The new exhibit at the Boston MFA, Reality and Imagination, makes a startling claim: Rembrandt’s relationship to the Jews didn’t amount to much. The curators suggest that his “Old Testament” paintings do not indicate a special affinity for the Jewish people. Instead, they argue these works reflect an engagement with a “vast, undifferentiated realm” of minority communities in 17th-century Amsterdam -groups defined simply by their distance from Christianity.

Consider Rembrandt’s pillars: Jacob Wrestling the Angel, Belshazzar’s Feast, Moses Breaking the Tablets. These are not mere sociological gestures toward “minority life.” They are sustained, visceral engagements with the Hebrew Bible. For Rembrandt, the Jews are not an accidental or interchangeable minority. Their story – what Thomas Mann called the “Great Story” – is the gravitational center of his biblical world.

Keeping the Book Open

Take the less celebrated Hannah Teaching Samuel to Read in the Temple. In it, the prophetess instructs the young Samuel. The viewer is struck by the material presence of Hannah’s body; while her gaze may drift toward the unseen, her physicality anchors the frame.

As in so many of Rembrandt’s works, the physical and the transcendent are inseparable. Hannah’s otherworldly expression is paired with fleshy, capable hands—her fingers physically holding the book open.

Her first lesson is clear: Open the book and read it. Whether it is the Book of Samuel or the broader Hebrew Scripture, the entire painting unfolds from that tactile act of reading – including the crucifix that, in the background, stands between the two tablets of the Law.

Where others, John Milton among them, often erased the Hebrew Scriptures through the filters of allegory and typology -insisting that Isaac, Noah, and Abraham are merely “shadows” of Jesus – Rembrandt insists on a Jewish presence that is particular, embodied, and irreducible. This was not a theoretical stance. Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, a neighborhood still known as Mokum (the Hebrew word for “place”) by locals today.

Rembrandt was undeniably a Christian. In his work, the snake encircling Aaron’s healing rod might bisect the Ten Commandments, doubling as a crucifix for his Christian audience. Yet, long before John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Rembrandt’s paintings performed a deeper kind of diversity: the Christian painter living with, and through, the Jew.

Against Exceptionalism

The Enlightenment’s stress on universal rights did not begin in the abstract; it began with the Jew as the “Other.“ Historically, once the Jew is accepted in his particularity, other minorities follow. When that Jewish particularity is flattened into a “vast, undifferentiated” abstraction, the historical engine that shaped modern liberal civilization disappears.

Most sadly, the MFA curators reject the very core of Hannah’s teaching: the art of reading. While Rembrandt’s paintings demand “cognitive vigilance,” this exhibit treats the work of the West’s greatest painter as mere ornament – fodder for a mindless stroll. In their attempt to be “inclusive,” the curators become enemies of exceptionalism – of both the Jews and Rembrandt.

In their retreat into the safety of the ‘undifferentiated,’ the curators ignore the very command Hannah and Rembrandt issue to us all: “Open the book, and read.“

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)