BRING ME THE HEAD OF NERO SHAPIRO

Over the centuries there has been much speculation about Rembrandt’s poignant painting ‘The Jewish Bride’. Who was she? Who is the man in the picture? What exactly is the occasion? And how can you tell she’s Jewish? The recent discovery of a cache of Rembrandt’s letters provides incontrovertible evidence on the origins of the painting and its intriguing relationship to one of Rembrandt’s most celebrated works, ‘The Night Watch’.

The subject in the first picture was indeed Jewish but the bride-to-be as the painting was completed on the day before her wedding. She was Calpurnia, the daughter of Rembrandt’s agent, Tiberius Levinson. They were close friends and Rembrandt honoured Levinson with this painting on the day before his daughter’s wedding to an Amsterdam herring mogul, Nero Shapiro. Tiberius was never totally convinced by Shapiro and over a Jonge Genever with Rembrandt he confessed that “there was something piscatorial about the man”.

If you look closely at the painting you can see Levinson tenderly caressing his daughter’s bosom in a none too subtle attempt to determine whether she is with child.

The day did not turn out to be the joyful occasion the Levinson family were expecting. Shapiro did not make an appearance at Rotterdam synagogue leaving Calpurnia abandoned at the altar. After waiting two hours, father Tiberius, incandescent with rage, called out the local militia, known as ‘The Night Watch’. Rembrandt, who was caught up in proceedings, took quickly to his easel and recorded the event in another fine painting. In it you can see the distraught Calpurnia Levinson looking pleadingly at the posse and an incensed Tiberius furiously directing the militia to “bring me the head of Nero Shapiro”.

The sorry tale ended happily, at least for the Levinson family. Calpurnia mourned for a while but the upside of Shapiro’s defection was her escape from the aura of herring he permanently exuded. She soon met and married a more fragrant option, a deft Delft dentist called, Flavius Fayvelson. Shapiro managed to avoid the clutches of the Night Watch and escaped to Spain where he was captured by the Inquisition. He survived the rack, converted to Catholicism and re-opened his herring business but with a difference. Shapiro’s ‘Challah & Herring’ restaurants were soon to appear all over Spain. But he never married and became known in his declining years as ‘the loner from Gerona’.