/internal/media/dispatcher/1270798/resize%25253Aformat%25253DthumbnailThe Talmudist1919Jacob Binder107 x 101.92 cm (42 1/8 x 40 1/8 in.)Oil on canvasGift of a group of art lovers through a committee consisting of Alexander Brin, Carl Dreyfu, Louis E. Kirstein, A.J. Philpott, and A.C. Ratshesky26.2011This painting of a religious Jew deeply absorbed in the study of the Talmud was painted by Jacob Binder, a successful Russian Jewish portraitist who had studied with John Singer Sargent.
In 1925 members of the Boston Jewish community donated this work to the MFA in response to a public campaign for its purchase for the museum by Alexander Brin, editor of the Jewish Advocate. Six years earlier John Singer Sargent’s representation, in his murals for Boston’s Public Library, of the Jewish faith as the blind-folded, dethroned Synagoga female figure had caused an outcry amongst the Jewish community. Brin’s desire to donate the painting to “the great reservoir which is the pride of the city of Boston” was a reaction to Sargent’s murals, a wish to present “the most typical presentation that a dignified, self-respecting artistic Jewry could make”
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