Rembrandt's Jews

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: After having enjoyed Michael Zell's book on Rembrandt and the Jews, I looked forward to the release of Nadler's publication. While Rembrandt's Jews is well-written and at times touching, I found it to be a pastiche of other books I have read on Dutch Jewry. What Nadler has done, albeit in an engaging way, is combine other scholars' ideas about Dutch tolerance of the Jews and Jewish life in seventeeth-century Holland (Yosef Kaplan and Miriam Bodian, for example), while throwing in a few works of art for illustration.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating story
Review: This engaging and beautifully written book, on one level, tells the story of how the artist Rembrandt van Rijn interacted with his Jewish neighbors, many of whom were clients and/or served as models for his Biblical paintings. So it is in part about his art, but more importantly, it offers an intimate look at Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, and conveys how the Jewish communities there lived and worked and interacted with the larger Christian population.

The book design is lovely, the text charming, and the illustrations quite remarkable. Not too long, not too short; it is just right.