The Jewish Cemetery is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael, now at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

[1] The central elements of the painting differ from what one would see in Ouderkerk, as Ruisdael made adjustments to achieve compositional and allegorical intent.

[8] Vanitas works tend to be still-life or genre scenes, with skulls, books, flowers, and candles as common subjects in this theme.

[9] Similarly, Jacob van Ruisdael employed deserted tombs, ravaged churches, stormy clouds, dead trees, changing skies, and flowing water to symbolize death and the transience of all earthly things.

[2] Jacob Rosenberg and Seymour Slive describe the "compelling and tragic mood in nature" of the Jewish Cemetery—"a moralizing landscape .... painted with a deliberate allegorical programme.

[8] In addition to serving as a memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death, the painting may also offer themes of hope and renewal.

Water constantly flows, changes, and regenerates in the stream, perhaps symbolizing life and aliveness while the decaying tree bending over it represents death's inevitable arrival.

"[8] It has also been theorized to symbolize the renewal of life, connecting the work to a theological message: rabbis have said that the resurrection of the dead would be the first sign that the moshiach (the anointed one from the House of David) would be coming.

(Michael Zell writes that "Ruisdael focuses on a corner of the cemetery, isolating four of the oldest, most unusual and most conspicuous Sephardi tombs" with "illegible pseudo-Hebraic inscriptions.

[1] In the illuminated white marble tombstone, adorned with a large stone box and colorful cap, lie the remains of Elias (or Eliahu) Montalto.

[citation needed] On one side of the block the Mendez coat of arms appears, though barely legible and not depicted with any detail in the painting.

[1] This half-column is thought to be the column that once decorated the top of the stone slab that was placed over the tombs of Mendez Velho and three other members of his family, linking them all together.

The stone slab cracked around 1676 and the column fell off and was later made visible above ground, which is what Ruisdael captures in his paintings and prints, though he has placed it on the opposite side.

[1] Also noted in Ruisdael's composition is what in the actual cemetery is a wooden post—presented in one of the Teylers drawings as a signpost, and in the Detroit painting as a stump, while in the Dresden version left out altogether.

This wooden post would have been found near the tomb of Jacob Pereyra, itself a flat marble slab seen in both paintings and the drawing.

In Beth Haim the actual tomb comprises a slab decorated with a coat of arms consisting of lion and a coronet, along with Hebrew inscriptions detailing his rank and notable accomplishments.

The lower edge of the tomb is in the water and instead of the detailed coat of arms that adorns Palache's actual grave, the painting shows merely a letter sign, similar to a 'Y'.

[1] In the center of the composition, a pair of white tombs are flanked by the figures of three mourners—a Jewish family, including a father, mother, and boy, dressed in black, and reflected in the middle distance by the lids of two elongated pyramids.

David Henrique De Castro was the first to connect the marble tomb in Dresden painting to the Portuguese-Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk.

[2] Following the fall of Granada in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella granted full power to the Inquisition, which drove Jews from Spain, leading to the arrival of Portuguese-Jewish refugees in Amsterdam, around 1590.

[14] Since its founding in 1614, the year Jews became officially religiously free, the Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk saw the burial of Sephardic refugees who fled the Inquisition from Spain and Portugal.

The Dresden painting is described as having the qualities of a more developed technique: lighter brushwork, a strong and simple structure, and greater perspective and clarity in the artist's approach.

They became well known in the late 1670s, as they were reproduced by the engraver Abraham Blooteling, and later were used in a pair of etchings by Romeyn de Hooghe that depicted the Ouderkerk cemetery.