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Rembrandt has been hailed for his love of the Jewish people — was it all a myth?
In a preface to the 1932 Hebrew edition of the painter Leonid Pasternak’s study of Rembrandt, Russian-Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik observed that although the Dutch artist was not Jewish, we “must consider him as ‘a Jew of honor,’ for his love and empathy towards the Jews.”
Bialik was not alone in his admiration. Rembrandt’s close ties to his Jewish neighbors in mid-17th century Amsterdam — to say nothing of his sensitive portraits of them — were held up for generations as a model of philosemitism.
Recent scholarship, however, has shown that Rembrandt’s affection for Jews has been generally overstated. He had, for example, perhaps a couple of Jewish sitters, but nothing like the dozens once ascribed to him.
Yet a new Rembrandt exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, entitled “Reality and Imagination: Rembrandt and the Jews in the Dutch Republic,” embraces not only the hard facts of the Rembrandt-Jewish relationship, but the myths, too.
Co-curators Michael Zell and Simona Di Nepi have juxtaposed the real with the imagined, introducing visitors to the artist’s known Jewish interactions — the “reality” — as well as his so-called imagined encounters: that is, the biblical Jews he often painted. The result is a fine overview of the Dutch maestro’s associations with Amsterdam’s Jews, as well as a fascinating window onto the relative freedoms enjoyed by Dutch Jews at large in the 17th century Dutch Republic.
Importantly, neither Zell nor Di Nepi was all that interested in addressing, at least explicitly, Rembrandt’s alleged philosemitism. “We just concentrated on the evidence that we have for relationships, commissions, interactions,” said Zell, professor of Baroque and 18th Century Art at Boston University. “We set aside any question of whether or not there was something unique about Rembrandt’s interest in the Jews.”
The exhibit, which runs until December of this year, is a collaboration between the MFA’s Center for Netherlandish Art (CNA), and art history undergraduate and graduate students at Boston University; the students were involved in every curatorial decision. “It’s a really unprecedented experiential learning and professional development opportunity,” said Zell. (This is the fifth such partnership between the CNA and an academic institution. Previous partners include Yale and Brown).
Perhaps the most striking piece in the gallery’s “reality” section is a 1647 portrait of the artist’s neighbor Ephraim Bonus, a Sephardi physician and, in all likelihood, the only living Jew Rembrandt ever painted. The portrait is the gallery’s “linchpin,” Zell said: a drawing of a Jewish subject for which Rembrandt had only to depict what was in front of him, instead of conjuring up a mix of caricature and theology (more on that later).
Next to the Bonus portrait are four images Rembrandt drew for Menasseh Ben Israel, a hugely influential Dutch Rabbi and scholar. Ben Israel would go on to use the sketches as visual representations of key biblical stories in his treatise Piedra Gloriosa (The Glorious Stone).
Rembrandt, often very precious about his work, agreed to alter two of the prints after the Rabbi insisted they did not align sufficiently with the biblical text. And though scholars have puzzled over the nature and extent of Rembrandt’s relationship with Ben Israel, it’s the images’ very existence that Zell wants to highlight. “This moment of interfaith collaboration is just remarkable,” he said.
The Ben Israel prints, however, are not only evidence of Rembrandt’s dealings with Amsterdam’s Jews. By calling attention to such a towering figure as the Rabbi, they underscore the exhibit’s other defining motif: the Jewish community’s considerable — relative to their European counterparts, at least — freedom and influence in the mid-17th century Dutch Republic. (Established in 1581, the Republic was a confederation of seven Dutch provinces that had broken away from Catholic Habsburg rule. Notionally Calvinist, it was renowned for its enlightened attitude towards religious and ethnic minorities and its patronage of the arts and sciences.)
And so also on display are several pieces of Judaica that testify to the Dutch Jewish community’s vibrancy in Amsterdam — a city so full of Jewish life that author Israel Zangwill later called it the “Jerusalem of the West” — and further afield, too. There’s a brilliantly detailed map of the so-called Holy Land, with the names and places written in Hebrew; a brass Hanukkah lamp in the Dutch-Jewish style; a Sephardi Ketubah, with engraved still-lifes that climb up the side of the document like ivy; and an 18th century copy of a portrait depicting the 1675 opening of Amsterdam’s Grand Sephardi synagogue, the world’s biggest at the time.
What caught my attention most of all was a pair of silver Torah finials, whose conical shape, intricate flower engravings and tinkling bells were inspired by Dutch architecture and Christian reliquaries, said Di Nepi, who’s the MFA’s Charles and Lynn Schusterman Curator of Judaica. Made in 1649 in Rotterdam, a port town whose trade activity attracted scores of Jews, the finials are the oldest surviving in the United States. And given that they were crafted by a Christian silversmith — the Dutch Republic may have been atypically tolerant, but Jews still were not allowed into its guilds — they are an excellent shorthand for both the achievements and difficulties of 17th-century Dutch Jewry.
The power of imagination
Though the physician Bonus is today accepted as Rembrandt’s only undisputed Jewish sitter, the artist, like many of his contemporaries, was fond of depicting biblical stories — and not just from the New Testament. According to the museum, scenes from the Hebrew Bible were painted more often in the Protestant Dutch Republic than anywhere else in Europe, and inventories of Jewish households at the time revealed that these depictions often were collected by Dutch Sephardim.
The “imagination” section of the exhibit, then, features Rembrandt’s take on biblical episodes like Abraham’s sacrifice and David and Goliath, as well as two iconic pieces that scholars once held up as proof of Rembrandt’s philosemitism (‘The Jewish Bride,’ notably) but which have since been re-assessed.
Taken together, a portrait emerges of how Rembrandt understood Jews; of the influence of 17th-century Amsterdam and the importance of the artist’s solidly, immovably Christian worldview.
The paintings, generally speaking, are heavy on caricature. “This is an imagined version of the biblical characters of the ancient Jews,” Di Nepi told me. “There is this mixture of a look that evokes the Middle East, which was at the time run by the Ottoman empire. A lot of turbans, very lavish silk with gold and silver embroidery, and sashes that probably came from Persia.”
The 1648 sketch “Jews in the Synagogue,” for instance, depicts a huddle of Jews in floppy hats, long robes and turbans. To portray what he understood to be a representative Jewish figure, Rembrandt produced a blend of ancient Israelite and 17th century Dutch Jew, a formulation he repeated across his other so-called Jewish portraits. This, Zell said, “is Rembrandt’s Christian perspective shaping the way that the Old Testament scenes are portrayed.”
Far from indicating a special affinity for Jews, these paintings suggest Rembrandt didn’t really distinguish between the minority groups he mingled with in diverse 17th-century Amsterdam. Jews, Zell said, were simply part of a “vast, undifferentiated realm,” separate from Christianity.
Still, even if his outlook was traditionally Calvinist — which, at its heart, aimed to convert Jews and all other non-Christians — this need not overshadow the fact that Rembrandt, to paraphrase one reviewer, could paint in three dimensions. “He possessed a gripping naturalism,” Zell said. “And so he created these unprecedentedly lifelike figures.”
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UK threatens sanctions after Israel opens bids for E1 settler homes
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – The United Kingdom threatened to sanction Israelis involved in West Bank settlement expansion after the Jewish state’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim.
Construction in E1 “would cut across the heart of Palestine and risks separating the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which would endanger the viability of a two-state solution,” the British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said in a special statement he posted on X on Thursday.
Targeted sanctions, Miliband wrote, would be part of a series of measures his government would take. His office also summoned Israel’s charge d’Affaires Thursday to demand a closure of the bidding process, which first opened on Tuesday, and a withdrawal of the construction project altogether.
“Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution,” he wrote. Miliband has held his position for a month and is part of the new leadership Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham appointed when he took office in July.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar attacked Miliband on X, stating that Britain’s “decision to damage the relationship between our countries is deeply unfortunate.”
He said that the U.K. government’s “systematic policy of blaming only Israel while ignoring Palestinian extremism has already contributed to a massive wave of antisemitic hatred and attacks against the British Jewish community.”
The Jewish people have the same right to “live throughout the Land of Israel” just as the British people have a right to live anywhere in the U.K., Sa’ar wrote.
Plans to expand the built-up area of Ma’aleh Adumim settlement by constructing some 3,400 housing units on a largely underdeveloped hilltop within the city’s boundaries have been in place since 1994 when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister.
Israel mostly froze those plans under pressure from the international community, including the U.S., with many countries warning that building homes in E1 would harm their diplomatic ties with Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to advance the project in earnest in 2012 to protest the United Nations General Assembly decision to grant the Palestinians the status of a non-member state and has since pushed the project forward in spurts, particularly during election seasons.
The publication of the bidding process for the homes was first announced on Tuesday and is set to close on Oct. 19, one week shy of the Israeli elections on Oct. 27. Opening the bids is a move that plays well with Netanyahu’s right-wing voter base, which opposes Palestinian statehood and believes that settlements like Ma’aleh Adumim and the E1 area should be annexed into sovereign Israel.
But the move reverberated globally, with the U.K. signing onto a joint condemnation by France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, in which they warned that settlement building in E1 distanced peace and undermined the country’s international standing.
They also reminded businesses who might bid for E1 construction that they could face legal or reputational consequences, given that such companies could be in breach of international law.
Palestinian Authority Vice President Hussein Al-Sheikh said he welcomed the condemnation, explaining on X that such a position “reflects the importance of the international role in confronting settlement activity and safeguarding the two-state solution.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Argentina removes federal judge over antisemitic remarks in historic first
(JTA) — An Argentine federal judge was removed from office Tuesday for a series of antisemitic posts on his social media accounts that constituted misconduct incompatible with his role, an impeachment panel ruled.
Alfredo Eugenio López, who headed Federal Court No. 4 in the coastal city of Mar del Plata, was removed by Argentina’s Jury of Impeachment, a special panel composed of judges, lawmakers and lawyers.
It is the first time in Argentina’s history that a judge has been removed over antisemitic remarks.
In López’s social media posts, the judge referred to the Jewish people as “a brood of vipers,” Israel as a “fictitious state” and Argentinian Jews as “foreigners.” He has also used such terms as “Zionist” and “gay” as insults.
According to the panel, the judge committed acts of “discrimination and the denial of equal rights against the Argentine Jewish community. For the purposes of these proceedings, it is particularly significant that, by acting in this manner, he shattered public confidence in his continued fitness to administer justice impartially.”The case reached the panel through Argentina’s Council of the Magistracy, based in Buenos Aires, the constitutional body responsible for the selection and discipline of federal judges.
The first complaint against López was filed in February 2025 by the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas, which is the umbrella organization representing Argentina’s Jewish community. One month later, the Argentine Forum Against Antisemitism also filed a complaint. In July 2025, attorney Yamil Santoro from Apolo Foundation added another one.
In his defense, López argued that his messages were “ subjective and decontextualized interpretations of exchanges on social media, which in no way affect the administration of justice or his impartiality” as a judge. He added that his remarks were unrelated to any pending case and that he had never been recused or removed from any judicial case.
Neither Lopez nor his attorney were immediately available for further comment.
“He was removed because he simply would not stop engaging in hate speech,” jury member Alberto Maques said during a live interview Tuesday on the A24 news channel. “It is absolutely disgraceful for a federal judge to engage in this kind of conduct.”
Maques said there were 15 social media posts that he acknowledged, but more than 50 posts in which he said “outrageous things that are not worth repeating because they truly constituted hate speech.”
“This is not merely an issue of hate speech against the Jewish community. This is someone who lacks common sense,” he added, interviewed by A24 news channel.
Prosecutors in the impeachment proceedings argued that the messages were not isolated political comments but reflected a pattern of hostility toward Jews, Zionism, and the State of Israel.
“No position of authority can shield hatred. This is not a matter of punishing an opinion. It is about sanctioning repeated conduct involving antisemitism, hostility and dehumanization, conduct incompatible with the impartiality, dignity and public trust required of the judiciary,” DAIA said Tuesday in a statement.
“This case sets a precedent: for the first time in more than a century, DAIA initiated proceedings of this nature against a judge. No office is above democracy.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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California progressive Wahab defeats AIPAC-backed Hernandez in close race
(JTA) — California progressive Aisha Wahab defeated AIPAC-backed moderate Melissa Hernandez in a congressional runoff this week, capping off a contest that had become unexpectedly tight after the pro-Israel lobby entered the fray.
The Associated Press called the race between the Democrats — who were vying to replace a disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell — a full two days after polls closed, when Wahab secured 53.1% of votes to Hernandez’s 46.9%, with 95% of ballots tallied. The gap between them grew by four percentage points from Tuesday evening, when Wahab had held a narrow 51% lead to Hernandez’s 49%.
“We stayed focused on the people, and I will fight for this district that raised me,” Wahab said in a Thursday statement, noting her journey “from foster care to Congress” in her East Bay community.
Although Wahab ended up victorious, the narrow initial margin on Tuesday shocked California’s 14th District, given that she had secured a double-digit lead in preliminary races two months ago.
But in the past few weeks, an unforeseen variable appeared to influence the trajectories of the two campaigns: a massive spending push from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee aimed at turning the tides for Hernandez.
Since the beginning of August alone, AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, and other affiliated groups spent more than $2.5 million on both boosting Hernandez and denigrating Wahab with negative ads and mailers, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
“This was not a landslide for Wahab by any means,” local Democratic strategist Noah Finneburgh, who is not affiliated with either candidate, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They narrowed the gap for sure,” Finneburgh added, referring to AIPAC. “They spent millions of dollars attacking Wahab very aggressively.”
These attacks, he explained, did not involve Israel and instead focused on divisive issues for the Bay Area, such as public safety and protecting kids.
“Negative advertising with a persuasive message can be very effective,” Finneburgh said.
In her Thursday night statement, Wahab declared that her “district cannot be bought,” describing the race as “one of the ugliest, most expensive elections we’ve ever seen.”
Prior to this influx of cash and related ads, neither AIPAC nor Israel had played a significant role in this short-lived race — which began in April following Swalwell’s resignation over allegations of sexual assault.
When the district held a special primary to seek Swalwell’s replacement on June 16, Wahab and Hernandez finished as the top-two candidates and moved on to this week’s special general runoff election.
California primaries are “nonpartisan” or “top-two” races, in which the two highest ranking candidates move on to the general election, irrespective of their parties. The top-two in this case were both Democrats, like Swalwell, in a district that the Cook Political Report deems solidly blue.
Even though Wahab will now finish the remainder of Swalwell’s term, she will have to compete with Hernandez again in the November general election for a full term that begins on January 3, 2027.
In a June 16 special primary that preceded this week’s runoff, there was still a massive gap between the two candidates, with Wahab accruing 42.8% of the votes, compared to Hernandez’s 16.8%. A separate primary for the November race, which occurred two weeks earlier, placed Wahab at 38.3% and Hernandez at 17.2%.
Wahab, who will be the first Afghan American in Congress, has focused on affordability, civil rights, education and climate change. Her campaign calls for an end to wars and “prolonged occupations” but only specifically calls out U.S. military activity in “Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.”
Though Wahab has been critical of Israel and its operations in Gaza, she has not been as vocal about the issue as many other progressive colleagues nationwide. She responded “yes” when asked if Israel was committing genocide in a primary debate, but she didn’t include Israel or Gaza in her campaign priorities.
During a recent appearance on far-right influencer Hasan Piker’s livestream, Wahab acknowledged that “it’s not a zero-sum game in the Middle East,” adding that “we can care for all people.” She also referenced a resolution she introduced last year in the California legislature, pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza but also condemning Hamas and demanding the release of the hostages.
“We talk about both Palestinians and the Israeli victims there,” Wahab told Piker. “We talk about holding the perpetrators accountable from both sides.”
Asked if she was in favor of “ending all U.S. aid to Israel,” she responded “yes,” while stressing that “humanitarian aid is important to me, too.”
Wahab has earned the backing of multiple labor unions, the California Democratic Party and Our Revolution, the group formed by Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. The liberal pro-Israel group J Street also recently invested $108,000 in her campaign, according to the FEC. American Priorities, a pro-Palestinian PAC, also spent at least $200,000 on supporting her.
Hernandez has received endorsements from several police and fire unions, as well as Democratic Jewish Reps. Lois Frankel of Florida and Brad Schneider of Illinois.
Come November, Hernandez will gain one additional asset. Due to statewide redistricting, the 14th District will gain about 26,000 new voters from Dublin, where Hernandez previously served as mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
But Finneburgh said he believes that Hernandez has only a minimal chance of winning that race, especially because Wahab will be heading into that election as an incumbent.
He also suggested that if “she plays her card right,” Wahab could even take some endorsements away from Hernandez.
“There’s going to be people who are going to probably move over from the Hernandez camp and back her,” Finneburgh added. “It’s going to be hard to unseat her.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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