The ancient Greek and Hebrew languages enjoyed something of a revival during the Renaissance. Scholars were rediscovering classical literature; artists painted scenes from ancient history. Some artists tried to make their images look more authentic by adding inscriptions in Hebrew or Greek.
A 16th century miniature by Giulio Clovio shows John the Evangelist writing his name in Hebrew letters on a scroll. Unusually, the Hebrew writing is legible and the spelling is correct; few artists at the time had a full command of the languages and their attempts to reproduce the Hebrew alphabet were often crude and approximate. Even in the 17th century, when Dutch painters sometimes included Hebrew inscriptions in their work, the writing was often little more than a scribble. This detail from a drawing of a synagogue service by the 17th century artist, Bartholomeus Molenaer, is a good example:
It was not a lack of skill that prevented artists from reproducing Hebrew letters correctly; they were talented people and the Hebrew alphabet is no more difficult to write than any other. They simply didn’t take the trouble to learn how to write Hebrew, knowing full well that the purchasers of their works were as much in the dark about the language as they were. They knew that nobody would complain that their squiggles were meaningless, they were confident that an approximation of a Hebrew character would suffice just as well as the real thing.
Rembrandt didn’t agree. In his few works that contain Hebrew lettering, his calligraphy is generally immaculate. It is true that sometimes he confuses a ‘ד’ with a ‘ר’, or a ‘ו’ with a ‘ן’, but these are understandable slips and they happen only rarely.
Rembrandt took great pains to portray his Hebrew inscriptions accurately. His painting of Belshazzar’s Feast, depicting the biblical story of the Writing on the Wall, is the best example of his Hebrew calligraphic skill. But there is something over and above the calligraphy that makes the Hebrew stand out. In the Bible story, King Belshazzar cannot decipher the message that a disembodied, supernatural hand is writing on his wall. The Talmud offers three suggestions as to why this may be. One is that, instead of writing the words from right to left, as Hebrew is always written, the hand is writing them vertically, from top to bottom. And this, as we see, is how Rembrandt inscribes the words in his painting. Rembrandt, it appears, was familiar with the Talmud’s explanation of the writing:
Rembrandt lived in the Vlooienburg district of Amsterdam. Five doors away lived Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel. Whether or not the two men were friends is hard to tell, but they certainly knew each other. Art historians can’t agree as to whether Rembrandt drew this portrait of Menasseh ben Israel. But even if he didn’t, the two men worked together in other ways. It was almost certainly Menasseh who helped Rembrandt with his Hebrew lettering, and told him about the Talmud’s explanation of the Writing on the Wall.
Like many Dutch Jews in the 17th century, Menasseh ben Israel came from a Portuguese family which had been forcibly converted to Christianity. He was born as Manoel Diaz Soeiro in 1604, on the Portuguese island of Madeira. The family were hounded by the Inquisition who believed, correctly as it turned out, that they were secretly living Jewish lives. They fled, when Manoel was very young, to La Rochelle in France. Then, in 1610, they moved to Amsterdam where they were finally free to live openly as Jews and to adopt Hebrew names.
Menasseh ben Israel spent his career as a rabbi in Amsterdam. He was the youngest of the city’s three rabbis and by all accounts he was the least learned in religious matters, but far more interested than his colleagues in secular culture, a man as much at home in the company of non-Jews as Jews. He was an inspiring orator and was deeply wounded when the lay leaders of the synagogue ranked him below the other two rabbis in terms of status and salary, and restricted him to giving only one sermon each month.
Among the pupils who Menasseh ben Israel taught was the young Baruch Spinoza, the future philosopher, eventually expelled from the Amsterdam Jewish community for his heretical views. The ten year old Spinoza would have been in the congregation at the highlight of Menasseh’s career, when, despite his subordinate status, he was selected to preach in the synagogue in front of the visiting Queen Henrietta Maria of England and the Dutch Prince of Orange.
Menasseh wrote several books. He penned his most famous, The Hope of Israel, after hearing the theories of another former Portuguese convert to Christianity, a man now known as Aaron Levi. Levi had arrived in Amsterdam from South America, bearing the astounding news that the native residents of the continent were in fact the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Menasseh didn’t quite believe him but he was prepared to accept that some of the native South Americans were descended from one or two of the Lost Tribes. This, in his eyes was hugely important. Menasseh believed passionately that the Messiah would soon arrive and, in common with many Christians at the time, he was convinced that he would not come until the people of Israel were scattered across the entire globe. Now that some of the Lost Tribes had been found in South America, the speedy arrival of the Messiah appeared imminent.
There was still one place in the world where Menasseh knew that the people of Israel could not be found. It wasn’t far from Amsterdam, just a short trip across the sea to England from where, 350 years earlier, the king had expelled all the Jews. Fortunately for Menasseh the English had just been through a revolution and executed their king. The country was now run by a pious Christian named Oliver Cromwell. Menasseh hoped that Cromwell would share his opinion that the Jews should be allowed back into England, in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah.
Menasseh set off for England in 1655. He appealed to Cromwell with theological arguments about the arrival of the Messiah and a good deal of economic persuasion. For the past two years England had been at war with the Dutch. Menasseh urged Cromwell, now that the war was over, to make the most of the renewed trade relations with Holland by allowing Dutch, Jewish merchants to enter the country to buy and sell goods.
Cromwell was sympathetic and called a conference to discuss Menasseh’s proposals. Unfortunately, public opinion was against them. Ordinary English people did not want to hear an announcement that the Jews were to be readmitted to England. In the end Cromwell did allow a small group of Jewish merchants to quietly settle in London but his gesture fell short of the grand proclamation that Menasseh was hoping for.
Menasseh ben israel considered his mission to England to be a failure and spent the few remaining months of his life as a disillusioned man. Nevertheless, over the coming years, as a result of Menasseh ben Israel’s efforts, more and more Jews did unofficially return to England, until their presence in the country was an established fact. Even today, more than 350 years later with hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the country, the old expulsion order has not been repealed.
Shortly before he left Amsterdam for England, Menasseh ben Israel engaged Rembrandt to illustrate a book he was writing. It was an unusual commission for the great artist, he rarely illustrated books and he had enough on his plate at the time, struggling with various financial and legal woes. Menasseh was not a wealthy man, he could not have paid Rembrandt much, if anything at all. Rembrandt must have taken on the project, either as a favour to a friend, or because he found the subject religiously inspiring. The book, Piedra Gloriosa, was based on King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in the Book of Daniel, in which he saw a towering, fearsome statue, of gold, silver, iron and clay, topple to the ground, thrown down by a stone. In Piedra Gloriosa, Menasseh made use of the dream’s imagery to explain the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah.
Rembrandt etched four plates for the book. They appeared in the first edition of the book but were replaced when the second edition was printed.
Nobody knows why Rembrandt’s images were discarded, it has been suggested that too much time had passed between the two printings and the plates had degraded. As it turned out, Menasseh didn’t have time to enjoy the publication even of the first edition. He left Amsterdam for London five months after the book was printed, spent two years in England and died on his way home. He never saw Amsterdam, or Rembrandt, again.