Jenna Weissman Joselit
Jewish Review of Books, Mar. 13, 2025
“The former conversos in the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam embraced the Esther story as their own.”
Purim—the whole shebang, from the ancient story on which the holiday is based to the contemporary ways in which it’s celebrated—always struck me as raucous and overegged. After seeing the Jewish Museum’s latest revelation of an exhibition, The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt, I just might change my mind.
An arresting assemblage of paintings, prints, textiles, scrolls, archival matter, ritual artifacts, and household ones, too, depict the surprising hold Queen Esther had on the seventeenth century Dutch imagination, including Rembrandt and his school. The show brings together 120 objects gathered from private collections around the world and from dozens of institutions, including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, whose storied Rembrandt self-portrait has left the building for the first time in decades.
There’s a lot to take in, but thanks to the nimble intelligence and keen eye of its curator, Abigail Rapoport, the exhibit doesn’t overwhelm so much as immerse its visitors in a world where Queen Esther rules. Here, the head of one female royal is crowned with ribbons of colorful fabric that look like a turban; the hearths of the well-to-do are guarded by cast-iron firebacks featuring Esther and Ahasuerus; canvases of Esther in a state of contemplation, at the banquet table, and in deep conversation with Mordechai crowd Rembrandt’s workshop.
The Dutch fascination with Shushan was a product of both their Protestant biblicism and the long reach of the Dutch East India Company. In light of their decades-long struggle to liberate themselves from Catholic Spain, the Esther story also spoke to them of tenacity, resilience, and heroism in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. And it entertained them. Its Scheherazade-like tale of feminine wiles and court intrigue freed them to conjure up rooms draped in lush silk curtains, tables laden with exotic foodstuffs, courtiers swathed in flowing robes lined with ermine, their feathered turbans slightly askew—and, at the center of it all, a resplendent Esther bedecked in luminous pearls the size of grapes. ...SOURCE