Encountering Difference: Rembrandt’s Presentation in the Dark Manner

Rembrandt’s etching of The Presentation of Christ in the Temple of c . 1654 has long been understood to represent a radical break from the protocols of pictorial and scriptural tradition. The significance of this theological inflection, however, has yet to be investigated. This study locates Rembrandt’s dramatic reformulation of the biblical event within a distinctive historical and religious context by considering the artist’s involvement with Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, the foremost Jewish apologist of the seventeenth century. In 1655 Rembrandt illustrated the rabbi’s messianic treatise, Piedra Gloriosa , a book which emerged from and was fashioned to appeal directly to a movement within Dutch Protestantism known as ‘philosemitism’. Philosemitic texts are shown to correspond theologically with Rembrandt’s transformation of the scene into a confrontation between the universalist message of the Christian Gospel and the authority and ceremonial of Jewish law.