You wouldn’t guess it from glancing around the Jewish Museum’s current exhibition “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt,” but the book in question ends in carnage. The Persian king Ahasuerus doesn’t know that his new wife, Esther, is Jewish, or that Mordecai, a Jewish leader in the city of Shushan, is Esther’s uncle. So when the king’s advisor Haman, incensed that Mordecai has refused to bow to him, asks permission to exterminate all the Jews in Shushan, Ahasuerus assents. At her uncle’s urging, Esther goes before the king—an act for which, if she had not been summoned, she could have been killed—to reveal her Jewish identity and to beg him to save her people. Ahasuerus agrees, but with Haman’s forces already imminent, he must authorize the Jews of Shushan to mount their defense and save themselves. Bloodshed ensues, Haman’s troops are sorely routed—seventy-five thousand of them are felled in the war—and the Jewish people live on.
But the way Rembrandt and his compatriots tell it, the story is one of the Persian court’s opulence, full of feasts and richly appointed dressing rooms. Esther’s courage in approaching her husband is couched in sumptuous fabrics, Persian rugs, and glinting tableware. “The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” (which, after it closes in August, will travel to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and then to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston) shows how these artworks transformed the story of citizenly virtue and justice into an alluring, beautiful tale to be emulated—not only for the Jewish immigrants newly settled in Amsterdam who celebrated the story during Purim, but also for Dutch Christians, who saw in Esther’s underdog triumph a potent symbol of their nation’s recent victory in the Eighty Years’ War.
The show begins by situating us in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Jacob van der Ulft’s The Dam Square with the New Town Hall under Construction (1652–89), a sensitively painted, bustling landscape of Amsterdam awash in morning light, hangs next to Adolf van der Laan’s View of the Portuguese and German Synagogues in Amsterdam (ca. 1710), an etching of the man-made island Vlooienburg, where most of the city’s Jewish immigrants settled and where the two synagogues stood catty-corner from one another (a map of the city with both Jewish and Rembrandt-related landmarks reveals that a third synagogue was just around the corner, as was one of Rembrandt’s longtime homes). Amsterdam, ruled by the Spanish Catholic crown for over a century, had, in 1648, joined the newly independent Dutch Republic following the grueling Eighty Years’ War, and the city became renowned as a hub of religious toleration. Each gallery is chock-full of Judaica from the period, including an abundance of Esther scrolls, from which the book is read aloud each year on Purim, and ceremonial silverware.
It’s clear that the story of Esther held wide appeal: it decorated domestic objects such as cast-iron firebacks, mother-of-pearl snuffboxes, and Delft tiles (here in warm purple, not the traditional blue), and Dutch noblewomen sat for portraits dressed up as the Persian Jewish queen. The most striking of these is Princess Elizabeth, Princess Royal, Abbess of Hervorden (1630–56) by Gerrit van Honthorst. The pale-faced princess dons gold brocade and ivory silk trimmed with pearls and black jewels. On her head of dark curls is a Persian-style cap, rounding up into a point. This is a kind of imitatio Esther: in the queen, citizenly courage and regal grace are united.
It isn’t until the subsequent galleries that we get the torrent of genre paintings, beginning with Rembrandt’s A Jewish Heroine from the Hebrew Bible (1632–33), set off in its own room. The presumable Esther glows moonlike in the dark, draped in jewels and burnt-orange velvet (perhaps meant to recall the House of Orange, whose William the Silent headed the rebellions that led to Dutch independence). But the queen doesn’t pay her lavish dress any mind. Instead, she gazes off, quietly steeling herself to approach the king unsummoned. The toilette scene was a popular way to portray Esther (an iteration by Johannes van Noordt also appears in the show, and there is a depiction of Rembrandt’s wife Saskia posed this way, too), along with lush banquet or court scenes. The paintings suggest that Esther’s noble tribulations—her inner turmoil, her possible death—are justly matched by the beauty and riches around her, even though (especially because) the glitter matters little to her.
One of the promised cornerstones of the show is Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait, Age 23 (1629), on loan from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It’s hard to imagine someone this fresh-faced executing such a feeling portrait, but here he is: the young Rembrandt, eyes searching and hopeful yet restrained, wearing a foppish feather in his cap. Though the work doesn’t depict the story of Esther, it’s the gallery’s centerpiece, set off by a ceiling-height wooden arch that reminds us this building was once the Warburg family mansion.
The Rembrandt portrait isn’t the only painting in which Esther and company are absent. Several pictures seem to be related to the story only insofar as they depict boozy festivities or Persian rugs. Perhaps the popularity of such imagery made the tale a naturally appealing subject, or Esther was so beloved that Eastern motifs proliferated as a result. The show declines to make either case explicitly, only broadly mentioning the Persian goods arriving in the Netherlands during the period.
“The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” concludes with a touching reminder that Esther’s civic virtue was not merely a legend repeated during the holidays, but a model to be followed. A ruby velvet lectern cover, embroidered and tasseled in navy, green, and gold, hangs over a vitrine of handwritten documents. These are applications for a dowry lottery, founded to help orphaned or impoverished women in Amsterdam who sought the means to get married after fleeing religious persecution. The lottery, established in 1615 by Sephardim who had themselves escaped the Portuguese Inquisition, fittingly took place each year on Purim, a holiday so named for the lots that Haman drew to pick the day he would stamp out Shushan’s Jewish population. The lectern cover, along with an elegant silver lottery bowl, is on loan from the Dotar Society, which ran the lottery and is still active today. Such acts of charity, clothed in dignity and ceremony, befit the queen whose beauty and self-sacrifice inspired the works on display at the Jewish Museum.
