Andy Warhol, in his prolific career as an artist, filmmaker, and professional provocateur, attracted no shortage of negative press. But few matched the drubbing he received upon the debut of “Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century” at the Jewish Museum in 1980.

“The way it exploits its Jewish subject without showing the slightest grasp of their significance is offensive — or would be, anyway, if the artist had not already treated so many non-Jewish subjects in the same tawdry manner,” a New York Times critic, Hilton Kramer, a longtime Warhol detractor, wrote. That the review appeared the day before Yom Kippur only added to its bite.

The exhibition featured portraits of Gertrude Stein, Sarah Bernhardt, Louis Brandeis, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, George Gershwin, Franz Kafka, Golda Meir, and the Marx Brothers. Warhol based the portraits of his “Jewish Geniuses,” as he liked to call them, on famous photographs of the subjects, worked over in a pastiche of silk screen and acrylic painting.

Almost 28 years later, the Jewish Museum is giving Warhol’s portraits another shot. The exhibition, “Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered,” which opens March 16, brings together his prints, a complete set of his paintings, preliminary sketches, and other ephemera as it examines the Pope of Pop’s foray into Jewish culture. It is presented in conjunction with the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

When “Ten Portraits” first showed at the Jewish Museum, Warhol was arguably the most famous living artist in the world. Yet his reputation among American critics had reached a low point. Warhol had spent the 1970s filling his bank account by mechanically producing portraits for any sitter willing to pay as much as $37,000 for a print. Approximately 1,600 people took him up on the offer, many of them the glitterati of celebrity society. When, in 1979, the Whitney Museum of American Art put on an exhibition of these portraits, the press judged the show hackwork driven by Warhol’s obsession with money. A year later, when “Ten Portraits” opened in New York City after stops in Rockville, Md., and Coral Gables, Fla., hostile critics saw the endeavor as a continuation of Warhol’s “Franklin Mint” approach to art. Warhol was accused of cynically exploiting for profit the cultural pride of Jews. Even critics who praised the art worried that the show reeked of “Jewploitation.”

The curator of “Warhol’s Jews,” Richard Meyer, believes the critical response wasn’t entirely fair to Warhol. Mr. Meyer said the project grew out of working relationships with Jewish philanthropists and institutions that existed prior to the show. In the mid-1970s, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem asked Warhol to do a five-panel portrait of Golda Meir. It was paid for by Sydney Lewis, a wealthy Jewish philanthropist and a Warhol collector. “The fact that an artist of his stature was doing a series on great Jews was hugely meaningful to parts of the Jewish community,” Mr. Meyer said.

During this time, Warhol befriended a Jewish New York gallery owner, Ronald Feldman. For years Warhol had prodded Mr. Feldman for ideas. When an Israel-based dealer suggested to Mr. Feldman that Warhol do 10 additional portraits of Meir, Mr. Feldman thought the idea was excessive. But he suggested to Warhol a 10-portrait series of accomplished Jews in the 20th century. Warhol warmed to the idea, so Feldman presented him with a long list of possible subjects. Many of the selected 10 came from Mr. Feldman’s urgings, including the final portrait of Louis Brandeis. At the start of the project Warhol didn’t even know all of his subjects. In a diary entry he writes, “Who is Martin Buber?”

So what were Warhol’s true motivations? The artist was notoriously abstruse when discussing his own work. Part of this extended from his pop sensibility; he was more interested in letting his images circulate in the popular imagination than he was in probing his subjects. “In terms of Warhol’s own interests, I don’t think he was invested in the historical biographies of these people,” Mr. Meyer said. “None of his portraits were deeply revealing.”

As a commercial gallery owner, Mr. Feldman admits that he wanted the portraits to turn a profit. Money was never far from Warhol’s ambitions either. “But the Ten Jews gave [Warhol] a chance to do portraits of famous people who were not alive,” Mr. Feldman said. “That was something that really turned him on. It wasn’t his intention that it would only be commercial.”

Regardless of the critical response at the time, the works hold significant cultural value for the Jewish community. In the early 1980s, the portraits traveled to different Jewish institutions around the country. In 2006, Mr. Feldman’s children donated one of Warhol’s paintings of Brandeis to Brandeis University in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Supreme Court Justice’s birth. “It didn’t matter that he didn’t have much to say about Jewish culture or history,” Mr. Meyers said, “because he had reignited these 10 figures and their histories.”