Jewish art poses a perennial problem of definition, just like Jewish identity. Inevitably the question arises about whether an artist has to be considered Jewish, and even what that might mean: is it a matter of ethnicity or of religion? Additionally, many early Jewish contributions to visual culture lie entirely outside any identification of an artistic hand; rather, they are defined chiefly through their location and function, usually as decorations within a ritual context of religious practice, be it in a synagogue or home. Yet even in those cases, the makers of the objects need not have been Jewish themselves, which seems to be a distinct possibility in the case of some medieval manuscripts. Indeed these questions seem so intractable, the range of time over two millennia so great, and the media so diverse that any single volume, especially one this brief, hardly seems capable of addressing the subject. Into the breach comes Edward van Voolen, long-time curator of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, where he is charged with consideration of such topics. These also include issues of representations of Jews, as demonstrated at that museum a year ago in an exhibition of “the Jewish Rembrandt.” The title of...