These are two portaits by Rembrandt, both in the Hermitage Museum, in St. Petersburg. The one on top is known as “Portrait of an old Jew”. The second one is known as “Portrait of an Old Man in Red”. I find them both extraordinary, but that is unimportant because I don’t have any ability to judge art work, and experts can perhaps show me where I am wrong. But I can say that I really like both of them and no one, absolutely no one, can tell me I am wrong.

But this is not my point. My point is that I turned on a short video yesterday on YouTube called something like “Treasures from the Hermitage”, and there was this young, guide-looking Russian woman, pointing out a dozen or so of her Hermitage favorites.

One of the items she had selected was Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Jew, the top painting above. But….she identified it as Rembrandt’s famous Portrait of an Old Man in Red.

Two questions arise. First, why did she do this? An honest mistake? Or is there a back story? And if there is a back story, what is it? Something nefarious, or something innocent? Or actually something to with Rembrandt scholarship, with questions about how various of his paintings are, or should be, identified? I have no idea.

The second question is, how did I learn this? No, I did not know (or remember) anything about either of these paintings before yesterday. And I only saw the top one on the video.

The answer is that I was really intrigued by the subject of the painting. I wondered who he was. And perhaps I had this interest because the more I looked at the painting, the more I thought the sitter must be Jewish. And I said this, even though there is nothing Jewish about the painting itself. No six pointed stars, no menorahs, not even a kippah.

I went to my computer and Googled “Rembrandt painting old man red Hermitage” and I got multiple copies of the lower picture, not the upper one. I then Googled “Rembrandt Jew Hermitage” and got the upper one.

Forgetting the question about how the portrait was identified on the video, my question is: how can some one in 21st century America look at a portrait from 17th century Amsterdam and recognize the unidentified subject of the portrait as Jewish.

By the way, in neither painting can the sitter by individually identified.