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’.

YOU’LL NEVER COOK LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN

I’ve been a journo all my life but when you hit the slippery slope in my profession, there’s no way back.  In my pomp I had it all, interviews with emperors, dinners with senators and an open ticket to any Bacchanal that was going.  But my fondness for the grape was eventually my downfall and I became unemployable in Rome and its neighbouring provinces.  A change was needed and I used up my balance of ‘Chariot Miles’ to make a clean getaway.  I landed a job as a restaurant reviewer with the ‘Jerusalem Journal’.  No Pulitzer for me there, but the pay was OK and the cost of living a fraction of what it was in Rome.

It was Passover.  Things were quiet and my editor invited me to run my palate over a new home-delivery restaurant that had recently opened.  It was called ‘Judas’s Carry-out’ and while their focus would be on home deliveries, they were holding a special ‘eat-in’ launch that night and I had a ticket.   To provide some visual interest I was took along our artist, Lennie Davinci.

We got there at about 7 and were confronted by a very strange scene indeed.   It was an odd assembly, a group of 13, all men. Lennie thought they were a football team as he heard someone mention the word ‘Corinthians’, which reminded him of a Brazilian team with that name.

The seating plan was weird, everyone sitting side-by-side as if posing for a team photograph.  We thought they may have been a pub team because of their varying ages, from the skipper in his early 30s to some much older men.    One of them, Judas, was the restaurant’s owner.  A sneaky looking guy he kept moving amongst them pouring drinks, I assume to juice up his bar takings.

The evening kicked off with a guy who seemed to be the skipper, they called him ‘JC’ and, wait for it, he washed everyone’s feet.  Maybe this was some kind of club ritual.  (I remember the club I played for had fines for various errant behaviours, so perhaps it was something like that. But it was a strange thing to do inside a restaurant.)

The room was incredibly noisy.  The table was about 30 feet wide and guys had to shout to talk to their mates at the other end of the table.  Judas would have been far better advised to have had three tables of four, but he had clearly never run a ‘sit-down’ restaurant.  Lennie wasn’t complaining either as he was able to paint the entire team without having to move his materials around the room at all.

My brief from the editor was to concentrate on the food.  There hadn’t been a new restaurant launched in Jerusalem for quite a while and Tiberius (Levinson) fancied himself as a bit of a foodie.  He was expecting great things from ‘Judas’s Carry-out’.

As I said earlier, this Judas was pretty clueless when it came to seating arrangements.  But the cuisine – the main reason for our being there – was even worse, a disaster.   I was expecting some excellent Phoenician wines but the Corinthians seemed to concentrate on ‘House Red’, and not a particularly good one at that.  But nobody seemed to mind.  And the food was hardly a triumph either with the only fare we saw being served up being dry white bread. Sports teams can be pretty voracious when it comes to food, so maybe all the good stuff had gone before we got there. Given that we were on the threshold of Passover some matzos with chopped liver would not have gone amiss. Maybe a nice chicken soup with matzo balls?  But nothing doing.  I suppose the terms ‘gourmet’ and ‘footballer’ don’t go too well together and perhaps their end of season do was a budget affair.  You would have thought they might at least have had a starter.

Given the limited menu, Lennie and I finished early and repaired to our local pub before filing copy.  My review was none too complimentary but Levinson was happy to receive it well before the press deadline.

Talking to fellow reporters next day at the office, it seemed that things didn’t turn out too well after the dinner.  Judas sneaked out early having delivered up this travesty of a meal and reported JC to the Roman authorities for something or other. Money had obviously changed hands.  I’m not sure how things ended up.

My review appeared in the paper under the heading ‘The Last Supper’.   It summed up my opinion of Judas’s cooking. He would never cook lunch in Jerusalem again.  But I gathered later that Lennie’s picture went down well. Very well indeed.