Purim Illuminated

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.

Standing in front of Rembrandt’s sumptuous painting, A Jewish Heroine [probably Esther] from the Hebrew Bible, which holds court in a room all its own, or taking in a suite of lavishly detailed paintings of the feast of Esther by Jan Lievens and of Esther at her Toilette by Aert de Gelder, you can lose yourself amid the visual extravagance.

But not for long. Soon enough, The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt returns you to history and with it, to Rembrandt’s Jewish neighbors. The former conversos in the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam embraced the Esther story as their own. Accustomed to hiding their Judaism beneath a feigned Christianity, they found in Esther’s story of being a covert Jew in Ahasuerus’s harem, a real-life parallel with their personal experiences of masquerade, disclosure, and freedom. Little wonder they took to Purim with relish, the engravers among them, such as Salom Italia, drawing on the latest printing technologies to bring to life the ancient Near East. His vivid engravings on a parchment Megillat Esther—featuring lions, monkeys, gardens, parrots, peacocks, and, of course, imagined ancient Persians—illuminate the traditional text of the scribe.

 Amsterdam Jews also commissioned silversmiths to create elaborate platters and shell-like collection cups known as tazzas, festooned with scenes drawn from the biblical account and used only on Purim.

At some point in the 1600s, someone skilled in needlepoint —we don’t know who, but it would be nice to hold the women of the community responsible—fashioned a crimson-colored “harlequin’s cloth” to adorn the lectern of the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam on which one of Salom Italia’s scrolls was probably read. The textile, which has been used every Purim since the mid-seventeenth century, is beautifully hung on a special dowel that enables the museumgoer to see its intricate floral motifs and merry little tassels up close.

This decorative cover belonged, and still does, to the Santa Companhia de Dotar Orphas e Donzellas (The Sacred Society for Orphan Girls and Young Women) which sponsored a lottery on Purim. Evoking Esther, herself a parentless child, the society invited impoverished young women to apply to receive a dowry of several hundred guilders. Also on display is a sampling of the poignant letters penned by applicants who, like Esther Mendes do Vale of Amsterdam and Clara de Almeida of Bayonne, wrote pleadingly in Portuguese to the administrators to have their names included in the annual lottery. Their voices bring the exhibition full circle, propelling the visitor from Rembrandt’s engravings of the “Great Jewish Bride,” with which it began, to her real-life coreligionists, with which it concludes. You’ll come for the Rembrandts, but it’s the beseeching letters from these would-be Queen Esthers of the seventeenth century that stay with you.