Jacob Van Ruisdael’s Jewish Cemetery, c. 1655/56, and the Forging of Dutch Identity after the Peace of Westphalia

Ranking among the monumental landscapes of the Dutch Golden Age, Jacob van Ruisdael's two versions of the Jewish Cemetery in Detroit and Dresden have long been studied by scholars. This paper offers a new interpretation that locates these landscapes within the social, political and religious context of the years following the conclusion of the Eighty Years War and the Treaty of Westphalia. Incorporating actual sites from different locations, these landscapes focus upon the ruins of Egmond Castle and/or Abbey in conjunction with the Jewish Cemetery at Ouderkerk and a cottage in Westphalia. The specificity and choice of sites invoke a new social and political identity of the Dutch Republic. The Egmond ruins destroyed by the Dutch during the war may inflect the emergence of national myths surrounding the Count of Egmond, who was executed by the Spanish. Such other details as the new growth, the Westphalian cottage, the rainbow, the emergent light in a darkened sky, and the Jewish cemetery with light shining on the tombstone of Eliahu Montalto together invoke the ideals of a new society based upon religious toleration, the harmony of science and religion, and the hope for universal knowledge and peace in the Dutch Republic. Such ideas were espoused by Hugo Grotius, Manasseh ben Israel, and the Pansophist Millenarians, Adam Boreel, the Mennonite Galensz. Abrahamsz, and the Czech exile Jan Amos Comenius. Jacob van Ruisdael's known patron, the burgomeister Cornelisz de Graeff, was himself a Millenarian who provided financial support to Comenius in 1656.