The second explanation comes from Rembrandt's choosing to live in a Jewish neighborhood. Van den Boogert, however, says that Rembrandt lived on Jodenbreestraat ("Jewish Broadway") solely "for economic reasons," adding that "since this part of town was no longer exclusive, it represented an opportunity to live in a reasonably prosperous neighborhood of various ethnicities. Many artists' studios were there, including that of Rembrandt's first Amsterdam teacher. The belief that Rembrandt deliberately moved to this street to be near the Jews is simply not true." In fact, the name "Jodenbreestraat" was adopted only in the 18th century. During Rembrandt's years there, it was called simply Breestraat.

In addition, Rembrandt was already familiar with the neighborhood. Some time before he purchased his property at No. 4, he had lived next door, at No. 2, which was the home of an art dealer whose niece, Saskia, the artist married. Today the artist's residence is host to the Rembrandt House Museum, which has been restored to reflect the ambience in which Rembrandt lived, worked and carried on his art business for nearly two decades (1639-1658).

Then there is Rembrandt's use of Hebrew. There are eight paintings with Hebrew inscriptions - supposedly proof of the artist's intimate knowledge of the language. To account for this, one over-the-top writer actually postulated that Rembrandt studied Hebrew at Leyden University. "We know Rembrandt matriculated at the university," says Alexander, "but there is no further mention of him, a sign that he probably dropped out to pursue his career as an artist."

Rembrandt's ability to incorporate Hebrew texts on his canvases may have been no more than knowing to which authority to turn. He did know Jews on a professional level, having supplied the rabbi and writer Menasseh ben Israel with illustrations for his 1655 "La Piedra Gloriosa," a work on mysticism that was published in Amsterdam in 1655. Ben Israel was a catercorner neighbor of the artist.

Another sign of Rembrandt's sympathy for Jews is his choice of supposedly Jewish subjects. "After a lecture I delivered at the Newark Museum in 2001, I was approached by several people who believed that only an artist with a Jewish neshamah could have painted 'The Jewish Bride' in such a touching way," says van Voolen. "They also gushed over 'all those handsome portraits of rabbis.' I didn't have the heart to say that not only are the sitters unlikely to be Jewish or newlyweds, they may not even be portraits in the conventional sense.

"And as for the rabbis," van Voolen sighs, as if reluctantly hammering another nail into the coffin of wishful thinking, "they probably aren't. Rembrandt was once given authorship of 16 rabbi portraits, including the 1664 masterpiece in Florence's Uffizi Gallery, which is now entitled 'Portrait of an Old Man.' There weren't that many rabbis in the entire Netherlands. These paintings are more likely psycho-
logical or personality types."

Rembrandt was once given credit for being the first artist to depict a synagogue interior, in an etching of 10 praying men called "Jewish Worshipers in a Synagogue." Its huge columns and cavernous space must refer to a large-scale structure, but the only candidate, the Portuguese synagogue, was not yet built during Rembrandt's lifetime.
Rembrandt was never held in disrepute, but it was not until the 19th century that his reputation emerged from under the stinging academic rebuke that it suffered because of his work's lack of classical orientation. With the rise of European realism, however, Rembrandt's "grubby" types came into vogue, inspiring a generation of artists, including Millet, Courbet and Manet. For their part, the Impressionists too were agog at his rich, impasto brushstrokes. His new popularity opened the floodgates for scholars and dealers to search for more paintings from Rembrandt's hand, and his body of work increased dramatically. At the height of Rembrandtmania, around the turn of the 20th century, approximately 700 paintings had been attributed to him, a number since reduced by half.

With the undisciplined growth of Rembrandt's oeuvre, his "Jewish" paintings ballooned in number as well. As late as 1971, Rembrandt's "Jewish" subjects stood at a massive 78. With today's more scientific approach, that number is shrinking rapidly. That development, ironically, lies at the heart of the Jewish Historical Museum's exhibition.

"We're not approaching this as a Rembrandt exhibition but as a Jewish Rembrandt show, so we want to display works which in the past had been considered Jewish, but are no longer interpreted as such," says van Voolen. "We are looking for 'discarded' Rembrandts, works that are no longer thought to be by his hand, but have a Jewish theme. We want to understand why they came to be called Rembrandts in the first place." In fact, in all of Rembrandt's oeuvre, he has only two subjects, the Portuguese physician Ephraim Bueno and Menasseh ben Israel, who are indisputably Jews.

Lurie thinks that the Jewish identification of Rembrandt is part of a pattern: "We Jews love to adopt great people as our own. Recently it was claimed that [17th-century Spanish artist] Diego Velazquez might have been a Marrano [a crypto-Jew]. And when a Jew leaves the faith, we are quick to issue a disclaimer of a forced conversion in exchange for professional success.

"Even Tel Aviv's street names play a role in the conspiracy to claim Rembrandt as our own," Lurie continues. "Look where we have placed Rembrandt Street. It is not in the same neighborhood as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo streets. Rather, it is adjacent to roads named for Soutine, Modigliani, Antokolsky and the Biblical Bezalel. Why would anyone growing up in that neighborhood think Rembrandt was anything but Jewish?" he chides.

The Dutch also have their reasons to promote the theory. Van den Boogert sees it as a wish to clear their conscience of their role in the events of World War II. "Don't kid yourself," he says. "That claim helps to reduce the guilt the Dutch feel today in their impotent reaction to the Nazis. The Dutch prefer to see Rembrandt as a prefiguration of their efforts in aiding Jews during the war. This, of course, is great chutzpah. The Dutch lost more Jews in World War II, proportional to their national population, than any country but Poland."

Even though Rembrandt's Jewish connection must be redefined, it is, ironically, the Jewish affection for Rembrandt that is responsible for his eponymous museum. A Dutch Jewish artist, Jozef Israels, was the driving force behind the rescue and restoration of Rembrandt's home in the early 20th century and its transformation into a permanent venue for the artist's etchings and other graphic art. Without Jozef Israels' intervention, today's No. 4 Jodenbreestraat might have suffered the same fate as its next-door neighbor, at No. 2 - the Rembrandt Cafe.

Myths die hard. Even van den Boogert, who is one of a select few entrusted with safeguarding the Rembrandt legacy, feels a twinge when he sets about his "grim"
business of re-evaluation. "Rembrandt never made a negative or satiric representation of a Jew, and he seemed to get at the soul of his Jewish models. Of course, I'm all for historical accuracy," he states emphatically, "but I must say that torpedoing the myth of Rembrandt's relationships with the Jews is not high on my list of priorities."

The Jerusalem Report, September 5, 2005 issue