Jews, Art, and the Orient: Seeing Chinoiserie and Eighteenth-Century Trade in Dutch Jewish Bible, Kehillot Moshe, 1724

This paper queries if Dutch imperialism is a part of local Jewish visual culture, and if so, how it can be spotted, and what it can look like. The decorative program of the two known special runs of Kehilot Moshe, The Twin Set of Kehliot Moshe, (Amsterdam: 1724), participate in the eighteenth century relationship of imperialism and Dutch Jews. The two known luxury editions, The Twin Set of Kehliot Moshe, feature hand illustrated miniatures as initials. In these drawings the artist references larger Dutch imperialist visual culture. The artist of The Twin Set of Kehliot Moshe references chinoiserie porcelain and textiles, and direct references to the WIC and VOC. In a context where Asianness and chinoiserie crafts come to signal luxury and the foreign or exotic, the hand drawn miniatures of The Twin Set of Kehliot Moshe reveal a visual culture that participates in the eighteenth-century relationship of Imperialism and Dutch Jews.

In this art historical case study, a microhistory, this paper traces the narrative and decorative elements in the Rabbinic Bible’s drawn miniatures and provides visual, object-based, and gendered approaches to study this encounter. This method unveils the artist’s references to the economic force of the Burs in colonial traded household objects, chintz textiles, military aspects of the VOC, and imiging of corporate recognition of WIC. These subtle and unsubtle citations position the artist’s immediate visual culture to show how colonialism impacted the Jews of Holland and the art they produced.

By using the KM as a case study of Jewish visual culture of Amsterdam in the eighteenth century, we see how Jews are affected by Dutch imperialism, how eighteenth century Jews in Amsterdam celebrated the benefits of Dutch Imperialism, and how they participate in it as consumers.