Borders and Boundaries in and around Dutch Jewish History 9789048521494

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Borders and Boundaries in and around Dutch Jewish History

Borders and Boundaries in and around Dutch Jewish History

Judith Frishman David J. Wertheim Ido de Haan Joël J. Cahen editors

a Amsterdam 2011

These proceedings have been published under the auspices of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Committee for the Study of the History and Culture of the Jews in the Netherlands and the Menasseh ben Israel Institute for Jewish Social and Cultural Studies, which is an academic collaboration between the Jewish Historical Museum and the University of Amsterdam.

ISBN 978-90-5260-387-2 © 2011, the authors /Aksant Academic Publishers, Amsterdam University Press All rights reserved including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the copyright owner.

Corrector: Piper Hollier Book Design: AlfaGrafica, Hilversum Printed in the Netherlands. Aksant Academic Publishers, Herengracht 221, nl-1016 bg Amsterdam, www.aup.nl

Table of Contents

Introduction Judith Frishman and Ido de Haan

PART I

7

BOUNDARY WORK

The Ghetto of Florence and the Spatial Organization of an Early Modern Catholic State Stefanie Siegmund

21

Explaining the Formation of Ghettos under Nazi Rule and its Bearings on Amsterdam. Segregating “the Jews” or Containing the Perilous “Ostjuden”? Dan Michman

35

Markers of a Minority Group. Jews in Antwerp in the Twentieth Century Veerle Vanden Daelen

45

PART II

CULTURAL TRESPASSERS

Jewish Parliamentary Representatives in the Netherlands, 1848-1914. Crossing Borders, Encountering Boundaries? Karin Hofmeester

65

Catinka Heinefetter. A Jewish Prima Donna in NineteenthCentury France Ronald Schechter

81

The Political Significance of Anne Frank. On Crossing Boundaries and Defining Them David J. Wertheim 95

6

PART III

Table of Contents

CROSSING BORDERS

The Twentieth-Century Portuguese Jews from Salonika. “Oriental Jews of Portuguese Origin” Manuela Franco

111

Dutch Jews and German Immigrants. Backgrounds of an Uneasy Partnership in Progressive Judaism Chaya Brasz

125

Burnishing the Rough. The Relocation of the Diamond Industry to Mandate Palestine David de Vries

143

PART IV

JEWS IN LIMBO

Some Reflections on Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Poznania and Jewish Relations with Poles and Germans Krzysztof A. Makowski

157

Belgian Independence, Orangism, and Jewish Identity. The Jewish Communities in Belgium during the Belgian Revolution (1830-39) Bart Wallet

167

Citizenship, Regionalization, and Identity. The Case of Alsatian Jewry, 1871-1914 Paula E. Hyman

183

Moroccan Jewry and Decolonization. A Modern History of Collective Social Boundaries Yaron Tsur

193

Contributors

201

Index of Names and Places

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Judith Frishman Ido de Haan

Introduction

The focus on borders and boundaries is part of the postmodernist trend in history writing in which historians of Jewish history in general and Dutch Jewish history in particular have belatedly taken part. While this postmodern boundary discourse represents an innovative and conscious move away from an essentialist approach to history and identity, the focus on borders may hardly be said to be new. Geographically speaking, Jews have never been confined within the borders of one nation or country. Even there where their places of residence remained the same for centuries, the countries and regimes that ruled over them were rarely as constant. These shifts in power were never without repercussion, leading at times to the creation of new national borders that divided communities once united. Acknowledging these processes of dispersion and integration, decades have already passed since the last encyclopedic projects were undertaken. Present-day students of Jewish history, unlike their illustrious predecessors, usually limit their areas of study, mastering the language(s), history, and culture(s) of one country or another. The plethora of area studies published during the past fifty years has slowly led to the erosion of widespread and long held preconceptions, including the notion that prior to the Enlightenment all Jews lived in ghettos and were subject to discrimination. Salo Baron and Cecil Roth already emphasized the interaction between the Jews and their surroundings in the early decades of the twentieth century. Protesting against the lachrymose version of Jewish history, they denied the Jews any degree of suffering beyond that of other groups in the Middle Ages.1 Needless to say, their approach was not unanimously welcomed, least of all by Zionist historians whose grand narratives depended on this negative interpretation of the diaspora. If identity is no longer to be regarded as something set but rather something

ccccccc 1.

S.W. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?”, The Menorah Journal 14 (1928): 516. For a discussion of Roth and Baron and Jewish historiography in general, see M. Brenner, “The Politics of Jewish Historiography”, in Dutch Jewry in a Cultural Maelstrom, 1880-1940, ed. J. Frishman and H. Berg (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007), 31-41.

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Judith Frishman and Ido de Haan

that is subject to change and negotiation, then logically attention should be paid to the “continuous construction, maintenance, or transgression of boundaries between ethnic and other collective identities”.2 Postmodernist historians have been turning their gaze to a wide range of identities once taken for granted, identities located on the borderlines between Jews and non-Jews as well as on those between one group of Jews and another. What some may consider the greatest and most obvious divide – that between Jews and Christians – has proven to be much more complicated than the mother-daughter paradigm maintained in the past. Daniel Boyarin has shown in both Dying for God and Borderlines that some Jews and certain early Christians had a lot more in common with each other than with their fellow Jews or Christians.3 According to Boyarin, one should in fact not speak of a parting of the ways as a natural process or simply as a result of the belief by some in Jesus, but rather of a forced partitioning of the ways representing a conscious drawing of boundaries as part of identity formation.4 Women’s studies too have disclosed the subjective nature of the dominant male-oriented approach that led to the marginalization of women in the annals of history. Having brought the roles played by exceptional women to the fore, feminist scholars moved on from writing a complementary history to a description of everyday life, ending in a more radical critique of gender roles and sexuality.5 Not only women’s everyday lives but also the examination of the development and roles of the bourgeoisie and the working classes were now considered no less valuable than the roles of the intellectuals upon whom the practitioners of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums had lavished so much attention. If West European Wissenschaftler, seeking continuity with the past for their radical endeavors, rediscovered the scholccccccc 2.

3.

4. 5.

J. Boyarin, “Responsive Thinking: Cultural Studies and Jewish Historiography”, in Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives, ed. A. Gotzmann and Ch. Wiese (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 490. D. Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); idem, Borderlines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). To say that Christians believe in Jesus while Jews do not is merely a tautology, Boyarin rightly points out. Daniel Boyarin is author or co-editor of several books dealing with sexuality both in the rabbinic period and in modernity. See Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Rabbinic Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Marion Kaplan is author of The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904-1938 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), editor of The Marriage Bargain: Women and Dowries in European History (Philadelphia: Haworth Press, 1985), author of The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and editor of Geschichte des Jüdischen Alltags in Deutschland. Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis 1945 (Munich: Beck Verlag, 2003).

Introduction

9

arship of Sephardic Jews, it was clear that their appreciation was limited to the literature produced by the elite of a population that was at one time considered superior to the Ashkenazim but had become a thing of the past. It would take some time before interest in the history of Sephardic Jews blossomed and even longer before the Mizrahim or middle Eastern Jews were deemed worthy objects of research. In the wake of these changes, Germany, the cradle of much intellectual activity, lost its hegemonic position as representative of European Jewish development in modernity. Instead, a comparison of paths of emancipation commenced – an undertaking that is still barely under way.6 In the wake of postcolonial studies, the troubling discovery was made that even those once colonized could themselves be found guilty of colonization and/or orientalism.7 Now not only the emphasis on Germany but also the primacy bestowed on Western society in general had to make way for new perspectives on those who had been looked down upon and marginalized by Jews themselves as “orientals”. Yedida and Norman Stillman, Aron Rodrigue, Yaron Tsur, Daniel Schroeter, and Oren Kosansky are but a few of the scholars researching various aspects of Jewish life in the Middle East.8 While in general these works were well received by both the scholarly and Jewish communities, this is certainly not the case for the works of the “New Historians” such as Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan, Benny Morris, and Ilan Pappé who have challenged the Zionist interpretation of the history of the ArabIsraeli conflict.9 It is here that we touch most uncomfortably upon the very heart

ccccccc 6.

7.

8.

9.

See for example P. Birnbaum and I. Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) and F. Malino and D. Sorkin, eds., Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe 1750-1870 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). Although the Jews of Europe were not literally colonized, Euro-Christian studies pointed to features of Judaism that were considered close to those of “orientals”. See J. Pasto, “Islam’s ‘Strange Secret Sharer’: Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish Question”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1998): 440. For a random sample, see N. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1991); Aron Rodrigue, Images of Sefardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993); Yaron Tsur, A Torn Community: The Jews of Morocco and Nationalism 1943-1954 [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001); Daniel Schroeter, The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Oren Kosansky, “The Real Morocco Itself: Jewish Saint Pilgrimage and the Idea of the Moroccan Nation”, in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa, ed. E. Gottreich and D. Schroeter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). For an overview of recent works on middle Eastern Jewry, see the articles by Goldberg, Goldish, and Kosansky in Perspectives. Newsletter of the Association of Jewish Studies (Spring 2005): 7-16. A. Shlaim and E.L. Rogan, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); B. Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); idem, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); I. Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951 (London: Taurus, 1992); idem, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples

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of the practice of Jewish history which is still intricately linked to the quest for Jewish identity once so easily found in the sharp divide between “us” and “them”.

Boundary work The following collection of articles, first presented at the Eleventh International Symposium on the History and Culture of the Jews in the Netherlands held on 1821 November 2007 in Amsterdam, is based upon the recognition of the effort that is needed to create these demarcations between Jewish and non-Jewish history, but also on the growing awareness of the effects of such boundary work on the identifications that play a pivotal role in these histories. It is now commonplace to argue that nations and ethnoi are forms of imagined communities. As expressed by Benedict Anderson, who coined the term, the demarcation of communities is the result of mapping, and in many cases literally mapmaking.10 Yet the boundaries drawn on paper are to be supplemented by contrasts, demarcations, distinctions and appropriations on the ground. In contemporary social theory, this kind of boundary work is applied to the demarcation of fields of science, realms of action, or spheres of justice. These spatial metaphors refer back to a much more literal form of demarcation, which pertains to the creation of borders and the erection of boundaries as part of the consolidation of political power over a territory.11 Jewish history has always offered a powerful example of this mechanism of territorial demarcation in the form of the ghetto, the first of which was established in Venice in 1516. As Stefanie Siegmund argues in her contribution to this volume, the history of ghettoization should not be read as another chapter in the long history of anti-Semitism. Instead, Siegmund presents the first wave of ghettoization of Jews as counterpart to the ‘spatialization’ of state power on the Italian peninsula which took place in the course of the sixteenth century. The latter process was introduced after the Catholic Church decided at the Council of Trent (1545-63) to aim for the consolidation of spiritual power through the assignment of believers to specific parishes. This mode of spatial control was then imitated by Cosimo I when he installed the Florentine ghetto in 1570-71. Seen from this perspective, ghettoization was not a special measure of repression of Jews, but a way of streamlining the administration of

ccccccc

10. 11.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); idem, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006). B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). P. Bourdieu, Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); idem, Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power (Cambridge: Polity, 1996); M. Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Introduction

11

the state, by subjecting Jews to a uniform model of assigning religious groups to a specific territory, uniformly administered under a central state organ, the Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisditione. Like other communities within the Tuscan state, the Jewish ghetto received a large measure of autonomy, yet it also severely restricted the mobility of individual members. Only Jews with the highest social and economic status were able to move freely outside the ghetto. As Dan Michman demonstrates in his contribution, these kinds of legal and administrative ghettos disappeared in the course of the nineteenth century, as part of the abolishment of privilege and the introduction of civic equality by the liberal states of Europe. However, the notion of ghetto was revived at the end of the century, both as a metaphor of social and cultural segregation, and as a denotation of a concentration of Jews, closely living together in monoethnic neighborhoods. The latter notion of ghetto was despised by Zionists as the epitome of backwardness and was understood in the same negative way by German anti-Semites, for whom the ghetto was the breeding ground of antisocial behavior and a threat to social hygiene. Seen from this perspective, ghettoization was highly undesirable, and Michman argues surprisingly yet convincingly that the erection of ghettos was never a main goal of Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish policies. The radical restructuring of the urban landscape which ghettoization involved was only enacted in the specific circumstances in those Eastern European towns where the aim to control the feared spread of an Ostjudentum was facilitated by the presence of a manageable number of Jews within the confines of the traditional Jewish neighborhoods of some of the Polish and Galician towns. Only where similar structural conditions existed, and where German officials were present who had experience with these Eastern European forms of ghettoization, did ghettos emerge. This was the case in Saloniki, but also in Amsterdam, where the traditional and informal Jodenbuurt was transformed into an enclosed Judenviertel. However, this was only one of the forms in which Jews were segregated and concentrated, and as Michman argues, soon the notions of a ghetto, colony, and concentration camp were used interchangeably as indication of the violent confinement of Jews within an enclosed area with insurmountable barriers. A testing ground for Michman’s argument would be the Jewish community of Antwerp, as discussed by Veerle Vanden Daelen. Antwerp never had a ghetto, but since the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants all settled in the same area around the central railroad station. In this way, an informal Jewish neighborhood emerged. Vanden Daelen demonstrates how this was the result of familiar patterns of chain migration and economic interdependency, leading to a concentration of Jews within the Antwerp diamond trade and within a neighborhood, without any visible borders. The only actual border, that of the eruv established in 1902 by the Antwerp rabbi Sternberg, was not only invisible for non-Jews, but also spanned a much wider area than the actual Jewish neighborhood. Even though the borders of this area were undefined, its Jewish nature was marked by a highly vis-

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Judith Frishman and Ido de Haan

ible population, characterized by dress and habits, and increasingly dominated by Hasidic Orthodoxy, turning the Jewish community of Antwerp from the prewar immigrant community into a religious minority in the postwar era. The reasons for the rise of Orthodoxy are complex and are both culturally and economically defined. Moreover, the increased visibility of Jews, standing out by the traditional dress of men and women, led to nostalgic depictions of a clearly invented traditional “shtetl on the Schelde”, but also fueled concerns within the community about the exclusion that might result from this heightened awareness of the Jews, both among Jews and non-Jews.

Cultural Trespassers The discussion of the Antwerp community already points to the interconnections between physical borders and cultural boundaries. The demarcations of the community are always also markers of identity and difference. Crossing such boundaries means that the trespasser shifts from a sphere of commonality with the ingroup to one of difference in comparison to outsiders. Instead of a self-evident identity as sameness with respect to those within the community comes the need for identification of both one’s own commitments and of the ties with other people. Crossing boundaries therefore inevitably leads to a redefinition of belonging. One of the most, if not the most important passage was the entrance of Jews in the sphere of politics. Following the lead of Ronald Schechter’s work on Jews in French revolutionary politics,12 Karin Hofmeester discusses the thirteen Jews who were members of the Dutch Second Chamber between 1848 and 1913. Michel Henri Godefroi, who occupied a seat for 32 years – the longest period – exemplified the politically liberal and religiously moderate tendencies among the Dutch Jewish elites of the nineteenth century. Although Godefroi sporadically took the floor to defend Jewish interests abroad (e.g., the Mortara affair of 1858), he refused to act as a broker of Dutch Jewish interests. This became evident in the debate about confessional schools, which Godefroi and his fellow Jewish MPs A.S. van Nierop and A.F.K. Hartogh rejected in favor of religiously neutral state education. However, this did not deter the political leaders who sought to mobilize support for the confessional school by stirring up anti-Semitic motives and identifying Jews as liberal enemies of the Christian nation. For this as well as for the next generation of Jewish MPs who were more radical or even socialist in perspective, it remained impossible not to be identified as a Jewish MP, whether they aimed to serve the national interest, that of progress, or that of the working class. In the end, the integration of Jews within the ccccccc 12.

R. Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Introduction

13

political sphere led to the erection of new boundaries in the form of the anti-Semitic complaint of Jewish “overrepresentation” in politics and society. Ronald Schechter shifts the attention from politics to culture by sketching the career of the Jewish prima donna Catinka Heinefetter, who enjoyed a huge success performing the leading part of Rachel in the opera La Juive of the equally Jewish composer Fromenthal Halévy. According to Schechter, Heinefetter’s “Jewish” traits, as well as her proverbial Jewish dark beauty, greatly contributed to her success in performing the role of Rachel. Other performers in that role were Jewish as well; if they were not, like Rosine Stoltz, a Jewish background was produced for them – and actually, even Heinefetter’s Jewishness has never been established beyond doubt. Although Théophile Gautier recorded a loud applause from fellow Jews for Heinefetter in the 1840s, the Jewish press was not unequivocally positive about the moral and religious value of her performance. Their praise was directed foremost to Heinefetter’s traditional roles as participant in Jewish charity. In the end, Heinefetter and the performance of La Juive were a channel through which an essentialized and exoticized image of female Jewishness was presented to the cultured public of mid-nineteenth century France. Another example of the ways in which cultural boundaries are overcome yet also reinforced is presented in the discussion by David Wertheim of the legacy of Anne Frank. The memory she and her diary left us were presented by her father and those who tried to guard her legacy as an icon of the need for universal humanitarianism. The image Anne Frank conveyed spoke to all around the world who wanted to partake in this common humanity, or so it was assumed. Yet, as Wertheim observes, the memory of Anne Frank was also mobilized to draw new boundaries, between oppressors and the oppressed, between those who had mastered the Fascist past and those who had not, between the forces of evil and good. Moreover, some people rejected the attempt to universalize Anne Frank’s experience, which was according to them ultimately Jewish. The reason why Anne Frank’s legacy can be put to such multifarious purposes is sought by Wertheim in the Diary’s focus on the issue of boundaries. It is Anne Frank’s struggle with the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, between youth and adulthood, and between men and women that made her diary a focal point for those who wanted to cross the boundaries that keep societies apart, as well as for those who want to erect new barriers.

Crossing Borders Just as the movements of subatomic particles are observable only when they are measured, these cultural trespassings make boundaries visible by crossing them. Yet there are more objective legal and geographical borders which require those who cross them to show their identification, both in terms of legal status and of social and cultural belonging. As the contributions of Manuela Franco, Chaya Brasz, and David

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De Vries illustrate, Jewish migrants not only have to cope with the challenges of the uncharted territory they enter, but also have to renegotiate their relation to the Jews who already live in the new land. A most dramatic illustration of the consequences of border crossing is given by Manuela Franco, who discusses the fate of some 500 Jewish families of Portuguese descent who had lived in Salonika since the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal. The legal protection they enjoyed under the pluralist system of the Ottoman Empire was challenged by Greek nationalism. After a series of negotiations, these families finally found protection by the decision of the Portuguese government in 1913 to grant these families the Portuguese nationality. It thus created a legal shield that became highly desirable once the Jews of Europe were persecuted by the Nazi regime. But it also made these “Levantine” Jews very vulnerable to the combined attack against “foreign” Jews which notably characterized the persecution of Jews in Vichy France, where most of these families ended up. Chaya Brasz demonstrates how Jewish migration leads to cultural confrontation within a Jewish community by the example of German Jewish immigrants and their influence on the establishment of Progressive Judaism in the Netherlands. Brasz argues that the established interpretation of Progressive Judaism as an import product of the German Jewish immigrants is a misconception created by the dominance of German Jews in the reconstruction of Progressive Judaism after the Holocaust. Actually, there was an indigenous and more radical Liberal development in the Netherlands, which collided with a more moderate Progressive Judaism introduced by the German Jews, resulting in different Liberal communities before the war. David De Vries describes the transplantation, or maybe better, dispersion of the Low Countries diamond industry to Palestine during the Holocaust. Due to the influence of the South African De Beers company on the organization of the diamond plants in Palestine, a “Taylorization” of the factory work took effect, which eroded both the skilled nature of the work and the trade union bonds which had characterized the industry. They were replaced by an ideology of efficiency and social engineering, which could be merged with the Zionist perspective on the new state. At the same time, the connection with the British and the aura of luxury around the diamond trade did not mix very well with the ethos of the Yishuv. Due to its problematic entrenchment in Palestine, as well as the pull to Antwerp by the reviving industry in Belgium, the diamond industry in Palestine almost completely collapsed in 1946. Its restructuring in the years thereafter led to the introduction of the more traditional modes of production which had been reinstated in Belgium.

Jews in Limbo Borders and boundaries are never stable. Erecting and guarding them takes constant labor, but ever so often they tend to shift. Therefore, the need for reidentifi-

Introduction

15

cation arises not only as the result of Jews crossing borders, but also as a result of border shifts in areas populated by Jews, leaving them and others in limbo about the entity to which they belong. These border shifts are a recurrent phenomenon in European history, and in a different way also characteristic of the territorial histories created by European colonialism. In a final series of contributions, Krysztof A. Makowski, Bart Wallet, Paula Hyman, and Yaron Tsur demonstrate how Jews struggled to define their loyalties in terms of belonging to the old or the new state, yet increasingly also in terms of a Jewish national identity. Makowski’s discussion of the Jews in Posen demonstrates the complexities of these issues. He opposes the tendency among historians to draw a strong antagonism between Jews and Poles, the former who are supposed to have supported the Prussian incorporation of Posen after the partition of Poland in the 1770s, and to have sided with the Germans against the Poles during the emergence of Polish nationalism in the middle of the nineteenth century. Instead, Makowski stresses the continuously peaceful and in some cases even close relations between Jews and Poles in Posen. Although mandatory school attendance after 1825 contributed to the pressure to assimilate, the Poznanian Jews developed an interesting hybrid between Polish and German nationalism. Bart Wallet depicts an equally complicated situation for the Jews in the Southern Netherlands who were confronted with the establishment of a Belgian state in 1830. While almost all of the Jews in the northern part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands supported the Dutch monarchy, a majority of the Jews in the South also sided with the Orangists, and some of them left the country. Yet the liberal cause of the Belgian Revolt attracted the support of some Jews, especially those of German descent, while a third group took a pragmatic stance and supported the Belgian state once it was safely established. The liberalism and only weakly nationalist nature of the Belgian Revolt created room for this variety of reactions. Both Makowski and Wallet emphasize the hard choices Jews had to make in times of shifting national allegiances. Paula Hyman demonstrates that the identities Jews created in the borderland of the Alsace were layered and internally diversified. The tensions these multifarious identifications engendered between local Jewish traditions, regional solidarities, and the immersion into the French republican culture reached a high point after the incorporation of the Alsace into Germany as a consequence of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. While the German Reich made a special effort to remove Jewish fears of the loss of equal rights, the republican dream was shattered by aggression within France against the French-Alsatian officer Dreyfus. Yet the coalition in support of Alsatian autonomy that might have offered a third way for Jews foundered on the anti-Semitism of Alsatian Catholics who were the main supporters of autonomy. Finally, Yaron Tsur discusses the transformation of the Jewish community in Morocco as a result of the French colonization after 1912 and the subsequent emer-

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gence of an independent Moroccan state, finally established in 1956. The Jews formed a subordinate community within the Islamic state of the nineteenth century, yet they peacefully coexisted with their Islamic neighbors. These divisions became deeper due to the modernizing tendencies introduced among Jews by the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Hebrew Haskalah movement. The segmentation of Moroccan society was further reinforced and institutionalized during the French protectorate period. After the failure in 1940 of the French Third Republic at home and abroad, a Moroccan national movement emerged. It presented an Arabic road to national independence, which had little to offer to Jews, while the alternative of an independent Jewish state became increasingly viable and attractive. As a result, the emergence of the Moroccan state was accompanied by a massive exodus of almost all of the 300,000 Moroccan Jews between 1948 and 1971.

Conclusion: the Limits of Jewish History Together, the contributions to this volume demonstrate the multifarious linkages and interconnections between the histories of Jews and non-Jews. Drawing borders and boundaries is confining and limiting, yet it is at the same time enabling and constructing with respect to the development of Jewish identities in the plural. Viewed from this perspective, it is demonstrated once more that a lachrymose or Zionist history of the Jewish people as an inert object of repression or assimilatory erosion fails to conceptualize the flexible resilience of Jews in the face of shifting geographical borders and cultural boundaries, and other demarcations of identity and difference. Yet if these essentialist readings of history are incorrect, if Jewish history everywhere is but part and parcel of the history of the surroundings, and if the uniqueness of the Jewish nation and its destiny are but myths,13 what then makes Jewish history Jewish?14 The answer has once more been sought by some in essentialist discourse, as is paradoxically the case of Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, albeit in a highly personal approach. At one stage the Boyarins proffer diaspora – in their view the quintessential Jewish experience – as an alternative to nationalism in a postnationalist era in the hope of survival and as a means of maintaining an attachment to a collective identity.15 Elsewhere they unabashedly identify their own struggles with those of the ccccccc 13. 14. 15.

So too Shlomo Sand in his book The Invention of the Jewish People (London and New York: Verso, 2009). This question is the subject of Moshe Rosman’s How Jewish is Jewish History? (Oxford and Portland OR: The Littman Library, 2007). J. Boyarin and D. Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Diaspora may be an alternative to the older yet recently revived concept of cosmopolitanism. The Boyarins are openly influenced by the postcolo-

Introduction

17

text.16 Emphasizing the power of imagination rather than attempting to see those who wrote or figure in texts as they saw themselves, Jonathan Boyarin concludes that “the ultimate payoff is the reformulation of our sense of ourselves in the present.”17 Unlike the Boyarins or Rosman, Andreas Gotzmann, scholar of German Jewish history, opposes his colleagues’ obsession with matters of assimilation and acculturation in what he sees as the “persistent need to defend the field [of Jewish historiography, JF/IdH] and its inward perspective against the master narrative.”18 He analyzes this return to essentialist discourse as “designed to define stable normative patterns and a secure vision of what to understand as ‘Jewish’ in the future when ‘looking at the past.’”19 If, however, one acknowledges the correctness of the claims of cultural discourse that cultural systems are dynamic and anything but fixed entities, then one must consequently shift the focus from structure to meaning. Then “there can be no normative patterns and no fixed point outside of the analytical process or apart from its historical place”, in other words, there can be no eternal essence of Judaism or the Jewish people.20 Gotzmann thus rejects engaging in “history as identity”, no matter how openly practiced by Jewish (or even nonJewish) historians. This jarring and bold challenge seems to be implicated by the contributions in this volume. Instead of a history of Jews as “a nation apart”, they illustrate ways of writing interesting Jewish histories that put Jewish communities in interactive contexts, without assuming a substantial common Jewish denominator. But not only Jewish history and the (national) Jewish grand narrative are challenged. This approach also questions the writing of Jewish histories within the boundaries of national states. This is demonstrated by this volume, stemming from a conference on Dutch-Jewish history. On earlier occasions, the organizers of these Dutch-Jewish history meetings have emphasized the international context in which this particuccccccc

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

nialist theorist Homi Bhabha whose first book, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), has had deep impact on a great many thinkers. Diaspora as the essence of identity is also popular now in Islamic identity discourse. See for example F. Mernissi, “The Cowboy or Sinbad? Who Will Win the Race towards Globalisation?”, speech held upon receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters, October 2003. See http://fundacionprincipedeasturias.org/en/awards/ 2003/fatema-mernissi-susan-sontag-1/speech/. D. Boyarin links his book Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Rabbinic Literature to his own bisexuality and does so repeatedly in both Unheroic Conduct and Queer Theory. In what is ostensibly a postscript to A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, the author criticizes Zionism and the claim it makes on Jewish identity. J. Boyarin, “Responsive Thinking: Cultural Studies and Jewish Historiography”, 483. A. Gotzmann, “Historiography as Cultural Identity. Towards a Jewish History Beyond National History”, in Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives, ed. A. Gotzmann and Ch. Wiese (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 517. Ibid., 518, 521. Ibid., 522.

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lar history needs to be placed. In this volume, a next step is taken, not only offering a series of papers centered around Dutch-Jewish experience, but also engaging with histories in many parts of the world other than the Netherlands. Moreover, these contributions indicate that the nation can be an interesting point of departure, but it never can be the final context in which to put Jewish histories. In the end, national histories can only be written as the permanent (re)construction of the boundaries of nations.21 The present volume hopefully demonstrates the extent to which these kinds of histories lead to a better understanding of the wealth of interconnected histories, thus enriching our comprehension of communities, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Yet we are also confronted with a loss. If writing the history of communities – not just Jewish communities, but every community – always results in stories of limits and margins, of contested boundaries and border lands, is there still room for “normal”, “routine” commonality, based on consensus, coherence, and maybe even cosiness (gezelligheid)? Does the emphasis on the contested nature of community within and/or across borders do justice to the experience of feeling at home and at ease within the confines of one’s own community? Questioning these senses of belonging is therefore in the end not only a matter of intellectual integrity, but also one of solidarity.

ccccccc 21.

See among the many titles on national history the highly instructive volume edited by Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan, and Kevin Passmore, Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1999).

Part I Boundary Work

Stefanie Siegmund

The Ghetto of Florence and the Spatial Organization of an Early Modern Catholic State* The history of the early modern Italian Jewish ghetto should be of particular interest to modern historians and to all with an interest in the contemporary struggles of local and national governments to knit together people of disparate ethnic and religious affiliations into peaceful, tolerant, respectful, and flourishing states or unions. Specifically, the history of the ghettos, and more broadly of the “space” and places designated for Jews in early modern Europe before a political commitment to religious freedom was fully developed, may help set in perspective a comparative history of European approaches to the incorporation, integration, and toleration of its constituent minorities and to the demographic mobility that is so deeply associated with their history. The question of locating and defining the place of minority groups, broadly speaking, is related to the specific interest in the early modern world of statesmen – and of church officials – in defining borders and boundaries. As I have argued in a full length Italian case study, the decision of the Medici regime to ghettoize the Jews of Tuscany in 1570-71 is best explained in the context of an early modern statebuilding process that was newly attentive to the incredible potential of spatial organization for the determination and administration of rights and obligations, instead of the formerly status-based organization of the same.1 I have called this the “spatialization” of early modern state power.2 A second and related argument that I will discuss here pertains more to the question of Jewishness – the specific shape and form of Jewish identity at any particular time and place. In the process called ghettoization, the spatial reorganization of a population of Jews – that is, their relocation to a ghetto – had an almost immediate and long-lasting impact on them, ccccccc *

1. 2.

Adapted in part from The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community by Stefanie Siegmund, © 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University, all rights reserved. By permission of the publisher, www.sup.org. I thank Stanford University Press for permission to incorporate some revised sections of that book here. Stefanie Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, 14.

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turning them into the kind of local, self-governing community the existence of which historians previously assumed. Finally, I will discuss briefly a third point, which is that the spatialization of state power was tied to efforts to restrict mobility. Thus mobility itself – such as egress from the spatial restriction of the walled and gated ghetto – may be seen as a form of resistance to state authority, a resistance that marked status within the Jewish community, even when the movement was authorized, nontransgressive, and even monitored. Thus, whereas historians have more generally associated a high level of mobility with the lowest status social classes – the migrants, vagrants, beggars, thieves, soldiers, and prostitutes of early modern Europe – in a local context, increased mobility can be seen as a countermove against the lowered status and leveling of Jewish status that came with ghettoization.

Sixteenth Century Contexts: State and Church In the mid sixteenth century, an ambitious duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I de’ Medici, undertook a major political and administrative reorganization of his state. His reforms set out to disentangle a messy, overlapping, competing set of jurisdictional and administrative units, the better to control them. The reordering affected the collection of taxes, approval of local statutes, membership in guilds, the appeals process in the court system – indeed, most every aspect of “state authority” that then existed.3 Not usually cited in descriptions of this state-building but integral to this reordering was the relocation of the Jews and the establishment of a ghetto. The ghetto of Florence was decreed in 1570, existing housing was purchased and modified to make it suitable, and the Jews of Tuscany moved into it in 1571. About four hundred Jews who had previously been living in small villages and towns throughout Tuscany were now forced to live in the city of Florence in a neighborhood that was – like the ghettos of Venice and Rome established earlier in the sixteenth century – locked at night by doors secured by night watchmen. I understand the creation of this ghetto in the context of the new interest of early modern states in boundaries – not only in expanding them, but in determining them, mapping them, and using them. A second context is Catholic Reform, whose influence was already felt in the cities of central and northern Italy. In the case of Florence, the ghetto was actually a byproduct of the administrative reorganization that was part of Cosimo’s state-building enterprise, but its packaging and the meaning assigned to it by Christians were determined by the religious context.

ccccccc 3.

These topics are fully explored in Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, chapters 1, 2, and 7.

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Boundaries: The Spatialization of State Power in Parish, Commune, and Ghetto For French historian Peter Sahlins, the sixteenth-century state was an administrative and jurisdictional entity of noncontiguous borders; it had no “territorial” coherence or authority until late in the seventeenth century.4 The same can largely be said of Tuscany, but there a strong interest in boundaries is in evidence by the later sixteenth century. In 1570, the same year the ghetto was created, the Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisditione (Nine Conservators of the Dominion and Jurisdiction), the duke’s most important administrative agency, ordered that each spring “all the communities that have borders (are confinanti) with other states are obliged … to visit and recognize all the borders (confini)” and to file annual reports.5 In 1578, as part of its ongoing effort to control and improve transportation in the state, vital to the economy – which in turn required good management of roads and rivers – the Grand Duke made local communities responsible for maintaining annual reports on the conditions of their roads. This bookkeeping both required and established a formal designation of each local community’s boundaries, at least as they pertained to maintenance of the roads found therein.6 These seemingly inconsequential administrative procedures are novel: they represent a new way of thinking about the authority of the state that is both territorial and geographic, and also – linking the two – spatial. Where did this attention to territorial boundaries come from? Practical, rational, economic planning, to be sure. But there were other influences as well. In the mid-sixteenth century, Cosimo de’ Medici undertook a series of thorough-going administrative reforms in an effort to strengthen his rule and his economy. He was a resourceful ruler who seems to have recognized and employed good strategies for state-building when he saw them. In the decades leading up to the ghettoization, Cosimo was a keen observer – through his ambassadors – of the proceedings at the Council of Trent, which met from 1545 to 1563. It was the Catholic Church, a great early modern bureaucracy, and not a monarchy such as Spain or France that first systematically responded to the perceived threat of fluidity and mobility – of people, books, and ideas – by becoming “territorially” defined. The territory, of course, was not a state with contiguous geographic borders. The Reform program of the Catholic Church mid-sixteenth century was focused not on the papal states alone but on the whole reach of the Catholic Church – and in expanding its reach – and that required a new level of attention to the administration of the ccccccc 4. 5. 6.

Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 28. Giovanni Cascio Pratilli and Luighi Zangheri, eds., La legislazione medicea sull’ambiente, 4 vols. (Florence, 1994-98), vol. 1, 149. On this, see Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, 427n111, 497nn3-4.

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smallest and most fundamental unit of the Church, the parish. The parish itself was the key territorial and also social-spiritual unit, served and guided by a priest. A certain number of parishes combined to form a diocese, guided of course by its bishop, and so on, with all the dioceses, collectively, comprising the total, if noncontiguous, state of the Church. The work of the Council of Trent included the attempt to ensure that there were no hidden pockets of heresy in formation, and also that each Christian soul received spiritual care (cura animas) – the sacraments. The discussion and resulting canons focused intensely on the relationship between clerical leadership and place – bishop and bishopric, pastor and parish. Closely observed by representatives of many European states, including Tuscany, the bishops advanced a program of reform and consolidation that emphasized the requirement of residency, that is, that bishops must reside in their diocese. These concerns were not new to the church; even Florentine synodal statutes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had repeatedly called for the “return to residence”, forbidding absentee beneficiaries to hire vicars for their rectories. Florentine synodal statutes had also previously attempted to stop parishioners from receiving sacraments outside their home parish without permission.7 The issue of residence was, however, rigorously and programmatically pursued anew by the Council of Trent. With the fragmentation of the church and the new reality to be known later as the policy cuius regio, eius religio, the relationship between territory and religion assumed a new importance. One of the masterful moves of the program developed at Trent was the systematization of the parochial structure, a reform effort intended to give each bishop greater control over his diocese and over the parish priests. But it is through the parish itself, not just through the bishops and priests, that the Church would try to reach all the people. As John Bossy put it: “[T]o the ordinary population … what the Counter-Reformation really meant was the institution among them, by bishops empowered by the Council of Trent to enforce it, of a system of parochial conformity.”8 This included Mass (weekly and on holidays), baptism, marriage, extreme unction and burial, the Eucharist at least once a year, and penance – all to be administered to individuals by their local parish priest and none other. A parish priest should know his entire flock, their comings and goings. To make this possible, the boundaries of the parish had to be fixed wherever they were not. Who lived in which parish? In a city with a church around every twisted corner and hidden piazza, who knew? The well-known “beating the bounds” ritual of England apparentccccccc 7. 8.

Richard C. Trexler, Synodal Law in Florence and Fiesole, 1306-1518 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1971), 59, 71. John Bossy, “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe”, Past and Present 47 (1970): 52.

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ly had no Italian equivalent – and that medieval ritual only really produced administratively useful boundaries later in a seventeenth-century context.9 The key text that defined the new role that the parish should (and would) play is a canon from the Council of Trent stating that wherever there was no parish church or where the precise boundaries of a parish were not known, boundaries should be determined and assigned. Thus, at the twenty-fourth session, in 1563, the bishops commanded themselves to establish territorial order in their dioceses: In cities or other places where parish churches have no fixed boundaries, and the rectors have no congregation of their own to serve but administer the sacraments to all who come to ask at random, the holy council bids bishops, for the good spiritual state of the souls entrusted to them, to divide the people into separate and clear parishes and to assign to each their own and permanent parish priest, who will be able to know them and from whom alone they may licitly receive the sacraments; … And bishops must see that the same is done as soon as possible in cities and other places where there are no parish churches.10

The same session at the Council of Trent concluded that no one was allowed to preach without the permission of the bishop, who, resident in his diocese, would assign only well-trained priests to the churches. “The bishop should carefully instruct the people that each of them is under obligation to attend their parish church, when they can reasonably do so, to hear the word of God”, which was to be preached on Sundays and solemn festival days, and at least thrice weekly during the season of Fasts, Lent and Advent.11 These reforms were largely accomplished by the 1620s in Rome, where the parish topography was reorganized and an annual parish census was added to include the number in each parish who had taken communion and the numbers of religious, of prostitutes, and of “people cohabiting in a state of sin”.12 In their pastoral visits, which became much more regular after the Council of Trent, the archbishops asked parish priests if they were keeping the required registries of communion, marriages, and baptisms. The entire Catholic world was to be mapped out, the clerical hierarchy fitting properly onto the grid, and the whole structure and system benefiting the parishioners who were to receive more honest, skilled, and pious care. Fixing people to their parishes was an important part of the plan that emerged from the Council of Trent, for it allowed parish priests and their supervisors direct

ccccccc 9. 10.

11. 12.

W. S. Tratman, “Beating the Bounds”, Folklore 42, no. 3 (1931): 317-23. Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, Trent to Vatican II (London and Washington DC: Sheed & Ward / Georgetown University Press, 1990), Session 24, Decree on Reform, canon 13, p. 768. Ibid., canon 4, p. 763. Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 24.

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knowledge of and influence over the frequency with which individuals came in for confession and communion, heard sermons, and attended parish schools. The parish was the base unit for the church’s reform efforts: to catechize the masses, to provide all with the necessary church sacraments, and – utilizing the new knowledge of who is present for the sacraments, masses, and sermons and who is not – to prevent the spread of Protestantism or other forms of heresy, dissent, or conflict within the community. Indeed, Christian community – which was once imagined as all of Christendom – had been ruptured by the Protestant divide, and in its place the Christian communal life of individual parishes was given new strength. The spatial-hierarchical structure that was being strengthened by the Catholic Church was one that could be imitated by Cosimo I. His administrative plan and reforms of the 1560s included strengthening the local subject communities of his state, each of which was now presided over by a chancellor. In this respect, his governance was more centralized than that of the Roman papacy, for he appointed the chancellors himself, while bishops were not appointed directly by the Pope but rather by a papally-appointed committee. The Church was, of course, a much larger and more complex state! Cosimo’s interest in the Church and its parish structure – which he also supported – went beyond its imitation as an administrative model. Space permits but one example of how Cosimo used Catholic reform policies for his own purposes, in this case, surveillance: according to the ambassador from Venice in 1561, “The Prince even wishes to know from the parish priests the number of hosts distributed during communion, because he is accustomed to say that alterations and changes in religion bring with them the manifest danger of State.”13 The Medici rulers also found it convenient to make use of the church’s administrative organization in pursuing their Jewish policy: when a list of Jews in Florence was made for Cosimo or Francesco in 1567 to facilitate the enforcement of the newly ordered yellow badge, the Jews were listed according to the parishes in which they lived.14 As we have seen, the Council of Trent required that the territorial boundaries of parishes be drawn and determined. It was a spiritual topography – the definition of a parish was territorial, demographic, and spiritual – comprised of the individuals who lived within bounds of a certain church, with whose souls a parish priest was charged. But did Church officers follow these principles to the logical conclusion that Jews could not be allowed to live within parishes any more than they could be considered part of the Christian community? It may be that we can detect some hints of the influence of this rather abstract, ccccccc 13. 14.

Translated by Ronald F.E. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York-London: Academic Press, 1982), 207. Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, 38.

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theoretical model of parish-based Christian community. We see it in the records of the pastoral visits made by the Florentine Archbishop Altoviti in 1568-69 (two years before the edict of ghettoization), the purpose of which was to investigate the condition of the churches and of conformity to the religion. Tucked almost illegibly into the comments on the absence of heresy, on the regular attendance of parishioners at communion, on the necessity of whitewashing the walls of local church properties, and on the need to purchase various holy objects are notes – usually just a sentence – recording the presence of Jews in the parish.15 This question of whether there were any Jews living there was not mandated by any specific reform of the Council of Trent. It may be that the new focus on the parish as a unit with boundaries raised the level of awareness of some Christians about the presence of Jews in their locale. As the focus of their communal activity came to be more parish-oriented and parish-focused, the residence of Jews on streets now thought of as within parish boundaries was incongruous and noteworthy. But we need not imagine that Cosimo himself was striving to make the parish a perfectly Christian community. For him, the administrative reform of the state had its own logic. The smallest administrative units were the communes and villages. Jews who lived in these villages created an administrative complication, since Jews were entitled to use a separate court system and often sent appeals and supplications directly to the duke, and since they were very often privileged and not subject to all the local laws, whether because of special rights they had obtained directly from the duke or because of a legal assumption that they were entitled to follow their own laws.16 In any event, their removal to a ghetto resolved these problems and allowed Cosimo to streamline his bureaucracy, to align the grid of administrative authority with the residential map. The Jews, once moved to a ghetto, literally became a commune – self governing as they had not been, collectively taxed as they had not been, and subject directly to The Nine Conservators of the Dominion and Jurisdiction (the Nove), just like all other communes in the state under the administrative reforms of Cosimo I.17 The ghettoization of the Jews, otherwise difficult to explain, makes a great deal of sense in this broad context even if we cannot identify evidence that proponents of ghettoization in the church and government specifically claimed that Jews were out of place in the parishes. Although those individuals who acted against the Jews and lobbied for their ghettoization had motivations (discussed in my book) that were often much less abstract and much less religious, the Jews were ultimately ccccccc 15. 16.

17.

Ibid., 38-39. For discussion of the status of Tuscan Jews in the Tuscan legal system on the eve of ghettoization, see S. Siegmund, “Division of the Dowry on the Death of the Daughter: An Instance in the Negotiation of Laws and Jewish Customs in Early Modern Tuscany”, Jewish History 16 (Winter 2002): 73-106. On this, see Siegmund, Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, 241-91.

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forced out of the parishes into their own administrative and physical space, a space that had most of the characteristics of a commune and some of those of a parish. In the context of the new parish-focused Christian community, and perhaps as part of the process that created it, Jews were encouraged or even pushed to create their own more formally defined community. In this light, we might even reread the papal bull that is generally considered to have initiated ghettoization, Pope Paul IV’s Cum Nimis Absurdum of 1555, to notice the rule that Jews in their ghettos should be allowed to have only one synagogue.18 If the authors of that papal bull for the establishment of a Roman ghetto also imagined the ghetto as a parallel to a parish, or even as a shadow of a parish or as an “anti-parish”, then of course it could only have one synagogue, as a parish by definition had only one church. In 1571, the Nove were given formal authority over the ghetto, just as they had authority over dozens of other communes of the state. The agency’s control over the ghetto was clarified and publicized on 30 July 1572 when the preamble of a first set of regulations clarified, concerning the Jews, “that their università and comunanza, residing in the place appointed, which is called the Ghetto, is under the care and government and orders of this Magistrate and subject to the justice of this Magistrate, equally for civil matters as for criminal transgressions and matters, except for those cases that are reserved for the Magistrate of the Otto as stated below.”19 The new blueprint that followed put an end to the system of supplications by Jews to the duke, in line with one of Cosimo I’s larger goals in reorganizing the administration of his state: the rationalization of the court system by discouraging supplications to the duke as the court of highest appeal.20 The subordination of the Jews to the Nove, under their own self-government, resulted in less direct contact between individual Jews and the grand-ducal court. The Jews were now subject collectively, as the Università of the Jews of the Ghetto, to the Nove Conservatori, the agency that had overseen the construction of the ghetto. But why should the ghetto have been placed under the care of the Nove Conservatori? There was no precedent for the Nove to oversee Jewish affairs. A proper answer requires that we return briefly to the history of the development of the state under Cosimo I. The Medici regime is impressive for its ready adaptation of a wide variety of state-building and centralizing, power-enhancing strategies: direct surveillance and policing, routinization of the collection of personal data (such as in the new requirement that notaries submit copies of their ledgers every year to the state archives), and the increased support for corporate bodies, whose leaders could ccccccc 18. 19. 20.

The papal bull is reproduced in Kenneth R. Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 1553-1593 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1977), 292. Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Nove 13, 115v-18r. See The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, 250, for further detail. Ibid., and notes there.

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be either directly appointed or brought into the service of the state through the expectation of honors, favors, rewards, or other gratification of self-interest. Clearly, there were many overlapping organizing grids for administrative contact with the people. But for the many towns and communes of the larger territory, the main point of contact with the central government was the Nove Conservatori del Dominio e Iurisditione. This centralizing organ was charged with the regulation and control of all the cities, towns, and monasteries in the dominion. Specifically, the Nove held jurisdiction over walled communities, while the Parte exercised jurisdiction around walled places and communities.21 It is therefore consistent with the administrative reorganization of the state that the Nove would be given authority over the ghetto, enclosed as it was within its own set of walls. In the ghetto – as in other places subject to the Nove – elections, regulations, requests to impose taxes, and all matters of importance were subject to approval by the Nove, and they also received state support for their enforcement. Comparison with other cities and regions administered by the Nove has led me to rethink previous historical understandings of ghettoization. Subject communities in Tuscany contributed to the state economy with their taxes, their production, their labor, and their markets. Prior to ghettoization, the state did not collect taxes from the Jews of Tuscany qua Jews, as individuals or as a group. Afterward, Florence collected a tax of two scudi per capita from the Jews of the ghetto, roughly the same as the per capita collected from residents of other communities, such as Pescia.22 The ghetto also had other income for its own communal needs, and its contribution to the state included the rental income from ghetto housing and half the income from fines that would be collected for any rule the governors of the ghetto wished to enforce. The ghetto was, in other words, administratively organized to become a self-supporting, self-governing town and to support state finances. Like the other subject cities of the Tuscan state, the ghetto too was granted a large degree of autonomy. The ghetto’s statutes of July 1572 required that they elect ten Jews to serve each year for a one-year term of governance.23 The ten officials and the two supervisors chosen from that group were expected to meet all needs of the community and were therefore given the right to impose ordinary and extraordinary (i.e., regular and occasional) taxes on the community. They were also obligated to carry out any orders given to them by the Nove. These officers had their parallels in the other communities administered by the Nove; the role of the Nove was to oversee the activities of the local governccccccc 21. 22. 23.

Ibid., 500nn35-36. Ibid., 500n40. Ibid., 500n42.

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ments. There was also a chancellor or secretary, although the procedure for this appointment is not specified. He was most likely directly appointed, and possibly salaried, by the grand duke, just as were chancellors in the other communes and cities of the state.24 The parallel treatment of the ghetto and other communities can be observed in the margins of the record books of the Nove, where notations summarize each day’s business. The marginal notes that read “permission was granted to the representatives” of any number of communes are graphically indistinguishable from the notes that read that “permission was granted to the representatives of the ghetto of the Jews of Florence.” Elections, taxes, and decisions (partite) were approved, the marginal notation clarifying mainly for ready reference the name of the community involved, for example, “Cortona” or “the ghetto”.25 The language of the magistrates’ office was formulaic, expressing the successful integration of the Jews, who, prior to ghettoization, had been an anomalous group of individuals who fit only awkwardly into the administrative system of the state. In the text of the entries themselves, there was also no differentiation in the wording or the graphic layout, and no subtle changes to the bureaucratic formulae. From the administrative perspective of the state, the ghetto was one of the communes. The similarity, I have argued, is not just superficial. Many of the articles of the ghetto’s first substantial statutes in1572 had their parallel in the regulations of other cities and communes, places from which the Jews had just been expelled. Penalties for injurious words or offense against officers, for example, were not only necessary in the ghetto but in Arezzo.26 And although the governors of the ghetto may not have had to contend with residents allowing their pigs to roam wild, as did the people of Empoli,27 both the Jewish governors in the ghetto and the Empolesi set fines against residents who threw dirty water or other filth out their windows by day or by night.28 The same statutes of Empoli, approved in 1560, required the residents, in weekly preparation for the Christian holy day, to clean their streets and portals every Saturday and on the eve of every festival and to carry away the debris. Reflecting their own calendar, Jews of the ghetto established that the same should be done for the main piazza every Friday (before the evening of the Sabbath), in addition to a requirement that shopkeepers sweep up debris from in front of their own shops every morning.29 ccccccc 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Ibid., nn43-44. An example of these texts may be seen in their reproduction in The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, fig. 3 and fig. 4. Adapted, with permission, from Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, 266. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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It should be noted that the cities under Florentine dominion had a long tradition of local statutes. In Arezzo, for example, the statutes ranged from a ban on catching fish in the river between St. Michael’s day in September and the calends of May (months when the fish were migrating to the sea) to legislation on the bearing of arms and on prostitution, on sodomy and adultery, on disrespect toward parents, and on the restitution of dowries. Under the reforms of Cosimo I de’ Medici, these towns and communities in Tuscany now had to receive the approval of the Nove to pass new capitoli, impose a new tax, sell property at auction, hire a new teacher, give charity for a special case, or set aside funds for a public works project.30 The Jews of Tuscany had never before been organized politically into a body that could issue statutes or formally collect taxes. The state’s administrative reform and spatial reorganization, which included the ghettoization, was the catalyst for this local political reformulation. And with time, the content of the statutes of the ghetto governors shifted demonstrably from mainly municipal matters to matters more closely concerned with the specifically Jewish aspects of life in a Jewish community. As we have seen, then, with ghettoization, the Medici state made the Jews live in a walled community as though in a subject commune. This resulted in – and required – the creation of a Jewish governing elite. It also made the Jews live in a religiously segregated zone as though in a parish – as I have suggested – and this resulted in the creation, more or less, of a religiously united Jewish community.

The Evaluation of Boundedness: Stability and Mobility as Markers of Status In the space that remains, I have a few remarks about another aspect of borders and boundaries: the active resistance to imposed boundaries, not as “transgression” but as a mark of status, that is, the assertion of mobility. Directly and indirectly, the spatialization of state power in the sixteenth century was tied to efforts to restrict mobility, which, in general, was linked in contemporary documents with disease, heresy, espionage and treason, and most other serious concerns of state. To exercise mobility, therefore, especially as a member of a group whose mobility has been declared threatening, was a form of resistance to that new expression of spatial control. There were among the Jews of central Europe in the early modern period great numbers who were not “rooted” in stable, localized communities. Thieves and beggars, homeless and vagrants, these were people with very low status in the eyes of established Jews and Christians. Rootedness then, as now, conferred status and privilege in many ways. Jews of the highest social ranking understood this. ccccccc 30.

Ibid., 273.

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In Tuscany, prior to ghettoization, individual Jews argued before the Duke that they had a right to be treated with a certain honor and privilege because of the antiquity of their stable residence in a particular town – Pisa, for example, or Siena. Those Jews who had only more recently arrived in Tuscany, this Jewish elite was willing to suggest, could not expect the same preferred treatment.31 Residential antiquity and stability was respected and emphasized. While frequent travel was actually common and essential in the world of commerce, fashion, and politics in which these urban residents lived, those who relocated often (by force or choice) or traveled regularly were vulnerable to being labeled a threat, even by coreligionists who understood the code. But with ghettoization, Jews were deprived of their mobility in a new way. They could not determine where they would live, in what house they would pray, or where they would socialize. They could not travel, even within the state, without specific permission from the state. Yet, Jews were allowed to leave the ghetto by day and also to obtain permits to leave the ghetto on overnight trips of varying lengths. Indeed, the permits that were granted to Jews to travel outside the ghetto are a crucial link in the history of border documentation and personal surveillance, and the record of permits from 1580, which include physiognomic descriptions and which I have discussed at length elsewhere, are one of the earliest documented forms of state-issued personal identification and passport. In studying these permits, I found that the frequency with which one left the ghetto on overnight trips was correlated with other more obvious economic markers of social status. So, I have argued, the ability to “transgress” a boundary – to physically be outside the ghetto – which I call “mobility”, is in this case actually best understood as successful resistance to the spatial restriction or disability imposed on Jews by Christian authorities in the ghettoization.32 Jews who avoided or resisted these controls successfully expressed an extra degree of status relative to other Jews who traveled out of the ghetto less. In the ghetto, mobility was highly correlated with other marks of status, such as matriculation into the higher guilds, election as a governor, or dowry size. Jews of the very highest status expressed that status by moving out of the state in 1570 and 1571 in response to the edict of ghettoization. The Jews who scored next highest on this scale were those who, with some persistence, eventually obtained permission to reside in Tuscany but outside the ghettos of Florence and Siena. A few more Jews lived in the ghettos but had shops outside the ghetto. Finally, there were Jews who lived in the ghetto but realized greater extraresidential mobility than others. In the face of the government’s interest in restricting them to the ghetto, their successful expression of freedom to move and to be present outside of the ghetto – their spaccccccc 31. 32.

See Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, 131, 230. Ibid., 303, 323.

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tial mobility, in other words – can be considered a primary factor in the very definition of status for these Jews.33 This mobility was also gendered: lowest on the status scale were Jewish women, who were four times less likely to make trips outside the city of Florence than men (and, not coincidentally, could not serve as governors in the ghetto and were progressively excluded from the Florentine guilds).34 This essay has not attempted to discuss the impact of the walls of the ghetto on the minority that lived within them; or the extent to which the walls segregated Jews from the larger culture, stigmatized Jews, oppressed and persecuted them, and simultaneously supported the production of a unique cultural and ethnic identity; or any of the other questions that may be asked about the history of a minority group. Instead, it has described the way one early modern state used the structure of the ghetto as an administrative and economic building block, giving the Jews who were moved into it a form that fit the grid of communes that comprised the state and was also modeled on the notion of the parish community. Because a spatial (or perhaps “placial”) model was used for the segregation of the Jews, rather than a visual segregation based solely on dress or badge or other differentiations in the law, spatialized forms of surveillance developed, such as the travel permits. The original purpose or cause of the decision of individual states to ghettoize the Jews in Italy may still be debated, but the early modern ghetto should be seen by historians – and evaluated and understood by those who read their work – as one of the very influential models that states have historically used to incorporate a disempowered and vulnerable minority.

ccccccc 33. 34.

On mobility as a marker of status, see ibid., 298-303. Jews also converted to avoid or leave the ghetto, but I do not see those conversions as readily linked with markers of socioeconomic status. Siegmund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence, 320 and notes there.

Dan Michman

Explaining the Formation of Ghettos under Nazi Rule and its Bearings on Amsterdam Segregating “the Jews” or Containing the Perilous “Ostjuden”? On January 13, 1941, the Nazi ruler of the occupied Netherlands, Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart, instructed the plenipotentiary (Beauftragter) for the city of Amsterdam, the Lübeck Senator Hans Böhmcker, to take measures regarding the “question of the presence of the Jews in Amsterdam”.1 Three days later, Böhmcker ordered the local Dutch city authorities to provide him as soon as possible with detailed data on a series of questions regarding the residential distribution of Jews in Amsterdam, foremost however about those neighborhoods in which Jews were a majority. He also asked for an accompanying map on which the borders of the “Jewish quarters” would be pointed out “precisely” (“in welchen Stadtteilen überwiegend Juden wohnen. Dazu bitte ich, eine Karte in vierfacher Ausfertigung beizufügen, aus der sich die Grenzen der Judenviertel genau ergeben”).2 In a consecutive report to Berlin it was said that the aim was “to have some form of a ghetto” (“um zu einer Form Ghetto zu kommen”).3 In the following months, a plethora of data was collected and submitted and there was quite intensive correspondence involving the German authorities, the Amsterdam municipality, and the Amsterdam Jewish Council (Joodsche Raad voor Amsterdam). This came to an end in June 1941 with the German authorities’ apparent decision not to implement a ghetto. The issue was raised again at the local Nazi top for a short while in October-November 1941, when the notion of deporting all Jews from the Netherlands within the framework of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question was in sight. However, after some ccccccc 1.

2.

3.

“Böhmcker aan de Regeeringscommissaris en Burgermeester van Amsterdam, Betr. Judenviertel- und Strassen in Amsterdam, 7. April 1941”, Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, hereinafter NIOD), Doc II-361, map T, J 56; Ben A. Sijes, De Februaristaking: 25-26 Februari 1941 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 92. “Van den Beauftragte aan de Gemeente Amsterdam, 16. Januar 1941”, NIOD, Doc II-361, J17; Lou de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog 4, no. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 881-82; Friso Roest and Jos Scheren, Oorlog in de Stad (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1998), 335. “Stimmungsbericht Nr. 29 (Januar 1941)”, NIOD, 61-76 (ZbV), 40394 sq.; quoted by Roest and Scheren, Oorlog in de Stad, 335.

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deliberations, Seyss-Inquart finally decided that “At present it is not envisaged to set up a ghetto. Restrictions on Jewish housing and movements will be imposed by the police.” (“Es ist vorerst nicht beabsichtigt, ein Ghetto einzurichten. Beschränkungen der Wohn- und Aufenthaltmöglichskeiten für Juden erfolgen durch die Polizei.”)4 Though no ghetto was ever established in Amsterdam, special signs (and signposts) were erected apparently marking a “Jewish quarter” (Judenviertel) and a “Jewish street” (Judenstrasse) in the center of Amsterdam, in the area which had long been called the “Jewish neighborhood” (Jodenbuurt) by Amsterdammers and was now called “the old ghetto” (“das alte Ghetto”) in German documentation.5 This was done in the wake of the violent irregularities which took place during the second week of February and served also as a pretext for the establishment of a Jewish Council for Amsterdam (Joodsche Raad voor Amsterdam). In his interrogations after World War II, Generalkommissar Hanns Albin Rauter, who headed the SS and security apparatus in the Netherlands, called it an “optical ghetto”;6 Adolf Eichmann characterized it in his interrogation in 1960 in Jerusalem as “a flimsy ghetto” (“ein lockeres Ghetto”), meaning “kind of ghetto”.7 Actually, except for the signs, nothing happened to have the area become even close to a closed ghetto: nonJews did not move out of this area, and Jews from other neighborhoods did not move in. Thus, it was a fake ghetto. Raul Hilberg’s remark that beginning in 1942 Amsterdam had “three ghetto sections which housed about half of Holland’s Jews” is entirely wrong and is an assumption based on a report of the Dutch government from October 1945, long before any serious research had been carried out.8 But the formulations by the different German personalities involved in the affair nevertheless show that the term “ghetto” was used in different meanings: on the one hand, the already existing age-old Jewish neighborhood was defined by this term; on the

ccccccc 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

“Zur Behandlung der Judenfrage”, 25 November 1941, NIOD, Arch. HSSPF, BdS, IVB4, 185a: “Zuständigkeit in Judenfragen” (film 311, 057.1), 27a, 2. “Aufgrund des Fernschreibens teile ich mit, dass sich einzelne Männer der Wehrabteilung unerlaubt ins Ghetto begeben haben. Aus dem Verhalten dieser Männer heraus ergab sich im Ghetto eine Schlägerei. Hierbei ist leider ein WA-Mann schwer verletzt worden, der heute Morgen gestorben ist. Obiger Grund wurde vor uns sofort zum Anlass genommen, das alte Ghetto abzuriegeln, ein Judenrat wurde gebildet, Ausweispflicht wurde eingeführt, Arier wurden ausgesiedelt, dafür Juden aus dem Stadtrand ins Ghetto gebracht. Eine Durchkämmung des ganzen Gebietes ist vorgesehen.”: telex Schmidt to Gutterer, Berlin, 15.2.1941, NIOD, 15; quoted by Roest and Scheren, Oorlog in de Stad, 41, 244. The Dutch version reads: “optische Ghetto”; N.W. Posthumus and L. de Jong, “Verslag vierde gesprek met H.A. Rauter, 13 febr. 1947”, NIOD, Doc I-1380, h-5, p. 7; quoted by de Jong, Koninkrijk 4 no. 2: 883. Israel Police, Bureau 06, Interrogation of Adolf Eichmann, vol. 1, 259; mimeograph, Yad Vashem Library, Y 61-760 I; also in NIOD, coll. nr. 270c (Trial of Adolf Eichmann, 1937-45, 1960-61). Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), 374.

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other hand, discussions were held about establishing a different “ghetto”. How can this be explained? Historians of the Holocaust in the Netherlands have paid considerable attention to the discussions concerning the possible establishment of a “ghetto” in Amsterdam, ever since Heinz Wielek’s first history of the Holocaust of Dutch Jewry De Oorlog die Hitler Won (The War That Hitler Won), published in 1947, up to Friso Roest and Jos Scheren’s PhD thesis Oorlog in de Stad (War in the City), published in 1998.9 Most historians – such as Wielek, Sijes, Presser, and de Jong – saw it is a logical part of the German overall policy throughout Europe of “ghettoization”, thus claiming that in spite of the fact that a real ghetto was not established, the idea was not accidental, and it was actually implemented by other measures, thus claiming that there still had been a “virtual ghetto”.10 Roest and Scheren, who were mostly interested in the local scene and adhered to the Functionalist approach in Holocaust history, i.e., the scholarly school which claimed that all anti-Jewish policies in the Third Reich had developed in a chaotic bureaucratic manner, without Hitler being deeply involved,11 thought it to be a chaotic anti-Semitic idea, never really seriously considered. (“Onze conclusie is dat het niet alleen niet tot een Amsterdams getto is gekomen, maar dat de vorming van zo’n getto ook nooit serieus is overwogen.”)12 None of these historians seriously tried to examine the Amsterdam ghetto affair within the larger context of the ghetto phenomenon in Europe under the Nazi regime, being actually interested only in the local history. They thus remained on the level of depicting the discussions, never trying to analyze the deeper reason behind the idea of the ghetto in the Nazi period. However, as surprising as this may sound, this fits into a much larger historiographical pattern. The ghetto phenomenon of the Nazi era has been widely described, and the research and memoiristic literature on it now constitutes an enormous corpus in many languages. But the reasons behind its emergence have hardly been analyzed in this literature. In the entire body of Holocaust research, now consisting of many ccccccc 9.

10. 11.

12.

Heinz Wielek, De Oorlog die Hitler Won (Amsterdam: Amsterdamsche Boek- en Courantmij N.V., 1947), 37; Sijes, Februaristaking, 92 and elsewhere in the book; De Jong, Koninkrijk; Jacques Presser, Ondergang (The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij, 1965), I-58, 79ff, 167, 173, 207-8, 319, 373-74, 392-98, II-184, 385 [English abridged version: Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 47, 114]; Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors. The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in The Netherlands 1940-1945 (London: Arnold, 1997), 63, 67-68; Roest and Scheren, Oorlog in de Stad, chaps. 8, 13, Conclusion. See for instance Presser, Ashes in the Wind, 114. On so-called “Functionalism”, see Tim Mason, “Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National-Socialism”, in Der Führerstaat: Mythos und Realität. Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 23-42. Roest and Scheren, Oorlog in de Stad, 455.

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thousands of studies, only Philip Friedman, Raul Hilberg, and Christopher Browning have actually tried to tackle the basic questions in a serious way; about 98% of the literature on this issue limits itself to national or local boundaries, not looking beyond them at a more general picture. Friedman’s treatise (1954) fell mostly into oblivion. Those of Hilberg and Browning took the invasion of Poland in September 1939 as the starting point for their enquiry and approached the issue through the logic of more or less calculated bureaucratic measures; they pointed to Reinhard Heydrich’s Schnellbrief of September 21, 1939, in Poland – one of the most important documents of the Holocaust – as the “ghetto order” and referred to it as a step in the escalating process leading to the Final Solution. Almost all Holocaust research has accepted and copied this point of view. However, this line of explanation does not deal with some of the most basic problems of the phenomenon: Why were ghettos needed at all? Why was the historical term “ghetto” chosen (sometimes interchanged with other equivalent historical terms, such as “Judenviertel”, “Wohngebiet der Juden”, or “Judenstrasse”)? Why was the phenomenon limited to Eastern Europe only (plus Theresienstadt and Salonika)? Why was the “system” not systematic – neither in terms of orderly spatial and chronological establishment (the time span of the establishment of a ghetto was sometimes a year; in several areas a ghetto was established in one city, while in a neighboring one it happened much later, etc.), nor in terms of comprehension (many Jewish communities even in Eastern Europe remained without ghettos until the period of extermination)? Why do examples sustaining the common explanation derive only from a very limited number of major ghettos (fewer than twenty, mostly in Poland, with Warsaw and Lodz serving as the most commonly quoted ones), while according to our present knowledge there were about 1140, including many in Rumania and Hungary?13 I propose to adopt a linguistic-cultural approach in order to understand the historical development and its contours. Doing so, it is imperative to pay attention to the longue durée historical background of the ghetto term and concept.14 As is well known, Jewish neighborhoods have existed – usually voluntarily but sometimes compulsorily – since the High Middle Ages. The word “ghetto” as a term used for a designated Jewish neighborhood in a city originated in the early modern period in Venice, more precisely in 1516, when Jews were allowed to settle in the ccccccc 13. For this number, see the recently published Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009). 14. For an extensive, comprehensive, and fully annotated version of the following analysis, see my book Die Angst vor den Ostjuden: Zur Entstehung und Bedeutung der Ghettos in der Shoah (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2010); English version The Emergence of the Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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Ghetto Nuovo island of this city. The term was adopted three decades later in the independent city Ragusa (Dubrovnik) on the Croatian seashore, which was at that time under Turkish influence but had an age-old Venetian orientation; and a decade later – in the papal state in Rome, this time for the compulsory Jewish neighborhood installed by the Vatican. The term spread since to other places, such as to Florence. Real ghettos were gradually abolished since the second half of the eighteenth century, the ghetto in Rome being the last one to exist, officially until 1848, actually until 1870. But while the real phenomenon disappeared, the term “ghetto” spread in the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. It was used in a critical, negative meaning by Zionists and anti-Semites, and sometimes in scholarly literature; and in a nostalgic meaning by those Jews who lamented the assimilation process affecting the continuity of Jewish existence. The ghetto discourse consisted of two versions: one in which the term was used as a metaphor, noting a virtual segregation from the non-Jews; the other, particularly in use in interwar Poland, in which the term related to a physical phenomenon of large, dense, and poor Jewish neighborhoods in the cities. After the ascendance of Hitler and the Nazi party to power in Germany in 1933, it was the German Jews who used the term metaphorically in their discourse during the first years of the Nazi regime while relating to their deteriorating social and legal position. From there, the term penetrated into the language of German policymakers, both metaphorically and (in the summer of 1938) with respect to a possible result of the housing policies towards Jews, mainly regarding the growing concentration of Jews in Berlin. However, in the fall of 1938 the semantics of the term suddenly changed in a most dramatic way, through the impact of Peter-Heinz Seraphim’s book Die Juden im osteuropäischen Raum (The Jews in the Territories of Eastern Europe).15 This product of Nazi Juden- and Ostforschung16 pointed to the existence of physical Jewccccccc 15.

16.

Peter-Heinz Seraphim, Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum (Essen: Essener Verlagsanstalt, 1938). On Seraphim, see Hans-Christian Petersen, Bevölkerungsökonomie – Ostforschung – Politik: Eine biographische Studie zu Peter-Heinz Seraphim (1902-1979) (Berlin: Fibre, 2007); Alan Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 142-51; Götz Aly, Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), 96101; Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge MA and London: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2003), 199. On these “academic” disciplines in Nazi Germany, see Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of “Ostforschung” in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Winfried Schulze, Otto Gerhard Oexle et al., eds., Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1999); G.F. Volkmer, “Die deutsche For-

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ish ghettos in Eastern Europe. These were, as said, the large Jewish concentrations in special dense and poor neighborhoods in the Eastern European big cities. In Seraphim’s eyes, these were the power centers of “Jewry”, as well as sources of maladies and epidemics. The ghetto is … the basis from which the Jewish expansion starts. […] Here the religious and political leaders of the Jews are raised, here the Jewish nature, in its specific form as it is found in Eastern Europe, forms itself, in order to influence from here, from the centers of business life, the surroundings, the nations in whose midst the Jews live. […] It is self-evident that the social hygienic situation in these Jewish ghettos is undesirable.17

His description was based on the internal Jewish critical discourse regarding the lifestyle and situation of the Jews in Eastern Europe in the interwar period, but in his interpretation, its meaning was turned upside down and channeled into the frameworks of Nazi anti-Semitic thought and imagery. This caused the SS and Security Police in November 1938 to oppose any ghettoization in Germany,18 a view firmly expressed by Heydrich on the highest level of policymaking in the (in)famous meeting on November 12, 1938, two days after the Reichskristallnacht: The ghetto in the form of totally segregated neighborhoods, where there are only Jews, is in my eyes impossible to implement from a policing point of view. The ghetto, where the Jew assembles with the entire Jewish clan, is impossible to supervise from the police’s point of view. It remains an eternal hiding place for crime and first and foremost for epidemics and similar things.19 ccccccc schung zu Osteuropa und zum osteuropäischen Judentum in den Jahren 1933-1945”, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 42 (1989), 109-214; Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, 193-220; “Schwerpunkt: ‘Judenforschung’ – Zwischen Wissenschaft und Ideologie”, in Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts / Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 5, ed. Nicolas Berg and Dirk Rupnow (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 303-598. 17. “Das Ghetto ist … die Basis, von der die jüdische Expansion ausgeht.… [H]ier wird der religiöse und der politische Führer der Juden erzogen, hier bildet sich das jüdische Wesen in seiner spezifischen Form, wie man es in Osteuropa findet, um von hier aus, von den zentralen Punkten des Erwerbslebens, Einfluß zu nehmen auf die Umwelt, auf die Nationen, in deren Mitte die Juden leben.… Es ist selbstverständlich, daß die sozialhygienischen Verhältnisse dieser jüdischen Getti überaus ungünstig sind.” Seraphim, Das Judentum im osteuropäischen Raum, 355-56, 366. 18. “SD II 112 an den SD-Führer des SS-O.A. Ost, II 112, Berlin, Betr.: Ghettoisierung der Juden”, 1 November 1938, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Washington DC, Sonderarchiv Moskau 500-1-343, 243. 19. “Das Ghetto in Form vollkommen abgesonderter Stadtteile, wo nur Juden sind, halte ich polizeilich nicht für durchführbar. Das Ghetto, wo der Jude sich mit dem gesamten Judenvolk versammelt, ist in polizeilicher Hinsicht unüberwachbar. Es bleibt der ewige Schlupfwinkel für Verbrechen und vor allen Dingen von Seuchen und ähnlichen Dingen. Heute ist es so, daß die deutsche Bevölkerung – wir wollen die Juden auch nicht in demselben Haus lassen – in den

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The invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, marked, however, a turning point. Now Nazi anti-Semitism physically encountered das Ostjudentum, including the already existing ghettos, and had to cope with it. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels sent teams to film the ghettos; Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS and head of the German Police, spoke about das Gesindel (scum); and commanders, soldiers, and others expressed their disgust when seeing the Jewish communities and Jewish individuals.20 Seen in this context, and through reading without preset assumptions, it becomes entirely clear that (as opposed to Hilberg’s view) Heydrich’s Schnellbrief to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen on September 21, 1939 (and the protocol of the meeting on that same day) never spoke about an establishment of ghettos as a new systematic and well-planned bureaucratic measure, but about the concentration of city Jews and Jews evacuated from the countryside in (the already existing) ghettos. It can be clearly understood as a reaction trying to cope with the “danger” of the Polish Jews which was now encountered. Some time later, Hans Frank, the Governor-General of the General Government in Poland, proposed (but later declined) to do the opposite in the case of Cracow, the capital of that General-Government: to drive the Jews out of the city and scatter them all over the area, thus dissolving the ghetto and allowing the citizens of the capital of the General Government “to breathe [clean] German air”.21 However, even Heydrich’s recommendation was not carried out within the three to four weeks he had suggested in the Schnellbrief. There was also no pressure

ccccccc Straßenzügen oder in den Häusern den Juden zwingen, sich zusammenzunehmen. Die Kontrolle des Juden durch das wachsame Auge der gesamten Bevölkerung ist besser, als wenn Sie den Juden zu Tausenden und aber Tausenden in einem Stadtteil haben, wo ich durch uniformierte Beamte eine Überwachung des täglichen Lebenslaufes nicht herbeiführen kann. Göring: Wir brauchten nur das Telefonieren nach auswärts unterbinden. Heydrich : Ich könnte den Verkehr des Judentums aus diesem Stadtteil heraus doch nicht ganz unterbinden.” “Stenographische Niederschrift der Sitzung im Reichsluftfahrtministerium am 12. Nov. 1938”, in International Military Tribunal (IMT), vol. 28, (Dok. 1816-PS), 510, 533-36. 20. Jochen Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2006), 46-48 and notes 178, 181, 182, 194; for more verbal expressions, see Markus Roth, “The County Chiefs (Kreishauptleute) in the General Government before and after 1945”, paper presented at the German-Israeli PhD students’ workshop, October 9, 2007. 21. “Er [Frank] beabsichtige deshalb, die Stadt Krakau bis zum 1. November 1940, soweit irgend möglich, judenfrei zu machen und eine große Aussiedlungsaktion der Juden in Angriff zu nehmen, und zwar mit der Begründung, daß es absolut unerträglich sei, wenn in einer Stadt, der der Führer die hohe Ehre zuteil werden lasse, der Sitz einer hohen Reichsbehörde zu sein, Tausende und Abertausende von Juden herumschlichen und Wohnungen inne hätte [...] Das Ghetto werde dann gesäubert werden, und es werde möglich sein, saubere deutsche Wohnsiedlungen zu errichten, in denen man eine deutsche Luft atmen könne.”: Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen 19391945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1975), 165 (12 April 1940).

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from above to enact the establishment of ghettos. It thus became a local decision whether to do so or not, being hesitantly applied in several places, and even then usually spanning over a (sometimes very) long time (in Warsaw it lasted from October 1939 to November 1940 and encountered much opposition from other German and local authorities). The functional success – from an organizational point of view – of the Lodz ghetto, which was established in April 1940, turned this ghetto into an example copied later on in many places throughout occupied Poland; it even became a pilgrimage site to learn from. These ghettos of the years 1940-41 are usually viewed in Holocaust research as the typical “classic” Nazi ghettos; however, their number was limited, and from a merely bureaucratic point of view they caused more problems than they solved: city transportation had to be altered, people had to be moved around, administrative and security forces were needed, etc. They also were clearly not a response to obstacles in the immigration programs (as proposed by Götz Aly),22 or a bureaucratic interim solution to the clash between the drive for expulsion and its shattering after the first phases of occupation in Poland (as suggested by Christopher Browning).23 The “classic” ghetto being a response to the danger of das Ostjudentum well explains why the establishment of ghettos did not occur in Western, Northern, Central and Southern Europe or North Africa under German control. Seraphim, who became an adviser to the General Government and also served from spring 1941 as editor of the periodical of the Institut zur Forschung der Judenfrage (Institute for Research of the Jewish Question) in Frankfurt and headed its Lodz branch, stated explicitly that the ghetto idea was not applicable in Central and Western Europe.24 In this context, it is quite interesting to see the initiative to establish a ghetto in Amsterdam and the discussions concerning it during the first half of 1941. Although there is no documentation on the motives that led to this initiative, it can be explained by some of the characteristics of Amsterdam Jewry, which were similar to those of Eastern European Jewry (the size – about 80,000 souls; the concentration in several neighborhoods, especially in the center of the city; and the poverty: Amsterdam had an enormous Jewish proletariat), and by the fact that some of the leading personalities of the German administration in the Netherlands (such as Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Commander of the Security Police Wilhelm Harster), had served in Poland beccccccc 22. 23.

24.

Götz Aly, Endlösung (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1995), 131. Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004), 111-68. “Bevölkerungs- und wirtschaftliche Probleme einer europäischen Gesamtlösung der Judenfrage”, Der Weltkampf 1 (1941), 43-44; also quoted by Philip Friedman, “The Jewish Ghettos of the Nazi Era”, in Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction. Essays on the Holocaust (New York and Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1980), 64.

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fore being commissioned to the Netherlands. If this seems perhaps far-fetched to some, one should pay attention to the fact that the Jewish community in Salonika, where ghettos will be established for a short while in 1943, was described by Seraphim’s Institute for Research on the Jewish Question in September 1941 as “Warschau am Mittelmeer” (Warsaw on the Mediterranean [Sea])!25 This shows that some places outside Eastern Europe, although not many, were also considered to be “ostjüdisch” in their character. In this context it should be emphasized that the common use in research literature, especially by some of the Dutch historians, of the term “ghettoization” even for segregating policies which did not include the establishment of a real ghetto is a distortion that runs against the use of the term at the time. A new phase of ghettoization started with the invasion of the Soviet Union. About 500 ghettos were established throughout the areas occupied by Nazi Germany. Now even official military and civil orders of the highest level were decreed, but once again a quite unsystematic process of establishment developed. Moreover, these ghettos emerged in the midst of the escalating murder campaign. The ghettos were clearly not needed as a stage in this process (which was implemented anyhow, before and alongside the ghettoization), and in many cases served for keeping a needed Jewish labor force for a while. But in other cases it seems as if ghettos were established just as a result of the inertia of the idea – which had taken root in the preceding one to two years – that anti-Jewish policies should inherently include the erection of a ghetto. As to the essence of these ghettos, they were now closer to being concentration or labor camps in cities than to the kind of “containing neighborhoods” which the ghettos had been before. In many cases, the timespan of their existence was very short, but there were exceptional cases (such as Kovno/Kaunas, which existed for more than two years). With the change in the substantial meaning of the ghettos for German policymakers, some ghettos also emerged as transit stations for further deportation. This was the meaning attributed by Heydrich in the Wannsee conference (January 1942) to Theresienstadt.26 It would later also be applied to the short concentration (Ghettisierung, as it was called in one document)27 of the Salonikan Jews in three neighborhoods, as the preparatory step for their deportation (February 1943), a concentration which entirely paralleled the function of the Judendurchgangslager (Jewish transit camps) Westerbork, Mechelen, and Drancy in Western Europe. The Hungarian regime would adopt it too for the concentration of Jews in city neighborccccccc 25. 26. 27.

Photo collection of the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage, YIVO, New York. Leon Poliakov and Josef Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden: Dokumente und Aufsätze (Berlin-Grunewald: Arani, 1955), 123. “Massnahmen gegen die hiesigen Juden”, memo of the German consul Schönberg to Berlin, Salonica [!], 26 February 1943, Yad Vashem Archives, TR.3 1003.

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hoods throughout the country, within the overall deportation scheme of Hungarian Jewry to Auschwitz (April-July 1944). Parallel to these developments, Rumania copied the ghetto idea starting in the summer of 1941 to the Jews of Bessarabia, Bucovina, and – in a most horrific way – in Transnistria. In the local vocabulary, “ghettos”, “camps”, and “colonies” became interchangeable terms, a fact which leads in the historiography to differing counts (between 50 and 150) of the number of ghettos in Transnistria. In any case, the Transnistrian ghettos were often more chaotic than the German ones, but after Ion Antonescu’s decision in 1942 to change his policies of annihilation, these ghettos turned into places where the Jews who had survived until then could live on until the end of the war. Having examined the entire ghetto phenomenon during the Shoah we can conclude the following: 1. The “classic” Nazi ghetto – the one which emerged in Poland in 1939-40 – was a reaction to the perceived danger of the Ostjuden, intended to “contain” these bearers of danger; it was thus a result of the internalization of self-invented anti-Semitic images shaped some time before – not of well-calculated, bureaucratic “rational” decisions intended to segregate all Jews. 2. The term ghetto changed its semantics several times throughout its history in general and during the Shoah in particular; when reading the documentation, one should therefore be most careful to try to decipher what understanding of the term “ghetto” the speaker (or writer) had in mind. 3. The emergence of the ghetto idea and of the Judenrat concept derived from entirely different sources and emerged at different times, that they were only partially overlapping, and that they were not inherently linked to each other; in the case of Amsterdam this should be especially taken into account.28 4. The emergence of the “classic” ghetto phenomenon at the turn of 1939-40 expressed a radicalization of Nazi thought within the contours of historical antiSemitism; it nevertheless remained a reaction crystallized and carried out by lower echelons of the Nazi regime, while the decision on the Final Solution in the summer of 1941 was a strategic leap, decided upon at the highest level – by Hitler himself. Ghettoization was therefore neither ideologically nor factually a step leading to the Final Solution. ccccccc 28. On the history of the Jewish Council concept, see Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 159-75; idem, “Jewish Leadership in Extremis”, in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 319-40; idem, “On the Historical Interpretation of the Judenräte issue: Between Intentionalism, Functionalism and the Integrationist Approach of the 1990s”, in On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime. Essays by Three Generations of Historians, ed. Moshe Zimmermann (Jerusalem: Magness Press, 2006), 385-97.

Veerle Vanden Daelen

Markers of a Minority Group Jews in Antwerp in the Twentieth Century

In a 1955 report, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), the renown American welfare organization for Jewish immigrants, observed how Jewish inhabitants of Antwerp stood out from the rest of the city’s population and were perceived as “Jewish”: “Everybody can point at a Jew in Antwerp – unfortunately. They are bearded, they wear a kaftan, they assemble publicly in certain streets, and therefore attract the attention of the Flemish-speaking population.”1 To this day, Jews in Antwerp remain highly visible and sustain their community as a “minority group” that is considered “different” and is distinguishable from the rest of the city’s inhabitants.2 Many people today view Jews in Antwerp as a “closed community” or even as “a shtetl on the River Scheldt”.3 Orthodox Jews in Antwerp consider themselves to be “integrated, not assimilated”, meaning that they respect Belgium’s constitution, laws, and regulations, while at the same time retaining their distinct cultural and religious profile. In this article, I seek to illuminate how this Jewish presence in Antwerp materialized during the twentieth century and how it “marked” its presence. By searching for “markers” of Jewishness in the city, everything that is an indicator of Jewish life or that is associated with it can be taken into account. Such markers can be physical or more sociocultural in nature.4 I will investigate how a number of these demarcations of Jewishness came into being and how permeable (or impermeable) they are. Certain markers can be clearly defined or outlined (the demarcations of the eruv, for

ccccccc 1. Joint Distribution Committee of New York (hereafter JDC-NY), printed material, United HIAS Service, Second European Emigration Conference, October 12-14, 1955, 64, Mr. Gretzer. 2. L. Wirth, “The problem of minority groups”, in Louis Wirth on cities and Social Life, ed. L. Wirth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 248. 3. S. Brachfeld, Brabosh, een sjtetl aan de Schelde, un chtetl sur l’Escaut: Beelden uit het Antwerps Joods Verleden, Images Anversoises d’Antan (Herzlia: Antwerps Joods Historisch Archief, 1986); see also D. Wachsstock, “Jewish Antwerp: A Shtetl in Transition”, In the Dispersion: Surveys and Monographs on the Jewish World 5/6 (Spring 1966) 68-76 (World Zionist Organization, Organization Department Research Section, Jerusalem). 4. L. Lucassen, D. Feldman, and J. Oltmer, “Immigrant integration in Western Europe, then and now”, in Paths of integration: Migrants in Western Europe (1880-2004), ed. L. Lucassen, D. Feldman, and J. Oltmer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 7-23.

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example, or official membership of the community), whereas others are less precise (the “Jewish neighborhood”). Some are more “visible” than the latter, and delineations of Jewishness can certainly differ for insiders and outsiders. Some markers can be objectively outlined or named, while others are more subjective or intangible. For example, describing the Jewish neighborhoods as a “ghetto” or “shtetl” marks a certain subjective viewpoint of the locale. By reconstructing the evolution of markers of Jewishness, we will see that the perception of Jews changed from a “mostly immigrant minority” to a “religious minority”.5 An examination of the changing characteristics of Antwerp’s Jewish life and its Jewish inhabitants, clarifies how Jews in Antwerp manifested – or “marked” – themselves in the city over the last century. In doing so, I would like to put the idea of a “closed community” in perspective.

Short Historical Overview: Jews in Antwerp during the Twentieth Century At the end of the nineteenth century, a wave of immigration from Eastern Europe brought many Jewish immigrants to Antwerp. These new immigrants joined the city’s already existing Jewish community, which was relatively young and fairly small. This immigration movement continued during the first half of the twentieth century, peaking in the 1930s with the arrival of great numbers of German and Austrian Jewish refugees. The number of Jews in Antwerp rose from approximately 1,200 around 1880 to about 30,000 by the end of 1940.6 The existing Jewish community, which had settled in the city before the immigration wave at the end of the nineteenth century, was predominantly of Dutch origin. This community was to a very high degree integrated into the general society. The new immigrants brought with them to Antwerp a diversity of Jewish life. In their religious practices, many of the Eastern European newcomers continued to adhere firmly to religious observances by, for example, visiting the synagogue daily and upholding strict kosher dietary laws.7 By 1911, Antwerp had three officially recognized religious Orthodox Jewish communities. Orthodox Judaism in Antwerp showed a myriad of internal differences and ranged from less to very strictly Orthodox. Some members’ lifestyles were often rather like those of conservative or liberal Jews. The growing multiplicity of Orthodox institutions in Antwerp attracted several Hassidic ccccccc 5. I am only aiming at describing the dominant “perception”, because immigration continues to play a role in Jewish life in Antwerp. There remains much immigration activity into and out of the city, mostly through marriage migration. 6. L. Saerens, Vreemdelingen in een wereldstad: Een geschiedenis van Antwerpen en zijn joodse bevolking (1880-1944) (Tielt: 2001), 10, 547. 7. V. Vanden Daelen, “Staat in de stad? Integratie en afzondering van joden in Antwerpen in de twintigste eeuw”, Stadsgeschiedenis 2, no. 1 (2007): 21-22.

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groups from Eastern Europe.8 Many Antwerp Jewish organizations had been essentially “transplanted” from Eastern Europe, where most of the Jewish immigrants in Antwerp had originated. Jewish Antwerp saw extraordinary Zionist activity and a range of leftist activities, including Communist and leftist Zionist, among others.9 Economic activity of the newcomers centered mainly in the diamond sector, and – parallel to the migration flow – this sector expanded and flourished. Other important sectors were textiles and leather. Although Jews in Antwerp could not be considered a homogeneous group, there was a shared common background in religion, culture, and language, especially Yiddish but also German and Eastern European languages.10 The majority did not have Belgian nationality, and even those who had already lived in the city for longer periods or had even been born there (or elsewhere in Belgium) remained officially registered as “foreigners”.11 Indeed, of the registered Jewish population in 1940, only 6.6% held Belgian nationality. This is a huge difference compared to France and the Netherlands, where respectively 56% and 80% of the Jewish populations held citizenship at the eve of the Second World War.12 During the Second World War, this remarkable Jewish life in Antwerp was completely destroyed: 65.88% of the registered Antwerp Jewish population was deported, all Jewish institutions and organizations were officially forbidden and dissolved by the German occupier, and Jewish properties were confiscated. When the Nazis left Antwerp in September 1944, the city was officially Judenrein.13 Nevertheless, Jewish life returned to the city and reorganized itself, reconstructing a community that was to a high degree based upon foundations from the prewar period. In the beginning, with only very few people, the community grew from approximately 6,000 people in 1946 to 8,000 to 15,000 in the 1950s.14 Today, the Antwerp Jewish community numbers approximately 15,000 to 20,000 people.15 The postwar-pe-

ccccccc 8. There were already at least eight Hassidic groups in Antwerp before the Second World War. See V. Vanden Daelen, Laten we hun lied verder zingen: De heropbouw van de joodse gemeenschap in Antwerpen na de Tweede Wereldoorlog (1944-1960) (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008), 201-2. 9. V. Vanden Daelen, “‘Elke jood in Antwerpen werkt in de diamant en heeft een sjtreimel op zijn hoofd’: Clichés over joden in Antwerpen in verklarend historisch perspectief”, in Antwerpen in de 20ste eeuw: Van Belle Epoque tot Golden Sixties (Brasschaat: Pandorra, 2008), 74. See also R. Van Doorslaer, Kinderen van het getto: Joodse revolutionairen in België, 1925-1940 (Antwerp: AMSAB/Hadewijch, 1996). 10. Vanden Daelen, “Staat in de stad?”, 22-23. 11. Vanden Daelen, Laten we hun lied verder zingen, 27-28. 12. Those were mostly families who had lived in the country before the mass wave of immigration started at the end of the nineteenth century; some of them had obtained it later. 13. L. Saerens, “De Jodenvervolging in België in cijfers”, Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis 17 (2006): 217, 220. 14. Vanden Daelen, Laten we hun lied verder zingen, 30-34. 15. Machsike Hadass Antwerp, Tourist traveler guide for the Jewish visitor (Antwerp 2001). 16. Vanden Daelen, Laten we hun lied verder zingen, 34-36.

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riod Jewish population consisted firstly of the small group of prewar Antwerp Jews who had survived the war in hiding or in safe havens abroad and camp survivors. The other part consisted of newcomers, mainly from Eastern and Central Europe, from DP (displaced persons) camps, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and other countries.16 Immediately after the war, about 10% of the Jews in Belgium were officially Belgians. This increase in comparison to the percentage of Belgian Jews before 1940 was due to the higher survival chances of those with official Belgian nationality during the war, as they were deported later than those without the nationality. Only in the second half of the 1950s did the number of Jews with full citizenship rise, and it did so considerably. According to Jewish sources, most Jews in Antwerp now hold Belgian citizenship.17 After the war, especially in the first decades after the city’s liberation, the economic concentration of Jews in the diamond sector became stronger than it had been before. According to the American Jewish Year Book, at least 70% of the Jews in Antwerp were involved in the diamond sector in the years 1950-51.18 In 1954-55 the estimated figure rose as high as 80%.19 At the same time, the Jewish community was becoming more Orthodox. The earlier leftist and Zionist life never regained their prewar prosperity or prominence, whereas religious life and its institutions, although with fewer people because of the Judeocide, grew stronger and became the characteristic feature of the Antwerp Jewish community.20 The Hassidic presence also rose markedly in the postwar years, constituting 12% of the Jewish population around 1960 and about 25% in 2004.21 This Hassidic community reinforced the Orthodox and religious character of the Antwerp Jewish community by, among other things, opening more kosher facilities and enlarging the group that was already using existing Orthodox institutions in the city. In many ways, this growth was an atypical evolution for Western European Jewish life in the postwar years.22

ccccccc 17. Vanden Daelen, Laten we hun lied verder zingen, 32-33. 18. R. Orfinger-Karlin, “5711 (1950-1951): Belgium”, American Jewish Yearbook 53 (1952): 289. 19. A. Karlikow, “5715 (1954-1955): Belgium”, American Jewish Yearbook 57 (1956): 330-31. 20. Vanden Daelen, Laten we hun lied verder zingen, 352-54. 21. J. Gutwirth, La renaissance du hassidisme: De 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004), 28-31. In 1966 Gutwirth estimated them to be around 1,500 persons of a total estimated Jewish population of 11,000 (about 13.5%), see J. Gutwirth, “Hassidim de notre temps”, Les nouveaux cahiers 7 (1966): 56-62. 22. See for example for the Netherlands: H. van Solinge and M. de Vries, eds., De joden in Nederland anno 2000: Demografisch profiel en binding aan het jodendom (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2001); M. de Vries, Een blijvende band? Niet-religieuze joden en hun binding aan het jodendom (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2004).

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Antwerp Jews Shaping Diamonds and Diamonds Shaping Antwerp Jews A first marker of Jewish presence in Antwerp is the considerable number of the Jews active in the diamond sector or in related professions. This evolution peaked in the first decades after the Second World War. During the 1970s, however, the manufacturing aspect of the business (the cleaving, cutting, polishing, and sawing of the stones) began to relocate (especially to India), and it eventually disappeared from Antwerp. The trade itself remains very present in Antwerp, and the city is a major commercial center for diamond trading, although processing of the stones is generally done elsewhere. Sociologists and historians describe the ethnic concentration within a particular economic “niche” as typical for immigrant and minority groups.23 After finding an economic niche that was not yet occupied by the local population,24 financial-economic and cultural factors reinforced the concentration in one profession. As the need of newcomers for income was often urgent and highly important, professions that required lengthy training or schooling were usually not considered. A job in the diamond trade, however, did not require any official diploma, and – especially for diamond cleavers – such positions required little overhead material and could be learned in a relatively short time.25 As the newcomers very often held only provisional residency and labor permits or worked illegally, they preferred employment sectors with little official regulation or state control. In this respect, the diamond trade was further attractive as, owing to the industry’s exceptional importance within the general economy, the Belgian authorities had adopted a liberal position regarding regulation and oversight of the diamond industry.26 A job within the diamond sector also became an ideal profession for Orthodox Jews, because its flexibility facilitated maintaining the demanding obligations of their religious life. The weekly Shabbat and the fast days and holy days would ccccccc 23. S. Kuznets, “Economic structure and life of the Jews”, in The Jews: Their History, Culture and Religion, ed. L. Finkelstein (New York: Harper, 1960), 1599; L. Vaughan, Clustering, Segregation and the ‘Ghetto’: The Spatialisation of Jewish Settlement in Manchester and Leeds in the 19th century (PhD diss., University College London, 1999), chapter 2: 14-16. 24. Kuznets, “Economic structure and life of the Jews”, 1600 (“… the bulk of the Jewish minorities arrived after the economy of the country of destination had reached the point where it was already almost entirely manned by the resident majority; and where, therefore, the economic choices available to the recently arrived minority were limited by established interests.”) 25. Vanden Daelen, Laten we hun lied verder zingen, 87-90. Laura Vaughan, in her study of the Jewish communities in Manchester and Leeds from the end of the nineteenth century, describes similar motivations (working from home or in small ateliers, preferably in service of other Jews, without training requirements, with just enough material, and preferably without investment of significant capital); see Vaughan, Clustering, Segregation and the ‘Ghetto’, chapter 4: 2-6. 26. Antwerpen: kunststad en wereldcentrum voor diamant (Brussels 1969), appendix: “België: economie en techniek”.

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have to be respected regardless of one’s professional status.27 Another factor is that the Jewish calendar is a lunar system, as opposed to the solar calendar followed in Europe, and so each Jewish “day” starts at sunset and ends when the first stars appear in the sky the following evening. A job following the regular work schedule of any other Antwerp inhabitant would not allow strictly religious Jews to observe Jewish holidays and have Friday afternoons and Saturdays to prepare and observe Shabbat. As a result, the number of Jews in the diamond industry strongly increased. In the 1930s, Jews constituted 25% of the diamond work force and were usually involved in jobs that could be done at home or in small workshops.28 On the eve of the Second World War, Jews constituted respectively 90% and 80% of the local cleaving and cutting professions, and respectively 40% and 20% of the sawing and polishing professions.29 Approximately 80% to 90% of the members of the Diamond Federation (the “Diamantfederatie”, the patronage) were Jewish.30 By 1966, the percentage of Jews in cleaving was said to have reached about 93%.31 The high number of Jews in the diamond industry created a self-reinforcing mechanism. As a result of the rising numbers of Orthodox Jews in the sector, its functioning increasingly adapted to the requirements of an Orthodox Jewish life, thereby helping to transform what had earlier been regarded as an immigrant milieu into an “Orthodox” one. Moreover, the assurance of being able to find employment in a specific economic sector that afforded the flexibility of combining work with religious Jewish life convinced many Jews to come to Antwerp, thus further increasing the number of Orthodox Jews. One effect was that the sector began to adjust its work rhythm to this significant and growing part of its workforce. The diamond sector started to follow ever more the Jewish calendar, the “luach”.32 Transccccccc 27. We discover these arguments and aspects in London as well (and presumably in other places with considerable Jewish religious presence): G. Alderman, “Jews in the Economy of London (1850-1940)”, in Ethnic Minority Groups in Town and Countryside and their Effects on Economic Development (1850-1940). Session B-5. Proceedings Tenth International Economic History Congress, ed. E. Aerts and F.M.L. Thompson (Leuven: University Press, 1990), 63. 28. R. Van Doorslaer, “Joodse arbeiders in de Antwerpse diamant in de dertiger jaren: Tussen revolutie en antisemitisme”, Les cahiers de la mémoire contemporaine / Bijdragen tot de eigentijdse herinnering 4 (2002): 15-16. The 25% only covers the official workers. According to the German occupier, 15 to 20% of the diamond workers in Antwerp were Jewish. The mayor of Antwerp, Camille Huysmans, on the other hand estimated their number at 35% for the period just before the Second World War, see E. Laureys, Meesters van het diamant. De Belgische diamantsector tijdens het nazibewind (Tielt: Lannoo, 2005), 132. 29. Laureys, Meesters van het diamant, 132. 30. Ibid., 132. 31. Wachsstock, “Jewish Antwerp: A Shtetl in Transition”. 32. V. Vanden Daelen, “Integrated Segregation. Jews, Orthodoxy, and Diamonds in Antwerp”, Seminar Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (University of Pennsylvania), 20 April 2009 (part of the fellowship “Jews, Commerce, and Culture”). We see a similar respect and adaptation toward the growing Indian presence in the last decades.

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actions in the sector are still sealed with a handshake and the Yiddish words “mazel un brokhe” (good luck and blessing), or, as has recently become frequent, “mazel”. The gradual disappearance of the processing of the stones (cleaving, cutting, and sawing), however, has brought changes to this economic niche occupation of Jews in the city. Notably, poverty among Hassidic families has grown. This poverty became more widely noticed by the start of the twenty-first century, both outside the diamond industry and the Jewish world. It has not yet become clear whether another “niche” will be found for Antwerp’s very Orthodox inhabitants.33 The above illustrated evolution has clearly stopped, however, and Hassidic and other strictly Orthodox Jews have increasingly begun pursuing other commercial trades and occupations. Yet for a long time, the economic concentration of this minority group within one economic sector made the sector a marker for Jewishness. This concentration contributed to the minority group’s social coherence. Social control remained strong and was reinforced by informal social ties such as friendship, intermarriage, and communication. As a result, the diamond sector was (and generally still is) a “closed” profession, in which one needed to be “introduced” by members of the ingroup in order to enter. Outsiders also perceived it as a “closed Jewish profession”, at least until the rising Indian presence, even though non-Jews were and are involved in the diamond sector.

From an Immigrant to an Orthodox Neighborhood Another marker has a spatial nature. What is now known as Antwerp’s “Jewish neighborhood” is an area that has changed only slightly from what was known as the “Jewish neighborhood” in the prewar period (the neighborhood’s center has shifted from one side of the railroad tracks to the other, for example). Around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, most Jewish immigrants in Antwerp settled in the neighborhood near the central train station. Such settlement of members of a minority group in a certain neighborhood, especially around train stations, is quite common for immigrant minorities.34 Such a pattern of settlement can be an indicator of segregation, but it often is also a first step towards accommodation or adaptation in a new country.35 Newcomers of similar origins often

ccccccc 33. I. Van Daele and H. van Scharen, “Voedselpakketten voor de diamantwijk”, Knack 36, no. 50 (13-19 December 2006): 34-38. 34. See for example: P. Sarre, D. Phillips, and R. Skellington, Ethnic Minority Housing: Explanations and Policies (Aldershot: Avebury, 1989) or F.W. Boal, ed., Ethnicity and Housing. Accomodating Differences (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 35. A. Raulin, Anthropologie urbaine (Paris: 2001); C. Peach, “The Consequences of Segregation”, in Ethnicity and housing: Accomodating differences, ed. F.W. Boal (Aldershot: Armand Colin, 2000), 11.

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cluster together to have a “known” or “familiar” base from which to start exploring their new surroundings. Moreover, clustering provides networks for finding homes and jobs, and often group solidarity, and therefore helps in gradually adjusting to the new environment. Groups which grew through chain immigration especially show this tendency to cluster.36 In this way, Jews in Antwerp offered newcomers a “known homelike surrounding” to integrate into their new environment. Mutual solidarity resulted in a mutual social aid system and support in finding employment and housing, among other things. International literature also indicates that many members of the next generations moved out of the “immigrant neighborhood”. They worked their way up in society and moved from the neighborhood, often within one or two generations’ time. As studies on New York’s Lower East Side indicate, this movement was driven not only by economic upward mobility but also by desire to “trade the foreignness of immigrant sections for an American neighborhood”. Of course, this did not mean that Jews no longer clustered. The neighborhoods they moved to also began to have high percentages of Jewish inhabitants, but these inhabitants were no longer immigrants.37 This phenomenon may explain the emergence of a second Antwerp neighborhood with a high percentage of Jewish inhabitants, situated in a suburban district that underwent marked development during the interwar period (Gitschotellei-Diksmuidelaan). This Jewish neighborhood always had a more “integrated” character than the one around the central train station. The few people who still remember it recall that it was known as the “Dutch Jewish neighborhood”.38 There were several prayer houses in the neighborhood, but Jewish schools and shops seem to have left no traces. Whether the Jewish inhabitants of this neighborhood had earlier passed through Antwerp’s “immigrant Jewish neighborhood” remains to be researched. After the Second World War, certain suburban areas of Antwerp again attracted Jewish inhabitants. However, these concentrations remain fairly unnoticed. Nonetheless, a considerable number of Antwerp’s Jewish inhabitants remained concentrated in the area around the railroad station, including even second and third generation descendants of the immigrants who originally clustered there. The major reason for this generational clustering is no longer explainable by immigrant status, but rather by the choice of Orthodox Jews to live near their places ccccccc 36. Vaughan, Clustering, Segregation and the ‘Ghetto’, chapter 2: 11. 37. See: Vaughan, Clustering, Segregation and the ‘Ghetto’, chapter 2: 9-10; H. Diner, J. Shandler, and B. Wenger, eds., Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2000); D.D. Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 19-58. 38. V. Vanden Daelen, “Van migrantengroep tot religieuze minderheid: Joden in Antwerpen in de twintigste eeuw”, Noordbrabants Historisch Jaarboek, forthcoming.

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of work (the diamond district and its surroundings) and near their places of worship. A suitable combination of work, family, and religious life necessitates that work, prayer houses, and home are within easy walking distance of each other. After all, according to strict religious rules, Jews are not allowed to use cars, bicycles, or any other means of transportation on Shabbat and on important Jewish holidays and fast days. And, for convenience, work and prayer should likewise not be too far from each other. In Antwerp, such geographical considerations led to the emergence of new prayer houses and synagogues, Jewish shops, schools, ritual baths, and other Jewish buildings that have remained in the same few streets of this “Jewish neighborhood”. One could even speak of a “natural” or “self-imposed” ghetto.39 This sort of “ghetto” falls within the working definition developed by Ceri Peach, namely, “an area in which a very high majority of the population is of a particular group and in which a high percentage of group members live in such concentrations.”40 The area does not have clear demarcations and does not exclude non-Jews, but observant religious Jews cluster for religious reasons. Today, less-observant or non-observant Jews do not generally live within this Orthodox neighborhood but rather in two of Antwerp’s suburbs, Wilrijk and Edegem. Nonetheless, many of them still work in diamonds and thus enter the diamond district and Jewish neighborhood on a daily basis.

The Eruv of Antwerp With respect to the settlement patterns of observant Jews, the existence of an eruv is especially interesting, as it forms a fixed religious demarcation with explicit, physical borders.41 The existence of an eruv is important for observant religious Jews. During Shabbat and important Jewish holidays, there are special restrictions regarding various activities (such as transportation, as mentioned above) and customs. Certain rules, however, are waived for someone in private space. On Shabbat, one such restriction that does not apply in private is the prohibition against “carrying” and moving objects (see Exodus 16:29 and Jeremiah 17:21-22). According to this prohibition, one is permitted to lift or push objects (such as wheelchairs and baby strollers) only inside the home or synagogue. To do so elsewhere would

ccccccc 39. C. Peach, “The Consequences of Segregation”, in Ethnic Minorities and Industrial Change in Europe and North America, ed. M. Cross (Cambridge: Camebridge University Press, 1992), 23; A. Raulin, Anthropologie urbaine (Paris: Armand Colin, 2001). 40. Peach, “Urban Concentration and Segregation in Europe since 1945”, 130. 41. Vanden Daelen, Laten we hun lied verder zingen, 205-7. I received a great deal of information on the Antwerp eruv from P. Kornfeld of the Jewish community Machsike Hadas through multiple interviews. Kornfeld is the author of the book Ha-rechovoth ha-ir (Antwerp 1989) on the Antwerp eruv. I am grateful to him for speaking to me about the contents of this publication.

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The Antwerp eruv. From: Maschsike Hadas, Tourist Traveler Guide for the Jewish visitor (Antwerp 2001) 23.

be violation of the Shabbat as one would be performing physical work. To make the lives of Jewish families a little easier, this private space, which is normally considered the area within the walls of a house, can be artificially enlarged via the establishment of an eruv. This eruv marks the borders of a well defined area, within which certain Sabbath restrictions are waived, and its borders are preferably “natural borders” such as a river, parts of medieval city walls, a railway track, a highway, etc. Where such “natural borders” are absent, the eruv is connected with Sabbath poles and ropes. Rabbi Sternberg (1855-1936) established the Antwerp eruv in 1902, and it still exists today. Strictly observant Jews choose to settle within these borders, thus making the area within the Antwerp eruv a definite settlement area for Orthodox Jews. However, the large area within the city’s eruv is not completely a “Jewish neighborhood”, as a large number of non-Jews and non-religious Jews live within the eruv borders as well. A higher concentration of observant Jews is found only in the area adjacent to the diamond district, the so-called “Jewish neighborhood”. But even within this area of high concentration of Jewish homes and businesses, not all inhabitants are

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observant Jews. The neighborhood is a colorful mix of Jews and non-Jews, immigrants and non-immigrants, and ethnic minorities. Indeed, there is no single street inhabited only by Jews. At the same time, the previously mentioned suburbs of Wilrijk and Edegem fall beyond the eruv. Although the eruv borders are clearly defined and evident for those for whom its function has meaning, the existence of the eruv is generally unnoticed by the larger population, and it is by no means a tool of “exclusion”. Most inhabitants of Antwerp are unaware of the existence of such a religious delineation for Orthodox Jews in the city. The borders of the eruv are not guarded or border-controlled areas, and they remain essentially “invisible” (and irrelevant) to non-Orthodox inhabitants of the city. Antwerp thus has porous and, for most of the population, even invisible borders of religious significance. These borders not only enlarge considerably the quality of life of the religious Jewish population; they also make these religious inhabitants more part of the surrounding society, as otherwise many of them would be forced to stay at home with disabled people and children during certain times, particularly Shabbat. To my mind, we cannot interpret the eruv as a “visible marker”, and certainly not as a “border” separating Jews from non-Jews, especially as it does not imply any mechanism of seclusion.42 In fact, the “Jewish neighborhood”, with its vague delineations, attracts much more attention as a marker of Jewishness. First, there is its physical connection with the diamond district, and second, the neighborhood is filled with “markers”, be they institutional and organizational (such as synagogues, schools, and shops) or the fact that one “recognizes” its inhabitants as “Jewish”. This cannot be said of the entire area within the eruv.

A “Shtetl” on the River Scheldt In seeking “markers” around the Jewish population in Antwerp, we find that in the postwar period these have been made primarily by the Orthodox character of the Jewish community or by part of its community. Synagogues and prayer houses are clear manifestations of Jewishness in the city, and Jewish kosher shops likewise make passersby aware of the presence of a religious Jewish community. The “ dress code” of certain Orthodox Jews is another clear manifestation of Jewishness. Orthodox Jews, in being “visibly Jewish”, present settlement patterns that play an important role in “marking” Jewishness in the city and forming a “Jewish neighborhood”. This image is reinforced by the nostalgic coloration of studies like Sylvain Brachfeld’s 1986 work Brabosh, a Shtetl on the River Scheldt, which depicts a community

ccccccc 42. Peach, “The Consequences of Segregation”, 18.

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Veerle Vanden Daelen of Hassidim in their special costume [kleederdracht in the original Dutch text], with its shops selling Jewish specialties, where one gets a general impression of Jewish people in their daily life, and especially on Shabbat and Jewish holidays does one feel the picturesque character of this neighborhood. The children on their way to the schools, the men to their jobs or to the synagogue, the women running errands – these are all memories of a Jewish world that almost completely disappeared from the rest of Europe.43

Such nostalgic imagery neglects the fact that it was only after the Second World War that Orthodox newcomers publicly showed their “Jewishness” via their dress and hair styles. As Brachfeld himself noted in an interview, “before the Second World War, nobody would walk on the street wearing a tallit … The eye-catching appearances only started after the war, maybe not even right away, but in the sixties.”44 This was partly an evolution brought by the newcomers, yet it was also part of the second generation which presented itself as more Orthodox than the earlier generation. As the visibly Orthodox group became larger, it became more customary – and thus easier – for religious Jews who were hesitant about openly displaying signs of their Jewishness to begin doing so. For example, in the postwar years there was a noticeable rise in publicly worn kippot (skull caps) and tallitot (prayer shawls). We can also distinguish the emergence of a more severe dress style for young Orthodox girls when we look at the class pictures of the Beth Jacob school. In the pictures from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the girls wear the short skirts and dresses with short sleeves that were fashionable then. Today, however, the girls at the school do not dress according to the latest general fashions but instead wear a fairly conservative uniform: a dark blue dress that covers the knees. Most girls wear shirts or blouses with long sleeves and stockings, even during the summer. In addition, the general fashion changes in the years after the war also made Jewish men more easily recognizable as Jews: the dark three-piece suit with hat was in fashion just before and after the war, and this clothing style made it easy for religious Jews to cover their heads in an inconspicuous manner. Today, however, such suits, and especially the hats, are no longer common, much less fashionable. Jews appear to be almost the only people who still wear them (and buy and sell them), and this has helped make them a “Jewish feature” for Jews in Antwerp.45 ccccccc 43. 44.

45.

Brachfeld, Brabosh, een sjtetl aan de Schelde, 6 (my translation; a similar, but slightly different description is included in French on p. 5). Interview of S. Brachfeld with author, Herzlia, 16 July 2004. Of course Brachfeld speaks from his present perception, and memory is not as accurate as if we could see footage or pictures, but taking into account his historical studies, I do believe him, especially since his information is confirmed by another Antwerp Jewish witness, Rabbi Friedrich (who also declares that the visible signs of Jewishness such as shtreimels only became part of the street image after the Second World War (interview of J. Friedrich with author, Antwerp, 10 May 2007)). Vanden Daelen, Laten we hun lied verder zingen, 212-14.

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Students of the Beth Jacob School; undated photo from the first years after the Second World War (late 1950s or early 1960s, approximately) and more recent (late 1990s or early 2000s, approximately). From: School archives Jesode Hatora – Beth Jacob.

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For the Jewish population who had already been living in Antwerp for a longer time, and especially those who had experienced the wartime persecution in the city, the eye-catching appearances of the postwar Antwerp Jews also provoked concerns of negative stigmas about the Jewish community as a whole and fears of provoking anti-Semitism. They tried to convince other Jews, especially those new to the city, not to attract attention by their looks or behavior.46 The Jewish social welfare organization undertook very concrete actions in this matter. So we read in the report of the representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Belgium to the headquarters in New York on December 6, 1946: I think you might be interested to know that such tremendous numbers of orthodox Jews in round hats, long beards, and longer coats, have been pouring into Antwerp that the Committee there decided that they would not give relief to anybody who did not wear a conventional fedora [classical hat, instead of a shtreimel for example]. The Committee provided the fedoras.47

Even within the Orthodox religious community, the subject made it onto the official agenda in September 1946 as “Question of adaptation of Jews coming from Central and Eastern Europe who recently arrived in Belgium”. The council decided that “from above, pressure had to be exercised on the newcomers, so that they would not attract the attention of the governments and the non-Jewish population with their style of clothes and appearances.”48 This very present fear that attracting attention would complicate the regularization process (such as gaining residence and work permits and citizenship) of Jews in Belgium was not ungrounded. A report from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) noted in 1955: “People who live in ghettos like the Antwerp ghetto are not readily regarded as integrated by the Belgian authorities, and therefore are amongst those people who are refused naturalization.”49 Although there was never an actual Jewish ghetto in Antwerp, the use of the expression illustrates the high concentration of Jewish inhabitants, clearly identifiable as Jewish, and the wish of the HIAS referent that the Antwerp Jews “blend in” better with the general population, in the hope that doing so would be beneficial for them. ccccccc 46. 47. 48.

49.

Vanden Daelen, “Staat in de stad?”, 30-31. JDC-NY, coll. 45/54, file 149, Beatrice Vulcan (Joint Brussels) to Henrietta K. Buchman (Joint NY), 6 December 1946. Archief SH, VIG-archief, A12, notulen beheerraad VIG, 29 September 1946. The board was afraid it would lead to anti-Semitism and that it would negatively influence the immigration possibilities for Jews to Belgium. They thought of organizing “integration classes” or “conferences for these newcomers to make the situation completely clear to them”. JDC-NY, printed material, United HIAS Service, Second European Emigration Conference, October 12-14, 1955, p. 64, Mr. Gretzer.

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The rising presence of Hassidic Jews in Antwerp led to stereotypical images of Jews in the city. It is plausible that the resolute maintaining of this special dress code (or codes, as there is variation between groups) encouraged other Orthodox Jews, particularly those who had chosen to dress inconspicuously or less discernibly “Jewish” in appearance, to adopt more distinctive and marked dress and appearance.

But there is more than rising Orthodoxy… Yet there is also a considerable percentage of Jews in Antwerp who do not live an observant Orthodox religious lifestyle. Not every Jew in Antwerp is observant or Orthodox. The city’s Jewish community is comprised not only of more outwardly “visible Jews”. For outsiders, however, these non-Orthodox Jews remain largely invisible, and this is different than before the Second World War and during the first years after the liberation. This can be explained by three factors: rising Orthodoxy, the economic concentration in the diamond business, and the Holocaust, each reinforcing the others. In the postwar period, Orthodoxy began to dominate all official organized Jewish life in Antwerp. Today, a large number of non-Orthodox Jews in Antwerp associate themselves with the official Jewish religious life in the city. Although all officially recognized Jewish religious life – the “Jewish communities” Shomre Hadas and Machsike Hadas and the Synagogue of Portuguese Rite – is Orthodox, it must be stressed that, first, there are many differences and variations of Orthodoxy, ranging from Hassidic and ultra-Orthodox or Hareidi to modern Orthodox; and second, the lifestyles of individual members of the Jewish communities differ strongly in many respects. Besides the strict Orthodox members, there are also people who are less observant (sometimes far less so) and who live, for example, outside the eruv. The spatial proximity of home, community facilities (synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher shops, etc.), and work is less important for these less religious members of the Jewish community, but they nonetheless respect Orthodox religious activity. As only Orthodox communities and customs are accepted by the majority of religious Jews in Antwerp, practically everybody adapts to this standard for official Jewish life, even if in one’s private home he or she follows less strict Orthodoxy or does not follow Orthodoxy at all. Thus, all Jewish institutions, including the social welfare services, respect Orthodox norms. Traditionally there is strong communal solidarity amongst Jews worldwide. This solidarity translates in Antwerp into a central welfare system. Almost every Jew in the city, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox, either contributes to this welfare system or is supported by it.50 In my opinion, the Holocaust has a leading role in the explanation. There ccccccc 50. Vanden Daelen, Laten we hun lied verder zingen, 89-90, 149-52, 185, 217-18.

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emerged after the persecution and Judeocide a strong and growing sense of “Jewishness” (see the previously mentioned rise in visibility of religious Jewishness in this respect). Antwerp experienced this evolution thanks to the ardent work of surviving Orthodox Jews to rebuild their religious life and with the Orthodox facilities attracting Orthodox newcomers. This evolution was different than in other cities in Western Europe, where the Jewish populations generally sought not to stress their Jewishness. Although anti-Semitism did not disappear after the Second World War, Belgian officials – both locally and nationally – did their utmost to accommodate the returning Jews and to react to manifestations of anti-Semitism. This was partially because the diamond industry, one of the country’s major economic sectors, could not have revived without the return to Antwerp of the Jewish diamond diaspora. Therefore the officials were very flexible in their attitude towards Jews (active or potential diamond people) in Antwerp. The same had been true after the First World War when many of Antwerp’s “diamond Jews”, having fled the country, needed convincing to return to the city. This flexibility and accommodation on the part of Belgian officials is also one likely reason Jews felt so at ease in clearly showing their Jewishness after the Second World War.51 The non-Orthodox Jews in Antwerp never formulated clear alternatives to the dominant Orthodox presence after the war. Non-Orthodox Jews either disappeared from the “Jewish scene” by keeping their Jewish identity private, or they respected and adhered to Orthodox initiatives. The high concentration of Jews in one economic sector surely plays an important role here: respect for Orthodoxy was in itself a business strategy. (Indeed, we now see similar respect for Indian customs.) The previously mentioned social cohesion (or control) of a strong economic and physical concentration also plays a key role. Because of the social cohesion of the Jewish minority in Antwerp, and because having a strong sense of Jewish self-identity became much more important than it had been before the war, even non-religious Jews in Antwerp sought to give their children “Jewish education”. Before the Second World War, the large majority (around 70%) of Jewish children went to public schools, but after the war almost all Jewish children attended Jewish day schools. Thus, we see in Antwerp that a majority of the Jewish community is clearly identifiable as Jewish because of their Orthodox lifestyle. This dominant segment is accompanied by a smaller group of non-Orthodox Jews who either subscribe to the Orthodox character of Antwerp’s Jewish community life (and therefore do not create any visible “markers”) or absent themselves from the picture by keeping their Jewishness largely or entirely private.

ccccccc 51. Vanden Daelen, “Integrated Segregation”.

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Concluding Remarks Antwerp underwent strong growth in its Jewish population from the end of the nineteenth century through the interwar period. Although the decimated prewar Jewish population was joined after the war by newcomers, it still remains smaller than in the prewar period. Notwithstanding the much lower numbers of Jewish immigrants and the smaller size of the community, Antwerp Jews appear more “present” in the city and are often considered a “closed community”. As we have seen, this has much to do with the Orthodox character of a major part of Antwerp’s Jewish population, most of whom have little significant contact with their non-Orthodox surroundings. Observant Orthodox Jews in Antwerp remain apart from the rest of the surrounding society, even when they are no longer “immigrants” but second- and third- (and higher) generation inhabitants of the city. All this was true during the prewar period as well. The major differences, however, were the lower percentage of Orthodox Jews and the greater, more evident presence of non-Orthodox Jews and Judaism. Antwerp’s Jewish life before the war was characterized by many elements of Jewishness, ranging from secular to religious, with many degrees in between. The general disappearance of non-Orthodox social supports for being Jewish (maintaining and exercising Jewish identity) is an element that makes Antwerp most intriguing. Certainly, not every Jew in postwar Antwerp was or is an Orthodox Jew, of course, but, alternative voices are practically entirely no longer heard or identifiable as such. Since the Holocaust, within Antwerp’s Jewish community there emerged larger respect – albeit not necessarily adherence – for Orthodox life. This respect was intertwined with economic reasons, as most Jews were to some degree colleagues or had mutual interest in the diamond business. Without the strong underlying religious aspect and a common economic base, cultural Jewish practices and family ties and solidarity would have been less essential factors in preserving group unity.52 The strengthening of Orthodoxy during the second half of the twentieth century brought with it more and more visible, noticeable “markers” of Jewishness.

ccccccc 52. Vaughan, “Clustering, Segregation and the ‘Ghetto,’” chapter 2: 11-13.

Part II Cultural Trespassers

Karin Hofmeester

Jewish Parliamentary Representatives in the Netherlands, 1848-1914 Crossing Borders, Encountering Boundaries?

In 1879, Michel Henri Godefroi received a commemorative gold medal for his thirty year jubilee as Lower House member. From 1849 till 1881 Godefroi sat in the Lower House, interrupted only by the years he was Minister of Justice in 1860-62 and a short break for health reasons. In 1849, he had been the first Jewish member of the Lower House in sixty years.1 After Godefroi, a substantial number of Jewish politicians made their entrance into the Lower House. As they crossed the border of national politics, Godefroi and later Jewish representatives evoked debates within Jewish circles on the legitimacy of specifically Jewish representation. Was it reasonable to strive for a numerically equal representation in parliament of Jews or to expect that they would defend Jewish interests in parliament? Should their Jewish identity in public and private life have any consequences for their political activities? These issues were also discussed by non-Jewish MPs. Although they were initially rather silent about Jewish representatives, this changed after political parties based on confessional principles started to dominate national politics in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Boundaries between the different groups were sharply defined. In this setting, Jewish politicians were explicitly addressed as representatives of the Jews, a minority that was depicted by some as “guests” in Dutch society. Paradoxically, this happened when the number of Jewish representatives increased: the more Jews crossed the boundaries of the national political arena, the more objections were raised against their presence in the Lower House. In this article the debates on Jewish representatives will be analyzed, after a short characterization of the Jewish members of the Lower House and the parliamentary context in which they operated.

ccccccc 1.

In 1797, Hermanus Leonard Bromet and Hartog de Hartog Lémon were elected in the National Assembly of the Dutch republic. They were the first Jewish representatives in Europe. See S. Bloemgarten, Hartog de Hartog Lémon, 1755-1823: Joodse revolutionair in Franse Tijd (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007).

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Making an Entrance into Parliament In the period from 1848 to 1914, the Lower House seated a total of thirteen Jewish members. With the exception of the period 1881-86, when there was no Jewish MP, at least one and at most five Jews were elected. On average they formed 2% of the total number of MPs, whereas in this period the Jewish share of the total population rose from 1.91% in 1849 to 2.04% in 1914 (see fig. 1). For a long time, Godefroi was the only Jewish MP. He was accompanied in 1852 and 1864 by the prominent lawyer Ahasverus (Asser) Samuel van Nierop, whose career in the Lower House was too short to leave a big mark. Godefroi entered the Dutch parliament as a direct consequence of the liberal constitutional change that took place in the Netherlands in 1848. One of the most important aspects of this change was the introduction of a system of direct elections. While suffrage remained limited by a census, enfranchising 7.3% of the total Dutch adult male population, members of parliament were no longer elected by an electoral college but directly by the voters. Each seat in parliament represented a district of similar size.2 Political parties did not yet exist; there were candidates on personal title, and they could be put forward by associations of voters, such as happened with Godefroi, who was put on the list for an Amsterdam voting district in 1848. He was elected in the first round. Godefroi combined a successful legal career as judge of the provincial court of North Holland with several important functions in Jewish public life. Since 1844, Godefroi was a member of the Executive Committee for the Affairs of Israelites (Hoofdcommissie tot Zaken der Israëliten), and from 1854 till 1860 he was president of this organization. After the full separation of church and state in 1848, the main task of the Committee was to establish an alternative to the consistorial system by which the Jewish community had been governed since 1808.3 This was not an easy process: only in 1870 was the Netherlands Israelite Church Community (Nederlands-Israëlitisch Kerkgenootschap, or NIK) established, in which Godefroi took up a position in the Executive Committee (Permanente Commissie). Godefroi entered the Lower House during the period of “classical liberalism”, when the constitution was interpreted and essential legislation was introduced. The debates in parliament were characterized as “civilized gentlemen’s conversations”.4 Godefroi was one of the MPs who helped shape the constitutional framework of the ccccccc 2.

3. 4.

See L. Blok, Stemmen en kiezen: Het kiesstelsel in Nederland in de periode 1814-1850 (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff/Forsten, 1987), 250; R. de Jong, Van standpolitiek naar partijloyaliteit: Verkiezingen voor de Tweede Kamer 1848-1887 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1999), 14-15. For the history of the Hoofdcommissie, its leaders and activities, see B. Wallet, Nieuwe Nederlanders: De integratie van de joden in Nederland 1814-1851 (Amsterdam: Bakker, 2007). H. te Velde, “Van grondwet tot grondwet”, in Land van kleine gebaren: Een politieke geschiedenis van Nederland 1780-1990, ed. R. Aerts et al., (Nijmegen: sun, 1999), 109.

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state. In 1861, his proposal for a law on the composition and competencies of the Council of State (Raad van State) was accepted. He was also actively involved in the revision of the penal code. Four years after Godefroi died in 1882, Abraham Frans Karel Hartogh was the next Jew elected as MP, holding a seat between 1886 and 1901. Like Godefroi and most other MPs, Hartogh was a lawyer, who approached political debates from a legal angle. As a liberal, Hartogh was politically linked to Godefroi and Van Nierop. Moreover, Hartogh shared the social and religious outlook of his predecessors: they were all from well-to-do families and were not orthodox in their private lives but followed halakhahat at major lifecyle events. All held important positions within the Jewish community.5 Together they constituted a first generation of Jewish politicians. At the same time, Harthogh formed a bridge to a next generation of Jewish politicians. This generation was part of a more progressive liberal group who attacked laissez-faire economic ideals and were in favor of more state intervention, the expansion of suffrage, tax reforms, and improvement of education.6 The Jewish MPs Hartogh, Arnoldus Polak Kerdijk, and Isaac Abraham Levy were all important figures in the progressive liberal movement. The emergence of this second generation is a result of the constitutional change that took place in 1887, when a lowering of the census led to an expansion of suffrage, now including about 14% of the adult male population.7 The number of Lower House seats also increased. As a result of these constitutional changes, the number of Jewish voters and of Jewish Lower House members increased (see fig. 1). Lower House members now originated from different social backgrounds.8 Jewish MPs no longer occupied administrative positions within the Jewish community, nor had most of them a strong Jewish identity in their private lives.9

ccccccc 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

“Hartog, Abraham Frans Karel”, in Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, vol. 6, ed. P.C. Molhuysen, P.J. Blok, and F.K.H. Kossmann (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1924), 714. See also Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad (hereinafter NIW), 9 July 1880 and 7 August 1925 and biographical data on www.parlement.com. S. Stuurman, Wacht op onze daden: Het liberalisme en de vernieuwing van de Nederlandse staat (Amsterdam: Bakker, 1992), 368-70. See www.parlement.com/9291000/modulesf/h9gn0k7n J.T.J. van den Berg, De toegang tot het Binnenhof: De maatschappelijke herkomst van de Tweede-Kamerleden tussen 1849 en 1970 (Weesp: Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1983), 232. Levy had several functions in Jewish social organizations; see NIW 27 September 1872, 13 December 1872, and 13 May 1887. Samuel van den Bergh supported various international sociopolitical Jewish organizations; see D. Arnoldus, “Bergh, Samuel”, in Joden in Nederland in de Twintigste Eeuw: Een biografisch woordenboek, ed. R. Fuks-Mansfeld et al. (Utrecht: Winkler Prins, 2007), 21-22; Zadok van den Bergh was a member of the board of a Jewish home for the elderly and a Jewish poor school, NIW, 15 March 1901. Levyssohn Norman married a non-Jewish wife, as did Kerdijk; Zadok van den Bergh married a non-Jewish wife after a divorce. In contrast to the first- and third-generation Jewish representatives, none of them was buried in a Jewish cemetery. See N.P. van den Berg, “Levensbericht van Mr. H.D. Levyssohn Norman”, Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse

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A third generation of Jewish MPs entered the Lower House in 1913. After the classic and progressive liberals, now socialist Jewish MPs entered the stage. The three newly elected Jewish MPs in 1913, Henri Polak, Asser Benjamin Kleerekoper, and Maurits Mendels, were candidates for the Sociaal Democratische Arbeiders Partij (SDAP) (social-democratic labor party), established in 1894.10 Their election was a direct result of another extension of suffrage in 1896, enfranchising 49% of all adult males.11 Polak was only a member of the Lower House for a short while, moving on quickly to the Senate in late 1913. There, he primarily spoke on socioeconomic issues and on environmental issues. Kleerekoper primarily addressed legal matters, arts, domestic affairs, and colonial affairs in the Lower House; Mendels also concentrated on legal issues and topics related to the colonies but also focused on labor and trade matters. This “third generation” did have functions within Jewish public life, albeit in another type of organization than the “first generation” Jewish representatives. They could be found in socialist and Zionist organizations and were later – in a period that lies beyond the scope of this article – active in the fight against anti-Semitism. Now that we have an overview of the Jewish MPs, it is time to see how they operated and were looked upon in political life.

Jewish Representatives – Representatives of the Jews? When Godefroi was elected in 1848, a pamphlet was published by the former army officer Jhr. Mozes Salvador in which he argued that Godefroi was put forward as a candidate because he was Jewish and was thus a candidate for whom the Jewish part of the electorate was supposed to vote because he was their coreligionist. According to Salvador, no one knew the political ideas of Godefroi or his willingness to defend the interests of his country, his fellow countrymen, and his coreligionists. Maybe he just wanted to enter politics because of career opportunities. Though Salvador would like to see one or more Jewish representatives in the Lower House, they should be elected because of their abilities, not because of their religious background: “I would rather see no Jew in parliament than to know he was only includccccccc

10.

11.

Letterkunde (Leiden: Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, 1895), 527-70 and A.F. Schepel, Polak, Polak Kerdijk, Kerdijk: Een familiegeschiedenis sedert 1779 (The Hague 1977). For more information on Henri Polak, see his biography: S. Bloemgarten, Henri Polak: Sociaal democraat 1868-1943 (The Hague: sdu, 1993); for Kleerekoper, see E. de Levita, ed., ABK “Oproerige krabbels”: Hoekstukjes van A.B. Kleerekoper (Haarlem: Tuindorp, 1994), 10-11; for Mendels, see L. Brug, “Mendels, Maurits”, in Biografisch Woordenboek van het Socialisme en de Arbeidersbeweging, vol. 8, ed. P.J. Meertens et al. (Amsterdam: iisg, 2000), 159-62 and E. Gans, De kleine verschillen die het leven uitmaken: Een historische studie naar joodse sociaal-democraten en socialistisch-zionisten in Nederland (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 1999), 110. See www.parlement.com/9291000/modulesf/h9gn0k7n

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ed as such.”12 Salvador’s criticism might have been inspired by political animosity: Salvador was a radical liberal, whereas Godefroi was a moderate liberal. Yet Salvador also objected to the fact that Godefroi’s Jewishness was “a religion he only professed for appearances’ sake.”13 He blamed Godefroi for his work as a member of the Hoofdcommissie, which “had done very little to nothing for the well-being of its coreligionists.”14 As controversial as Salvador might have been, he raised important issues that returned time and again in Jewish circles: on what ticket should Jewish candidates cross the border of the national political arena, and once they got there, what could be expected from them? These questions were discussed in the Nederlandsch-Israëlitisch Nieuws- en Advertentie-Blad (NINA, later renamed Israëlitisch Weekblad), which first appeared in November 1849. Right from the beginning, NINA’s editorials stated that Jews should have more representative functions and public offices in order to defend the Jewish interest: “If we do not stand up for our interests, who will?”15 NINA praised the fearless attitude of the Catholic representatives, who were “not afraid to be accused of intolerance or self-interest, if they feel there are issues that force them to speak up”.16 Although Jewish MPs should guard the interest of the total population and not just that of the Jewish part, NINA specifically stressed the problems concerning the reorganization of the Hoofdcommissie as an argument in favor of Jewish MPs. Yet it also stressed the numerical argument: Jews formed 1.6% of the total population and therefore were entitled to at least one representative.17 The NINA openly lobbied for Godefroi, Van Nierop, and subsequent Jewish representatives, until an editorial change – and another change of name, to Weekblad voor Israëlieten (hereinafter WvI) – in 1855 made it less politically outspoken. From 1865 onwards, another Jewish weekly started to appear, the Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad (hereinafter NIW), which was more oriented towards Orthodox Judaism and even less prone to political commentary. Still, both journals promoted Jewish candidates and expected that “their candidates” would defend Jewish interests in parliament.18 In many cases, Godefroi lived up to these expectations. As president of the ccccccc 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

Jhr. M. Salvador, Iets over de Amsterdamsche verkiezingen (Haarlem: Van Loghem, 1848), 10. Salvador, Iets over de Amsterdamsche verkiezingen, 9. Salvador, Iets over de Amsterdamsche verkiezingen, 7. NINA, 28 December 1849 and 4 January 1850. NINA, 28 December 1849. Actually, Jews formed 1.9% of the total population, according to the census. See J.A. de Kok, Nederland op de breuklijn Rome-Reformatie: Numerieke aspecten van protestantisering en katholieke herbeleving in de Noordelijke Nederlanden 1580-1880 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1964), 292-93. See for example NIW, 26 February 1869; NIW, 4 March 1869; NIW, 16 April 1869. For more information on the two journals and their editors, see I. Lipschits, Honderd jaar NIW: Het Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad 1865-1965 (Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1966).

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Hoofdcommissie, he asked the Lower House in 1858 to intervene in the international scandal that ensued after the clandestine baptism of Edgardo Mortara, even though he did not take the floor in the parliamentary debate on this issue. The outcome of the debate was an official protest of the Dutch government to the Papal authorities. However, after the official Dutch protest was brushed aside by the Vatican, Godefroi was so disappointed that he refused to intervene in a similar case a couple of years later. Nevertheless, he praised and supported the two MPs who had suggested withdrawing the Dutch representative in Rome.19 Other diplomatic cases concerning Jews that seemed winnable were more than once taken up by Godefroi. In 1863, during debates on a commercial treaty with Switzerland, he spoke about the discriminative laws against Jews in that country. As a consequence, the treaty was not signed. “Voilà un député qui ne rougit pas d’être israélite”, wrote the French Jewish weekly Archives Israélites.20 Though the Minister of Foreign Affairs felt that the Dutch government was not in the position to demand that the Swiss change their constitution, other MPs wholeheartedly supported Godefroi’s suggestion not to sign the treaty, and they won the case.21 In 1872, Godefroi successfully pleaded for a protest of the Dutch consul in Rumania against the persecution of Jews in that country, stressing his own Jewishness and his solidarity with his Rumanian coreligionists.22 A few years later, in 1876, Godefroi successfully argued that the Netherlands should not sign a commercial treaty with this country where Jews were discriminated. To strengthen his arguments, he pointed to the fact that Dutch Jews travelling to or through Rumania were also discriminated against and that there was a clear precedent in the case of the non-ratification of the Swiss commercial treaty.23 In none of these discussions did Godefroi meet any real opposition. If MPs had any reservations, they were of a general nature, not directed against Jewish interests, nor did they use arguments ad hominem. Godefroi also took the floor on domestic Jewish interests. During debates on the budget of religious communities, he argued in favor of an increase of the budget of ccccccc 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (The Hague 1859), meeting of 8 December 1858, 318, 322. See also W.M. de Lang, “Weerklank van de Mortara-affaire in Nederland”, Studia Rosenthaliana 19, no. 2 (1985): 159-73. In 1864, in Rome, an eleven-year-old Jewish boy called Coën was converted to Catholicism under the influence of his master shoemaker. The Hoofdcommissie again asked the Minister of Justice to interfere, referring to the Mortara affaire. The two MPs were the liberal S. van Heemstra and the orthodox-Protestant W. van Lynden. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (The Hague 1865), meeting of 29 November 1864, 223-24. Archives Israélites 24, 15 July 1863. See R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld, “Mensenrechten in de Nederlandse buitenlandse politiek. Het ZwitsersNederlandse handelsverdag van 1863 tot 1878”, Studia Rosenthaliana 12, no. 1-2, 133-57. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (The Hague 1873), meeting of 23 September 1872, 35-39. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (The Hague 1877), meeting of 18 December 1876, 667-68.

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the Jewish congregations and for an increase of the salary of the new chief rabbi of Amsterdam.24 During the debates on the Funeral Act of 1869, he proposed several amendments which made certain demands more in accordance with Jewish laws.25 In this debate, Godefroi explicitly presented himself as a Jew, explaining that people of his religion buried their dead in simple rough wooden coffins that could not meet the legal demand of waterproofness. The act was adapted according to his wishes.26 Even though not all Godefroi’s proposals were supported by a majority of the Lower House, the fact that he defended the interests of his coreligionists at home and abroad was widely accepted. It fitted into the Dutch political tradition that representatives of religious minorities were represented in local administrative bodies in order to defend the interests of their coreligionists.27 Things could become problematic, however, if Jewish interests did not match the interests of other religious groups, who became more and more politically organized in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Jews and the Politics of Education After 1848, no other political issue could stir up emotions more than education. The constitution established complete freedom of education, granting all citizens the right to establish schools without prior government permission. However, the state would remain responsible for the supervision of these schools and for the quality and morality of its teachers. It also remained the duty of the government to provide sufficient public education, and to do so in a way that it would not hurt the religious feelings of people. All of this had to be specified in a new Education Act. In 1857, after long debates between liberal and confessional politicians, a compromise was reached on an Education Act which provided for state subsidized primary schools, non-denominational but based on vaguely formulated “Christian and social virtues”. While many orthodox Protestants and Catholics rejected the new law, the majority of the Dutch Jews were satisfied with the law. They saw it as an improvement of the situation of Jewish elementary schools. These were established on the basis of a royal decree of 1817, which had granted Jews permission to ccccccc 24. 25. 26. 27.

NIW, 16 October 1868 and 22 November 1872. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (The Hague 1870), meeting of 23 February-26 February 1869, 891-952. Verslag der Handelingen, meeting of 23 February – 26 February 1869, 893-94. For this local representation and the mechanism of having a Jewish representative in a municipality or province with a large Jewish community, see B.Wallet, “Political Participation of Dutch Jews in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century 1814-1848”, Zutot 3 (2003): 173-77; F.C. Brasz, “De joodse stem in de Nederlandse gemeente-politiek 1851-1940”, Studia Rosenthaliana 19, no. 2 (1985), 299-311. For the Provinciale Staten, see H. van Felius and H.J. Metselaars, Noordhollandse Statenleden 18401919 (Den Haag: Stichting Hollandse Historische Reeks, 1994), 29.

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have their own semipublic schools based on Jewish religious principles. Many Jewish children, especially from poorer families, went to these Jewish schools, yet the quality of education there was often substandard.28 Moreover, many Jewish parents, journalists, teachers, and rabbis felt that the public school, open to all children would help Jewish children to assimilate.29 They accepted the Christian values formula, since, as Godefroi argued, “[F]or the general good, in order to reach an agreement on the educational law, I am willing to offer that to which I am entitled by law”, i.e., a religiously neutral public school.30 Nevertheless, several requests were sent to the Lower House to demand that the state continue financing Jewish public schools. They came from Protestants, who opposed the vagueness of the Christian values formula and argued it was only included to accommodate the Jewish children. For instance, the Protestant clergyman Cornelis Eliza van Koetsveld argued that “you have made them citizens of this country … and I welcome that. But you also wanted to transform them into part of your people and to do so you have even ruined your public schools.”31 The leader of the orthodox Protestants in parliament, Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, explicitly asked Godefroi if he thought that the constitutional rights of Jews meant that they – not forming a “kerkgenootschap” but a separate “nation” – could demand that the gospel be banned from the public schools.32 Pieter Jacob Elout van Soeterwoude, a close follower of Groen, took the argument one step further. Jews should not be banned from public schools, since the Netherlands were “too hospitable” for that, but instead he proposed an amendment to the law, granting Jewish parents the right to establish public Jewish schools in case they did not want to send their children to the “general” public school.33 Godefroi responded furiously to Van Soeterwoude’s apparent desire to exclude Jews from public schools. But more fundamentally, he argued that “there can be no question here of hospitality, this situation ended at the close of the last century.” The Constitution gave Jews just as much right ccccccc 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

M. Rietveld van Wingerden, “Freedom of Education and Dutch Jewish Schools in the Mid-Nineteenth Century”, Jewish History 17 (2003): 31-54. For more information on Jews and the educational laws, see K. Hofmeester, “‘Een teeder en belangrijk punt’: Opinies over openbaar onderwijs in joodse kring, 1857-1898”, in De eenheid en de delen: Zuilvorming, onderwijs en natievorming in Nederland, 1850-1900, ed. H. te Velde and H. Verhage (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1996), 157-76. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (The Hague 1858), meeting of 9 July 1857, 1105. C.E. van Koetsveld, Eene bede om Christelijke en Israëlitische volksscholen als eene volstrekte behoefte voor ons vaderland: Adres aan de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (Schoohoven: Van Nooten, 1856), 13, 15. Groen van Prinsterer, Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 30 June 1857, 98210. Elout van der Soeterwouden, Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 4 July 1857, 1040.

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to public, mixed schools as other denominations: “If one provision of the Constitution could be violated like that, there would be no reason to stop there.”34 The Jewish press reacted in a similar vein to the direction of the debate. The WvI expressed the fear that the way in which Christianity was de facto privileged “could have incalculable consequences for the Jew, also as citizen”;35 “Who will assure us that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, no political or political-confessional party or government will rise and try to prove, law in hand, that the Netherlands is a Christian state, where Jews are not entitled to any kind of equality?”36 The editors were also suspicious of the motives of the non-Jews, who “never cared so much for Jewish interests, or just to let us feel that we were only tolerated here in this Christian state, as now. O, how kind, how concerned they are about the Jewish youth.”37 The WvI paid special attention to Godefroi’s role in the debate. The editors were concerned he might have been more careful not to cause “offence and annoyance” and worried that as a result of the debate, in which “passions are aroused, the whole nation looks at the Lower House, the fanaticism of the people behind the voters can harm the fatherland … and as a Jew, he is in the center of attention.”38 At the same time, it was clear, the mixed public school was not only an instrument for further Jewish emancipation but also an essential symbol of it: if Jews were excluded from the constitutional right to public education, what would be the next step? In this struggle, the Jewish press saw Godefroi as “their” defender of Jewish rights.

Changes in Political Culture after 1868 The struggle over education and the role of religion in politics became more vexing after 1868. One reason for this was the changing attitudes of Dutch Catholics. Until that moment, the Catholic secular elite had followed the same route as Jewish community leaders, who saw liberalism as the entrance ticket to Dutch society. Yet after the restoration of the Catholic clerical hierarchy in 1853 and the growing influence of ultramontanist antiliberalism, exemplified by the 1864 Quanta Cura encyclical with its Syllabus Erorum, Catholics and Jews took divergent paths. Instead of companions in arms, Jews were now considered enemies of the faith, who had promoted liberalism and modernity at the cost of Catholic traditions.39 This change in Catholic atticcccccc 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Godefroi, Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 4 July 1857, 1041. WvI, 8 May 1857. WvI, 15 May 1857. WvI, 25 September 1857. WvI, 22 October 1858. For this argument and a detailed analysis of the process, see J.J.M. Ramakers, “Parallel Processes? The Emancipation of Jews and Catholics in the Netherlands 1795/96-1848”, Studia Rosenthaliana 30, no. 1 (1997): 33-40; J. Ramakers, “Conservatisme en antisemitisme: Nederlandse katholieken als ‘medestrijders’en ‘tegenstanders’ van de joden 1796-1940”, in Katholicisme en antisemitisme: Thema-

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tude did not remain unnoticed in the Jewish press. In May 1868 (when the school funding controversy was a major theme in the electoral campaign) the NIW wrote: “What can Jews expect from orthodox Catholics? They used to have the same interests as we and were kindly disposed to us. Lately however, for reasons unknown to us, they have changed their opinion and our former allies have become our enemies.”40 The number of orthodox Protestant opponents grew as well, and they became better organized. They initiated a series of associations and campaigns which took the struggle over education to a next level in which the tone of the debates was no longer that of a “civilized gentlemen’s conversation”. This was clearly reflected in the stance towards Jews. For instance, during the parliamentary debates on the budget in 1873, the orthodox Protestant MP Jan Messchert van Vollenhoven referred to the “oriental values” of Godefroi and stated that if he would become more involved in Western values, he would have to admit that religion as such was disappearing from the public schools.41 According to Messchert van Vollenhoven, Jews should be in favor of state-subsidized Jewish schools for Jewish children. Godefroi responded, “I have no specific mandate of my coreligionists, but if I were to speak for them, I would refuse the offer”, because the public school also was “a sign of the unity of the nation.”42 The Catholic representative Johannes Haffmans saw an opportunity to promote the Catholic position at the expense of Jews: “Forced association brings no unity; Godefroi thinks too much as a Jew; they are strangers here, and out of gratefulness for the hospitability, they accept everything. We Catholics are at home here.”43 His colleague Christianus Heydenryck added that Jews were cosmopolites.44 Ironically, while Godefroi stated that he was not acting as a representative of the Jews and argued in favor of unity of the nation, he was primarily attacked as a Jewish representative and depicted as the essential “stranger” or an “eternal guest”. In response, Godefroi reacted so furiously that the speaker of the Lower House asked him to restrain himself.45 The

ccccccc

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

nummer van Trajecta. Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis van het katholieke leven in de Nederlanden 25, ed. Th. Salemink and J. De Mayer (2006), 68. For a more general analysis of the increase of Catholic anti-Semitism in the second half of the nineteenth century, see also M. Poorthuis and Th. Salemink, Een donkere spiegel: Nederlandse katholieken over joden. Tussen antisemitisme en erkenning (Nijmegen: Valkhof Pers, 2006), 59-78. For a general overview of anti-Semitism in the Netherlands, see K. Hofmeester, “Antisemitismus in den Niederlanden im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert”, in Ablehnung, Duldung, Anerkennung: Toleranz in den Niederlanden und in Deutschland. Ein historischer und aktueller Vergleich, ed. H. Lademacher, R. Loos, and S. Groenveld (Münster: Waxmann, 2004), 604-30. NIW, 8 May 1868. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (The Hague 1874), meeting of 6 December 1873, 592 and 600. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 6 December 1873, 598. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 6 December 1873, 621. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 6 December 1873, 614. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 8 December 1873, 622. For the Jewish press, see NIW, 12 December 1873 and NIW, 20 February 1874; for the liberal press,

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Jewish press, the liberal press, and quite some MPs responded indignantly to the remarks of the orthodox Protestant and Catholic MPs.46 Samuel de Pinto, a wine merchant and spectator of the debate, concluded in a pamphlet explicitly titled Een Jood op de tribune der Tweede Kamer (A Jew in the Gallery of the Second Chamber) that the hateful tone of the debate had only confirmed him in his views that denominational schools would breed religious hatred.47 The news of the debate even reached France, where the Archives Israélites spoke of two Catholics who had “publicly attacked the Jews” and called it a “spectacle assez rare” in the Netherlands.48 Four year later, during the debates on a revised and even more secularist Education Act in 1878, the positions became even more pronounced. The Catholic MP Haffmans bluntly stated that Godefroi was the hero of the public schools. What was taught in these schools was determined by Jews, because only their interests were guarded; “the Israelite is the cock of the walk.”49 Again Godefroi’s “oriental glow” was mentioned.50 Godefroi’s Jewish background did matter now and was mentioned time and again, not only in parliament but also in Catholic and orthodox Protestant newspapers. He was seen as a pars pro toto for all Jews, who in turn were seen as the archenemies of state-subsidised confessional schools.51 The anti-Jewish rhetoric culminated in a series of articles written in 1878 by the new leader of the orthodox Protestant Anti-Revolutionary party, Abraham Kuyper, entitled “Liberalisten en Joden”.52 In this series, he called the Jewish minority the master of the political arena in Europe, overrepresented in law and finance and monopolizing the press. The latter also influenced public opinion – for example, the way the people’s petition in favor of confessional education was described, which came down to falsification. Kuyper also introduced a racial image of Jews, describing them as a different type of human being than the Caucasian.53 The liberal journal Algemeen Handelsblad immediately responded to this series and linked its publication to Kuypers’s failure to stop the liberal educational law of Kappeyne van de Kappelo in 1878. “Now that the attack on the public school has failed, a crusade against the Jews seems to be organized.”54 ccccccc

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

it was the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant that protested loudly. For the MPs, see Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 8 December 1873, 623. S. de Pinto, Een Jood op de tribune der Tweede Kamer: Beschouwingen naar aanleiding van eenige hoofdpunten in het debat over het onderwijs bij de behandeling der staatsbegroting voor 1874 (Leiden: W.T. Werst, 1874). Samuel de Pinto was a cousin of the famous lawyers Abraham de Pinto and Aron Adolf de Pinto. See the pedigree in the De Pinto Archive D.4915, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam. Archives Israélites, 1 January 1874. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 26 June 1878, 1070. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 8 July 1878, 1228. Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, meeting of 8 July 1878, 1228. A. Kuyper, Liberalisten en Joden (Amsterdam: Kruyt, 1878). Kuyper, Liberalisten en Joden, 9, 11, 13-16. Quoted in Kuyper, Liberalisten en Joden, 17.

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Second and Third Generation of Jewish Politicians: Borders and Boundaries Revisited After Godefroi’s bad health withheld him from another candidacy in 1881, the WvI published an editorial stating that this Jewish Lower House member would have to be succeeded by another Jew.55 It would take six years before this happened, but then there were three of them: Hartogh, Levy, and Kerdijk. Yet they were clearly less concerned with Jewish interests than Godefroi. There were several reasons for this. It appears some important Jewish issues had been solved by that time: the Hoofdcommissie was finally reorganized into the NIK in 1870, and in 1878 the school funding controversy seemed settled, albeit temporarily. More importantly, as Jews who had little connection to organized Jewish communal life and as left-wing and social liberals, the second generation of Jewish MPs wanted to reform society as a whole and did not single out specific groups. However, in the political climate of the 1880s, it turned out to be difficult to escape the identification as a Jewish politician. As early as 1881, the Anti-Revolutionary journal De Standaard wrote that Godefroi’s successor would probably be another Jew. There was nothing against that, but he should be elected as a Jew by the Jews “and not by us”, the editorial stated, thereby explicitly widening the gap between “us” and “them”.56 In 1890, the journal warned against the increasing antiSemitism in Europe, caused by feelings of powerlessness against the influence of Jews in press, banking, and justice.57 Two years later, De Standaard claimed that Jews were also overrepresented in politics.58 Apart from these attacks on Jewish politicians in general, individual politicians were targeted. One of the favorite victims of these attacks was the explicitly anticlerical Levy, who had called for resistance against the growing influence of orthodox confessionals on politics and the state.59 While the Catholic journal De Tijd responded sarcastically by calling Levy “an interesting fellow citizen from the Semitic tribe” reputed for eloquence when angered, others reacted more frontally to what became known as “the Levy threat”. Kuyper expressed his regret about “this expression of deep hatred against our Christian people” yet did not fear its threat. It could however very well “stimulate the sad antiSemitic movements we see elsewhere, to spread in our fatherland.”60 Others stressed the presence of Jews in the the Masonic lodges, the press, the financial world, and academia, and argued that in “every Kulturkampf, Jews stand in the front line.”61

ccccccc 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

WvI, 30 September 1881 and 14 October 1881. De Standaard, 5 October 1881. De Standaard, 5 May 1890. De Standaard, 31 August 1892. Quoted in De Tijd, 29 February 1884. Quoted in De Tijd, 11 April 1884. De Tijd, 11 April 1884.

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In the years thereafter, not just Levy but the entire Liberal Union (Liberale Unie) party to which he belonged was depicted in anti-Semitic terms. The Anti-Revolutionary Party member Keuchenius called it “a hermaphrodite child born from a Jewish father and a pagan mother”,62 and a party of Levy-ites.63 In 1891, De Standaard referred to the Liberal Union member Eduard Ellis van Raalte in order to expose the “enormous influence that this small Jewish element has in our nation.”64 In one sweeping statement, Jewish political influence in the Liberal Union was criticised; Jews and liberalism were equated and rejected. While Jewish MPs were identified primarily as Jews, the Jewish community and their leaders developed an increasingly distanced and even critical view on these Jewish representatives. Once Jewish candidates were elected, the NIW mentioned their election, though without further comment. In 1897, the editor of the NIW, Philip Elte, declared that since church and state were separated, “we have refrained from discussing political interests … We refuse to support candidates during elections, even if they were our coreligionists.”65 Elte’s basic point was that “we do not go to the polls as Jews but as Dutch citizens.” Since there were among Jewish voters all types of liberals, radicals, and social-democrats, Jews should not be addressed as if there was a Jewish political party. This announcement should be seen against the emergence of a third generation of Jewish politicians, including a growing number of Jewish socialist candidates. Elte especially objected to the campaigning techniques of the Social-Democratic party SDAP in the Amsterdam voting district IV. In 1897 the SDAP took part in the elections for the first time, and had high hopes that with all the new voters the 1896 electoral law had yielded, they would have a chance to win. In the Amsterdam district IV, which corresponded largely with the old Jewish Quarter, Jos Loopuit was nominated.66 The propaganda in the election newsletter Stemt Rood! explicitly referred to the Jewish background of both the voters and the candidate Loopuit.67 Socialism was depicted as the long-awaited Messiah, and therefore the author believed that the new voters in district IV, who were largely Jews, should vote for Jos Loopuit. In a letter to the editor of the NIW defending this technique, it was argued that Jews had the right to support their candidate, since they only had two ccccccc 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

Verslag der Handelingen van de Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (The Hague 1886), meeting of 2 June 1885, 1027. Ibid., 1028. De Standaard, 20 April 1891. NIW, 23 July 1897. Jos Loopuit, a Jewish diamond polisher, had joined the league for general suffrage and later became an active member of the SDAP. See S. Bloemgarten, “Loopuit, Joseph”, in Biografisch woordenboek van het socialisme, vol. 4, ed. P.J. Meertens et al. (Amsterdam: iisg, 1990), 133-36. For more information, see K. Hofmeester, Jewish Workers and the Labour Movement: A Comparative Study of Amsterdam, London, and Paris 1870-1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 72-74.

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to three Jewish representatives in the Lower House and because the orthodox Protestants and Catholics did the same.68 The discussion on the Jewish identity of Jewish voters, candidates and even voting districts expanded a couple of years later, and this time it concerned more than just the social-democratic candidates. In March 1901, during by-elections for the Lower House in district III whose representative Hartogh had died in February that year, two Jews stood candidate. District III was largely a newly built quarter where many Jewish and non-Jewish (diamond) workers lived who had been introduced to the principles of social-democracy via trade unions such as the ANDB and its leader Henri Polak, who was one of the candidates. The other was Zadok van den Bergh, who ran for the social liberals. Both candidates were attacked by the Centraal Blad voor Israëlieten in Nederland (CBvIN, a Zionist-oriented weekly established in 1885) as being Jews by birth but not by conviction. Polak and Van den Bergh saw Jews as a group that had no specific interests; in fact, “Jews as such do not exist for them.”69 Van den Bergh responded in the CBvIN as well as in the NIW, pointing to his functions in Jewish communal life as well as his attachment to Judaism in his private life. He also pointed to the Jewish interests he had defended during his period in the Municipal Council, where he sat since 1899. He finished his response by stating that the editor might want to reconsider his point of view and support his candidacy: “He very well knows that there is enough anti-Semitism in our country to restrain people from voting for a Jew.”70 The CBvIN subsequently launched another attack; this time Henri Polak was its main target. The social-democrat denied the existence of Jewish interests, such as (one of the hobbyhorses of CBvIN) the impossibility for Jewish civil servants to keep Sabbath. And if Henri Polak – and Zadok van den Bergh, for that matter – knew no real Jewish interests, then why were they put up as candidates in the “Jewish district III”?71 The NIW responded furiously to this article. It was bad enough that people spoke of Jewish representatives and Jewish voters, but now even Jewish voting districts were coined. This was a dangerous development since the whole Jewish community was always held responsible for the deeds of an individual Jew, even if he did not live like a Jew.72 Initially, the third generation of Jewish politicians, who used their Jewish identity as an asset in an electoral struggle, was not very successful. Only in 1913 were the ccccccc 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

NIW, 6 August 1897. Centraal Blad voor Israëlieten in Nederland, 15 March 1901. Centraal Blad voor Israëlieten in Nederland, 15 March 1901; NIW, 15 March 1901. Centraal Blad voor Israëlieten in Nederland, 22 March 1901. Elte referred to the antimonarchical tendencies of the Jewish candidates and how this conflicted with the traditional Jewish concern for the well-being of government and the Jewish thankfulness to the House of Orange. NIW, 26 April 1901.

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first of them elected to parliament, while the members of the second generation of liberal Jews became less prominent. Ironically, one reason for the failure to exploit a Jewish identity might be the multiplication of Jewish voices and the disagreement within the Jewish community on the question of who deserved to be called a genuine Jew.

Borders and Boundaries Revisited The entrance of Jewish MPs into the political arena triggered various processes of identification and also disidentification. The first Jewish MP Godefroi was supported by a large part of the Jewish (liberal) voters and readers of the pro-assimilation Jewish journals, not just because he defended Jewish interests, but also because he insisted on the recognition of Jews as equal citizens in an integrated national community. At the same time, non-Jews expected and accepted that a Jewish politician would defend Jewish interests, as long as this did not conflict with “the general interest”. When politics started to become organized along confessional lines, focusing on the school funding controversy, even culminating in an explicit anti-thesis policy in which advocates and opponents of confessional politics were supposed to be diametrically opposed to each other, Jewish representatives were attacked as such in parliament. At first these “attacks” came from a small group of orthodox Protestants who wanted to exclude Jewish children from public schools to keep them Christian. Later these attacks came from a large, well organized group of orthodox Protestants, joined in the late sixties by orthodox Catholics. In their attempts to reach the growing electorate, religion and emotion became important elements in the campaigns, thereby dividing Dutch society along confessional lines, explicitly creating boundaries between “Christians and non-Christians”. In the late eighties, when the school funding controversy was more or less resolved, Jewish representatives lost their natural support from the Jewish journals. Their Judaism in public and private life was discussed, as well as the desirability of having “Jewish representatives defending Jewish interests”. This can be seen as a sign of emancipation. Jews were now able to enter the Lower House without massive support from the Jewish journals, the ideology of Jewish politicians started to become more differentiated, and the number of different “Jewish voices” increased. In the late eighties and early nineties, this weakening of journalistic support could also be explained as fear stimulating anti-Semitism. As anti-Semitic ideas started to spread in Europe, it also became more accepted in the Netherlands to view Jews as a group with specific characteristics, overrepresented in all domains of society, including politics. In the late nineties, a third generation of Jewish socialist politicians tried to enter the national political arena, only succeeding in 1913. As they tried to mobilize the masses – including since 1897 also quite a number of (Jewish) workers – they did not shy away from using their Jewish background as an asset to gain votes from a

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specific social layer of society. Again, borders between different groups in societies were developed, this time along social lines. Jewish representation in the Lower House had by that time become a true structural element. Figure 1: Number of Jewish members of the Lower House as percentage of total number ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Year Total number Jewish % Jews of % Jews of of members members Lower House total population 1848 68 1 1.47% 1.91% 1852 68 2 2.94% 1.91% 1856 68 1 1.47% 1.91% 1860 72 1 1.39% 1.91% 1864 75 2 2.67% 1.91% 1868 75 1 1.33% 1.89% 1871 80 1 1.25% 1.89% 1875 80 1 1.25% 1.89% 1879 86 1 1.16% 2.03% 1883 86 0 0.00% 2.03% 1887 100 3 3.00% 2.03% 1891 100 4 4.00% 2.03% 1894 100 2 2.00% 2.03% 1897 100 3 3.00% 2.04% 1901 100 1 1.00% 2.04% 1905 100 4 4.00% 2.04% 1909 100 1 1.00% 2.04% 1913 100 5 5.00% 2.04%

Figure 2: Names of Jewish members of the Lower House, 1848-1914 ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 1848: M.H. Godefroi 1852: M.H. Godefroi, A.S. Van Nierop 1856: M.H. Godefroi 1860: M.H. Godefroi 1864: M.H. Godefroi, A.S. Van Nierop 1868: M.H. Godefroi 1871: M.H. Godefroi 1875: M.H. Godefroi 1879: M.H. Godefroi 1887: A.F.K. Hartogh, I.A. Levy, A. Kerdijk 1891: A.F.K. Hartogh, I.A. Levy, A. Kerdijk, H.D. Levyssohn Norman 1894: A.F.K. Hartogh, A. Kerdijk 1897: A.F.K. Hartogh, A. Kerdijk, E.E. van Raalte 1901: E.E. van Raalte 1905: E.E. van Raalte, J. Limburg, Z. van den Bergh, S. van den Bergh 1909: J. Limburg 1913: J. Limburg, E.E. van Raalte, H. Polak, A.B. Kleerekoper, M. Mendels

Ronald Schechter

Catinka Heinefetter A Jewish Prima Donna in Nineteenth-Century France

On January 7, 1841, the poet, dramatist, and cultural critic Théophile Gautier reviewed a performance of La Juive (The Jewess) at the Paris Opera. Writing in La Presse, France’s largest newspaper, he focused on the debut of Catinka Heinefetter in the lead role of Rachel. He began with “a physical portrait” of the twenty-oneyear-old prima donna, lamenting that “[t]oday we do not attach much importance to the beauty of actresses”, a category that included opera singers. Mademoiselle Heinefetter had “large, well-formed shoulders, a majestic figure”, a slender waist, and ample bosom. “Her whole person had something robust and energetic about it.” Gautier admired “her regular and beautiful features, her black eyebrows, her brilliant eyes, her straight nose”, all of which produced “an effect” even at a distance. He was more circumspect about her hands, which were “rather beautiful, though somewhat big”, and her feet, which he “suspect[ed] of being German”, by which he seems to have meant overly large. He quipped that “throughout the opera we were diligently on the lookout” for the singer’s feet “without succeeding in seeing them”, and he believed that the length of her dress was at least in part designed to occlude them. Nevertheless, Gautier wrote, “Since Mademoiselle [Cornélie] Falcon, no one has represented the beautiful Jewess Rachel with a more satisfying and realistic physical appearance, and this for the excellent reason that Mademoiselle Heinefetter is a Jewess herself and very beautiful.” Her coreligionists were proud of her: “Israelite applause was not lacking”, as “[t]he twelve tribes had their representatives” at the opera, but Gautier insisted that “Christians mixed their bravos [with those of the Jews] at numerous points.” Only after describing Heinefetter’s physical appearance and Jewishness did Gautier come to the matter of the singer’s voice. He characterized it as “grand, skillful, remarkable above all in the high and low tones” but “less satisfying” in the middle range and overall “capricious and inconstant”. In the first act Heinefetter was nervous, an understandable condition in one “who has never appeared in the theater before”, but by the second act she had “conquer[ed] her fear” and sang “with much vigor and energy”. Gautier also approved of her use of gesture, which in his view was more natural and believable than the hackneyed movements supposedly favored by declamation instructors.

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Catinka Heinefetter, lithograph by Léon Noël after Franz Winterhalter. From: Bibliothèque nationale de France (via Gallica).

Ronald Schechter

Catinka Heinefetter

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The critic ended his review with an account of the curtain call in which Heinefetter received “multitudes of bouquets”. Whereas a “shower of flowers” was becoming the norm for divas, in this case it was “a veritable downpour”. Alluding again to the singer’s Jewish heritage and supposed fan base, Gautier wrote that “all the lilies of Sharon and all the roses of Jericho had been requisitioned” for the occasion, adding, “At least Mademoiselle Heinefetter is a beautiful person, which makes this fanaticism more excusable.”1 Was Catinka Heinefetter a “Jewess”? If so, how did her Jewishness affect her career? Were audience members attracted to Jewish women in opera, and if so, what cultural factors accounted for this attraction? To what extent did the administration of the Paris Opera take Jewish or reputedly Jewish origins into account when casting female singers in La Juive and other productions? How did the already suspect reputation of the stage (in opera as well as theater) affect the moral stature of women such as Heinefetter, in both the eyes of the general public and the Jewish community? Before addressing these questions directly, I would like to sketch the career of Catinka Heinefetter, with special attention to her brief tenure at the Paris Opera in the early 1840s. Born on September 12, 1819 in Mainz, Catinka Heinefetter was one of six sisters who became singers. Her elder sisters Sabine and Clara were particularly renowned. Catinka debuted in Frankfurt in 1837 before moving to Paris, where she sang at the Opera in 1841 and 1842. Afterwards she appeared in Brussels, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest. In addition to her role as Rachel in La Juive, she sang Norma (in the eponymous opera by Bellini), Agathe (in Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber), and Valentine (in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots). She died young, at the age of 39, on December 20, 1858, only months after having retired.2 Apart from brief biographical entries in biographical dictionaries and music encyclopedias, little has been written about Catinka Heinefetter. But the Archives Nationales in Paris contain the personnel files of singers at the Académie Royale de la Musique (Royal Academy of Music), the institution in charge of the Opera. Among these is Heinefetter’s dossier, which consists of roughly thirty letters to, from, or concerning the singer from the summer of 1840 to the summer of 1842 and reveals much about the degree of control she had over her own life, her career, and the people who attempted to manage her. When combined with a few other sources, the Heinefetter file provides a rare glimpse ccccccc 1. 2.

Théophile Gautier, “Opéra: Début de mademoiselle Catinka Heinefetter”, La Presse, 7 January 1841, reprinted in Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans (Leipzig, 1859), vol. 2, 90-91. Pierer’s Universal-Lexikon (Altenburg, 1859), s.v. “Heinefetter”; Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1905-9), s.v. “Heinefetter, Sabine”; Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New York: Grove, 2001), s.v. “Heinefetter”.

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into the opportunities available to female Jewish performers in early to mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Upon reading this file, one is immediately struck by Heinefetter’s considerable bargaining power. The first item is the singer’s contract covering the period of March 1841 to January 1843. Though undated, it appears to have been signed in late summer or early fall 1840. In addition to Catinka’s signature, the contract bears that of her mother, Madame Seelandt, who served as guarantor and may have helped her daughter in her negotiations.3 After all, in 1836 the conductor Gaspare Spontini boasted to the King of Prussia that he had secured a contract with Clara Heinefetter “despite so many difficulties and obstinacies on the part of this singer and her mother”.4 Whoever took the lead in the negotiations, the contract showed great expectations on the part of the Academy. It offered Heinefetter 16,000 francs for the first year and 20,000 for the second and included three months’ vacation per year. (Opera singers often used their “vacations” to go on tour, and though this meant more work, it also provided additional income.) Payroll figures in the archives of the Paris Opera, which take into account the actual number of performances as well as negotiations made after the contracts were signed, show that for the 1840-41 season Heinefetter was paid 33,520 francs. She earned 18,000 in 1841-42, but during that period she took extended leaves.5 By comparison, according to the same payrolls, the conductor of the orchestra typically earned 8,000 francs per year, and musicians playing in the pit often earned 700 to 800 francs per year. Meanwhile, women working in the textile industry earned barely a franc per day.6 The most important theme to emerge in Heinefetter’s personnel dossier is a struggle over control of the singer’s schedule. Specifically, Heinefetter frequently requested more time to study her roles. On October 26, 1840, shortly before she was scheduled to debut as Rachel, Heinefetter wrote to the director of the Academy, Léon Pillet, to ask for an extension. She complained that her teachers had been absent for the previous two months and that she had not received the instruction necessary for a good performance. If the director insisted on focusing on “the letter” of an agreement that she had made with Henri Duponchel, the head of production at the Opera, this required her to be on stage “in the first days of November”. She suggested that “the first week of this month [November] is part of the first days”, ccccccc 3. 4.

5. 6.

Catinka Heinefetter’s contract with the Académie Royale de la Musique, “Heinefetter”, AJ 13 194, Archives Nationales, Paris. Alessandro Belardinelli, Documenti Spontini inediti (Florence: Edizioni Sansoni Antiquariato, 1955), vol. 2, 288. Cited in Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 124. Payrolls from the Académie Royale de la Musique, PE3(699), Archives de l’Opéra de Paris. Gérard Noiriel, Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries, trans. Helen McPhail (Providence RI: Berg, 1990), 18. Cf. Francis Demier, “Les ouvriers de Rouen parlent à un économiste en juillet 1848”, Le Mouvement social 119 (April-June 1982): 3-31.

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and asked for her first performance to take place on November 7.7 In November, however, she asked for an additional delay until the “first days” of January 1841, noting that she was studying with the tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez and had more to learn from him before appearing in public.8 Heinefetter did appear early in January, but if anything her success only added to the pressure Pillet put on her. At some point in the first half of March, he seems to have accused her of not attending enough rehearsals or learning enough roles, as she wrote on March 15 that she knew the part of Elvira (in Mozart’s Don Giovanni) and did not need any more rehearsals. She added that she had recently sung Rachel (in La Juive), Valentine (in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots), and Alice (in Meyerbeer’s Robert the Devil) and promised to rehearse Don Giovanni the next day. She concluded the letter with a plea for the director to stop being displeased at her.9 The question of preparation time emerged again on May 7 when Heinefetter complained to Pillet that she was not being given enough time to study the roles he expected her to sing.10 In addition to disputes over the amount of time it would take to learn her roles, Heinefetter’s file reveals a running quarrel over her physical condition. On November 9, 1840, the diva wrote Pillet that “my indisposition which makes it impossible to sing forces me to inform you that I will not be able to appear at tomorrow’s performance.”11 Later that month she complained about a “légère indisposition”.12 On January 21, 1841, she claimed, without elaborating, to be “forced to stay in bed”.13 Four days later she wrote, “Monsieur, I strongly regret being forced to inform you that an indisposition prevents me from singing Friday. I hope I can assure you that I will be able to do so next Monday. Please accept my very sincere apologies.”14 On March 15, she alluded to health problems when she wrote that “the doctor” would let her “go out tomorrow”.15 On May 7, she requested an early summer vacation, claiming, “[M]y doctors (mes médecins) are urging me in the interest of my health to breathe the air of the country.”16 At times Heinefetter alluded to the effect her menstrual cycle had on her conccccccc 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Catinka Heinefetter to Léon Pillet, Director of the Académie Royale de la Musique, 26 October 1840. “Heinefetter”, AJ 13 194, Archives Nationales, Paris. Heinefetter to Pillet, [letter undated but marked “reçu” November 20 1840]. “Heinefetter”, AJ 13 194, Archives Nationales, Paris. (Further references to correspondence in this dossier will cite sender, recipient, and date only.) Heinefetter to Pillet, 15 March 1841. Heinefetter to Pillet, 7 May 1841. Heinefetter to Pillet, 9 November 1840. Heinefetter to Pillet, [letter undated but marked “reçu” November 20, 1840]. Heinefetter to Pillet, 21 January 1841. Heinefetter to Pillet, 25 January 1841. Heinefetter to Pillet, 15 March 1841. Heinefetter to Pillet, 26 May 1841.

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dition and her ability to sing. On February 9, 1841, she wrote, “Monsieur, it is necessary to inform you with great regret that a circumstance to which a woman is subject has just announced itself unexpectedly and to my great discontent[;] it will therefore be impossible for me to sing tomorrow.”17 On March 3, she simply announced that she would “not be able to sing between the seventh and the tenth[;] it’s not a favorable time at all.”18 Was she being a prima donna in the proverbial as well as literal sense of the term? Not necessarily. Medical scientists have confirmed that menstruation can provoke dysphonia, a voice disorder characterized by hoarseness or constriction of the larynx.19 Pillet must have been aware of this problem, anecdotally if not scientifically, and if Heinefetter had “her” doctors, the Academy had its own. Nearly a quarter of the letters in Heinefetter’s dossier are from doctors, all but one reporting to Pillet. Specifically, on November 10, 1840, in response to Heinefetter’s claim of “indisposition”, Pillet received a report from a physician who “according to your invitation” had examined the singer that morning and found “very light redness” in her throat which constituted “more of a discomfort (une gène) than an impossibility of singing.” He predicted that Heinefetter would be singing again in two or three days.20 She must have complained about her health again, however, since just four days later, the “doctors (médecins) of the Académie Royale de Musique” reported that they had visited her at her home “according to the invitation of M. Le Directeur” and “examined her with the most scrupulous attention.” They wrote that “there is in Mad[emois]elle Heinefetter no appreciable symptom of the organs that could make it impossible for her to sing.” They added, however, that Heinefetter was “near her menstrual period”, which “could deprive her of some of the advantages of her voice.”21 The doctors were clearly no strangers to menstrual dysphonia. A report later that month informed the director that the examining physician found Heinefetter “in a state of perfect health” and reported that she “even declared to me that she did not have any indisposition.” She did add, however, according to the doctor, that she was in the midst of her menstrual period and that her voice would be “veiled” ccccccc 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

Heinefetter to Pillet, 9 February 1841. Heinefetter to Pillet, 3 March 1841. “The female larynx is … exposed to hormonal fluctuations, and changes in the voice during the premenstrual period do occur and can be troublesome for singers.” Françoise P. Chagnon, “Hoarseness and Voice Change”, in Oxford Textbook of Primary Medical Care, ed. Roger Jones et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 2, 722. See also Maree Carol Ryan, “Effects of Premenstrual Symptoms on Young Female Singers”, MA thesis, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1432, accessed 4 February 2009. Sibill Scandy Camille Soroy Couche-Dugera [doctor for the Académie Royale de la Musique] to Pillet, 10 November 1840. “Les médecins de l’Académie Royale de Musique” to Pillet, 14 November 1840.

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(voilée) as a result for the next four or five days. In other words, she would not be able to sing.22 On January 21, 1841, in response to the singer’s claim that she would be “forced to stay in bed” for several days, Pillet again sent the doctor, who responded later in the day that “Mad[emois]elle Heinefetter was “in bed” and complaining of “stomach-aches (des coliques) caused by the recurrence of her period (règles).” She was afraid, the doctor added, that going out in the January weather would be “harmful to her health.” He concluded by noting that the singer did not have an accelerated pulse and, crucial for an assessment of her ability to sing, that she did not have any complaints regarding her throat or “vocal organs”.23 Once again, on April 3, 1841, one of the Academy’s doctors wrote Pillet about his examination of the singer. Heinefetter had told the doctor that she was in the midst of her “monthly period” (époque mensuelle) and that it was “impossible for her to sing.” The doctor continued, “This periodic revolution, she says, causes her tremors that she cannot overcome, the blood rushes easily to her head and causes dizziness. A month ago Mad[emois]elle Heinefetter sang La Juive in such a state, and she says she was sick for eight days afterwards as a result of that attempt.” He concluded, “The facts offered by Mad[emois]elle Heinefetter are probably quite true, but they cannot be proved by a doctor.”24 An unsigned letter from March 13 [probably 1842] reports a visit by an Academy doctor to Heinefetter’s residence in which the patient was “in bed and affected by laryngeal angina”. The physician “hope[d] … that this indisposition” would not last “more than a few days” and promised to examine her again the next day and inform Pillet about her condition.25 The last letter from an Academy doctor to Pillet is from March 29, 1842, when a physician who had gone to Heinefetter’s residence “according to the invitation of Monsieur the Director” did not find the singer at home.26 It is perhaps for this reason that yet another medical affidavit is in the singer’s file. On April 2, a Doctor Trigeu “certifie[d]” that “M[ademois]elle Catinka Heinefetter has been suffering from a bronchial irritation which has kept her in her room for this time.” Trigeu does not appear in any of the other correspondence, and he does not say anything about working for the Academy or visiting Heinefetter at the request of the director. He simply identifies himself as a “doctor in medccccccc 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

Couche-Dugera to Pillet, 21 November 1840. Couche-Dugera to Pillet, 21 January 1841. Couche-Dugera to Pillet, 3 April 1841. Unsigned letter from a doctor for the Académie Royale de Musique to Pillet, 13 March [no year]. I believe this letter is from 1842, in part because it is in the same file folder as other letters from Spring 1842, but also because on March 11, 1841, Heinefetter’s principal worry was doubling for Rosine Stoltz, and she does not mention anything about a sore throat in that letter or in the one she wrote on March 15, 1841. Couche-Dugera to Pillet, 29 March 1842.

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icine at the faculty of Paris”, and appears to be Heinefetter’s defense against the director’s suspicions about the reality of her indispositions.27 Whether she was requesting more time to prepare her roles or delaying performances for health reasons, Heinefetter seems to have enjoyed considerable control over her schedule, despite the director’s attempted interventions. In addition, her file reveals a concern on her part over audience reception. On April 4, 1841, she wrote to Pillet, “In exchange for my complaisance for the interests of the administration, I should obtain some applause from the claque that has up to this point remained inactive for me.”28 On another occasion Heinefetter expressed concerned about her claque, i.e., the spectators who were paid (or at least given free tickets) in exchange for applauding enthusiastically. In an undated letter to Pillet, she verified that she was to receive eighty free tickets for a concert.29 Some of these tickets may have been for family and friends, but it is likely that others were for a claque. Her brother, who according to Heinefetter lived “in Paris with me”, may have helped round up supporters; as early as January 26, 1841, she requested an “entrée permanente” to the opera for him.30 Furthermore, Heinefetter was concerned about comparisons between herself and other singers. In a letter of March 11, 1841, Heinefetter complained that she had been assigned to double for Rosine Stoltz, who was five or six years her senior, in Der Freischütz. This was not the first time she had been required to double for another singer. As she indicated in her letter, she had submitted to this task several times before, but now she felt “very humiliated” by the assignment and wrote, “I would prefer to break or terminate my contract than to be used in this manner.”31 I cannot determine whether Pillet gave in to this threat, but in any event Heinefetter remained at the Opera for more than a year afterward. In all, the records of Catinka Heinefetter’s tenure at the Paris Opera reveal a young woman who tested the limits of her director’s malleability, who was not shy about making requests and launching complaints, and who understood her value to the institution for which she worked. But what, if anything, is Jewish about her story? To begin with, was Gautier correct in reporting that Heinefetter was a juive? This is impossible to determine with certainty, but the evidence suggests a strong probability that the singer was Jewish. In addition to Gautier’s attribution, there is an article on Catinka’s sister Clara Heinefetter (later Stöckl-Heinefetter) in the Jüdischer Plutarch, a “biographical lexicon of the most famous men and women of Jeccccccc 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Trigeu to Pillet, 2 April 1842. Heinefetter to Pillet, 4 April 1841. Heinefetter to Pillet, undated. Heinefetter to Pillet, 26 January 1841. Heinefetter to Pillet, 11 March 1841.

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wish origin”, which appeared in Vienna in 1848.32 As a German-language book focusing on the Habsburg Empire, it seems unlikely that the Jüdischer Plutarch would have been influenced by Gautier’s Parisian newspaper article of 1841 on the singer’s sister. Later sources such as the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906-7) and the German-language Encyclopaedia Judaica (1928-33) also listed the Heinefetter sisters, as did the anti-Semitic agitator Theodor Fritsch in his Handbuch der Judenfrage (1933 edition).33 Thus if they were not Jewish, they were identified as such by friend and foe over the course of several generations. Another document is worth examining when considering the question of Catinka Heinefetter’s Jewishness. On January 7, 1841, the singer wrote to Gautier, “Monsieur, it is with true regret that I see myself forced to postpone the visit that I meant to have the advantage of paying you one of these days. But the bad weather has forced me to take precautions which are all the greater since my debuts have not ended; and it is after this period [of the debuts] that I will be able to fulfill this duty [of meeting you], whatever the weather.”34 According to the editor of Gautier’s correspondence, Heinefetter “could have read the review of her debut in the newspaper of T[héophile] G[autier] that morning” before writing to the author. It seems practically certain that her letter was a reaction to the review, since no other letters between Heinefetter and Gautier are known to have been written, and it would be highly coincidental if Heinefetter had written this single letter before (or without) having read Gautier’s review. The letter suggests that the singer was displeased with the review, hence the “postponement” of a meeting that no one had actually scheduled. Any number of elements of the review might have provoked the cold response: Gautier’s focus on the singer’s large hands (and suspected big feet), his judgment regarding her “capricious and inconstant” voice, or his remarks about her Jewishness and Jewish fans. Revealingly, however, she did not contradict him on any of his points. Perhaps she did have large hands and feet. Perhaps she knew she had to work on her voice. (Gautier was not alone in criticizing her singing. Berlioz judged Catinka Heinefetter similarly.35) And perhaps it went without saying that she was Jewish. ccccccc 32.

33.

34. 35.

Jüdischer Plutarch; oder biographisches Lexicon der markantesten Männer und Frauen jüdischer Abkunft, (aller Stände, Zeiten und Länder) mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das österreichische Kaiserthum. Von mehereren jüdischen und nichtjüdischen, in- und ausländischen Schriftstellern (Vienna, 1848), 76-85. Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1906-7), s.v. “Heinefetter, Klara (Madame Stöckl)”, and “Heinefetter, Sabine”; Encyclopaedia Judaica (Berlin, 1928-33), s.v. “Heinefetter”; and Theodor Fritsch, Handbuch der Judenfrage: Die wichtigsten Tatsachen zur Beurteilung des jüdischen Volkes (Leipzig: HammerVerlag, 1933), 333. There is no reference to the Heinefetter sisters in the 1907 edition of the Handbuch. Catinka Heinefetter to Théophile Gautier, [January 7, 1841], in Gautier, Correspondance générale, ed. Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre (Geneva: Droz, 1985), vol. 1, no. 233, 232. Hector Berlioz, “Fräulein Heinefetter als Debütantin in der ‘Jüdin’ [von Halévy]”, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 14, no. 19 (5 March 1841), 76-77.

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Indeed, there is reason to believe that being Jewish (or at least being reputedly Jewish) helped rather than hindered Heinefetter’s career. Specifically, the stereotypical category of the belle juive helped to constitute Heinefetter as physically attractive. This cliché was the product of centuries of cultural work. From Shylock’s daughter Jessica in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to Isaac’s daughter Rebecca in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (a bestseller in France as well as the English-speaking world), Jewish women and girls in European culture had long been represented as beautiful.36 Indeed, the opera La Juive, which had premiered in 1835, was only the latest manifestation of a longstanding European taste for representations of Jewish women. The product of a Jewish composer, Fromenthal Halévy (1799-1862), and a Gentile librettist, Eugène Scribe (1791-1861), La Juive was one of the most popular operas of nineteenth-century France. It kept the Paris Opera afloat during hard times and effectively subsidized the company’s flops.37 The lure of the exotic female characterized orientalist fantasies of varying types and did not automatically involve Jewish women. Yet unlike the alluring Arab, Turkish, or Persian women of popular literature and painting, actual Jewish women were available to sing on European stages.38 The stereotype of the belle juive rendered them beautiful almost by definition. It was important for female opera singers to be beautiful. One popular illustrated book of 1845, edited by Gautier and other critics, bore the title Les beautés de l’opéra. The publication featured full-page prints of ten “beauties” who had starred in operas or ballets.39 Prime donne were prized mistresses of fashionable men who showered them with expensive gifts and acted as informal but influential publicity agents. Numerous men vied for Heinefetter herself. Less than two weeks after her debut, a lieutenant-general in the artillery requested permission from Pillet to have the singer in his “salon … at night” on January 23, 1841. The officer concluded his request frankly with advance “thanks for being so obliging in acceding to my desires.”40 While there is no way of knowing whether any intimacy ensued between ccccccc 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

On the image of the “Jewess” in European literature, see Luce A. Klein, Portrait de la Juive dans la littérature française (Paris: Nizet, 1970); Florian Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin: jüdische Frauengestalten in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993); and Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Diana Hallman, The French Grand Opera La Juive (1835): A Socio-Historical Study (PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1995), 1-4. On the role of orientalism in paintings of Jewish women, see Carol Ockman, “‘Two Large Eyebrows à l’Orientale’: Ethnic Stereotyping in Ingres’s Baronne De Rothschild”, Art History 14 (December 1991), 521-39. Marie Lathers has shown that Jewish women worked as artists’ models in nineteenthcentury Paris. Marie Lathers, “Posing the ‘Belle Juive’: Jewish Models in 19th-Century Paris”, Woman’s Art Journal 21 (Spring-Summer 2000), 27-32. Théophile Gautier, Jules Gabriel Janin, and Philarète Chasles, eds., Les beautés de l’opéra, ou, Chefsd’oeuvre lyriques (Paris, 1845). Lt. Gen. Bonet Duchannes [sp?] to Pillet, 16 January 1841. Whether the officer’s “desires” were ful-

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the singer and the soldier, Heinefetter definitely had lovers subsequently. Indeed, in what became a cause célèbre, in September 1842 two of Heinefetter’s lovers engaged in a duel in Brussels in which one rival killed the other.41 As a beautiful woman, Heinefetter was valuable to the Paris Opera. As a belle juive, she was more valuable still. In part, her desirability stemmed from the success of one particular opera, La Juive, though one could just as easily argue that Heinefetter’s Jewishness fueled the success of Halévy’s opera. It is not an accident that the director gave Heinefetter the role of Rachel for her debut. Gautier was no doubt not the only observer to find a juive convincing in the title role of La Juive. It is also not an accident that the first star of La Juive in 1835 was a woman reputed to be Jewish, Cornélie Falcon. Let us recall Gautier’s claim: “[s]ince Mademoiselle [Cornélie] Falcon, no one has represented the beautiful Jewess Rachel with a more satisfying and realistic physical appearance, and this for the excellent reason that Mademoiselle Heinefetter is a Jewess herself and very beautiful.” Just two months later, Gautier reaffirmed Falcon’s Jewishness, writing of the singer, who had given a recital in Paris, “She is as beautiful as ever. There are still the large, passionately dark eyes, the warm Jewish pallor (la chaude pâleur juive) … the abundant and superb hair…”42 Moreover, in 1842, according to the Archives Israélites, the principal Jewish periodical of the day, “everyone knows that M. Halévy, her [Falcon’s] coreligionist, wrote the role of Rachel, of La Juive, for this famous cantatrice.” And twenty years later, in an obituary for Halévy, readers were reminded that La Juive was a “Jewish subject, written by a Jew and having a Jewess as the first interpreter of its main role.”43 Other women whom contemporaries identified as Jewish sang the role of Rachel. Claire-Célestine Nathan-Treillet (1815-73) debuted in La Juive on May 24, 1839. In 1842, the Archives Israélites boasted of her “uncontested” reputation, though Berlioz complained in a letter to his father that the singer was “très médiocre” and ccccccc

41.

42. 43.

filled is unknown, though two days before the rendezvous, according to the Academy doctors, Heinefetter was suffering from menstrual pain. Couche-Dugera to Pillet, 21 January 1841. “Bruxelles, appartements de Kathinka Heinefetter: meurtre de Sirey par Caumartin”, in La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris 9, no. 48 (November 27, 1842), 471; “Madlle. Cathinka Heinefetter [Witness to a Fatal Stabbing]”, in The Musical World 17, no. 51, [December 22,] 1842, 410-11; “A Romance of Musical Life”, in The Musical Examiner, August 26, 1843, 317-20; Affaire Caumartin. Accusation d’homicide volontaire sur la personne d’Aimé Sirey [extract from the journal Observateur des tribunaux 9] (Paris, 1843); Der Process Caumartin - Sirey - Heinefetter (Leipzig, 1843); and Armand Fouquier, Causes célèbres de tous les peuples (Paris, 1859), vol. 2, no. 39, 1-20. Théophile Gautier, “18 mars. Porte-Saint-Martin”, in Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans (Paris, 1859), vol. 2, 40. Archives Israélites 3 (1842): 234-36; and vol. 23 (1862): 188. On Falcon’s Jewishness, see also Cormac Newark, “Ceremony, Celebration, and Spectacle in La Juive”, in Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848, ed. Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 162.

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insisted, using a pejorative for the Jewish community, that she owed her fame to “la Juiverie”.44 When she died in 1873, the Belgian periodical Le Guide Musical reported that she had been born “to Israelite parents”.45 The Archives Israélites also claimed Elise Julian Van Gelder, who in 1841 alternated with Heinefetter in the principal role of La Juive, as a member of the community. Other Jewish women who sang the role of Rachel were Auguste Iffla, who performed at the Bordeaux Opera, and Palmyre Wertheimber, who starred at the Paris Opera in the 1850s.46 Strikingly, in the decade following the premiere of La Juive, it appears that one of the few Rachels in the Paris Opera who was not Jewish was Rosine Stoltz. According to musicologist Mary Ann Smart, however, Stoltz “is said to have fabricated a Jewish background for herself.”47 It is possible that the singer envied her colleagues’ (and competitors’) Jewishness and therefore appropriated this identity for herself. Of course, La Juive was not the only opera mounted in July Monarchy Paris, though it was arguably the most successful. Factors beyond the verisimilitude of a Jewish Rachel account for the striking number of female Jewish opera stars. Specifically, in the field of music in the nineteenth century, Jews had quickly found a niche in the larger gentile society.48 Among composers, the most famous examples were Halévy and Meyerbeer, in whose operas Jewish women were frequently cast. Moreover, the field of theatrical performance, including operatic performance, furnished numerous opportunities for Jews. The stage served as a ready outlet for Jewish talent in part because it was already a socially suspect place and therefore not as fiercely guarded by gentiles as other professions. Indeed, during the French Revolution the same legislative body that emancipated the Jews debated the national status of actors, whose profession enjoyed a dubious reputation and who were only emancipated after debate.49 Paradoxically, the Jewish community itself seems to have been ambivalent about ccccccc 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

Hector Berlioz, Correspondance générale, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Flammarion, 1972), vol. 2, 553, cited in Jean-Louis Tamvaco, Les cancans de l’Opéra: Le journal d’une habilleuse 1836-1848 (Paris: CNRS Editions 2000), vol. 2, 1128n; and Archives Israélites 3 (1842): 234-36. “Necrologie”, Le Guide musical: Revue hebdomadaire des nouvelles musicales de la Belgique et de l’étranger, August 21-28, 1873. According to a recent biographer of Halévy, Nathan-Treillet “like Mlle. Falcon was Jewish”. Ruth Jordan, Fromental Halévy: His Life and Music (London: Kahn & Averill 1994), 69. On Iffla and Van Gelder, see Archives Israélites 3 (1842): 234-36. On Wertheimber, see vol. 12 (1851): 445 and vol. 16 (1855): 237. On Wertheimber’s Jewishness, see also Nahida Ruth Lazarus, Das jüdische Weib (Berlin, 1896), 260. Mary Ann Smart, “The Lost Voice of Rosine Stoltz”, in Cambridge Opera Journal 6 (March 1994): 37n. Sander L. Gilman, “Are Jews Musical? Historical Notes on the Question of Jewish Musical Modernism and Nationalism”, Modern Judaism 28 (October 2008): 239-56. See my Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 161-62.

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female theater and opera stars. The editors of the Archives Israélites reported on the successes of fellow Jews in all kinds of endeavors, including theatrical and musical achievements. But they scrutinized the morality and religiosity of Jewish stars. Thus their first article about the enormously successful actress Rachel Félix begins by noting with distaste that one of her performances at the Théâtre Francais in 1840 took place on Yom Kippur.50 The following year Mademoiselle Rachel was back in favor because she took part in the Rosh Hashanah services at the principal Parisian synagogue, where “her presence made a great impression”.51 In 1843, the editors criticized the Jewish piano virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles for holding a musical soirée in his home on Yom Kippur, and they praised Rachel for refusing to perform there.52 That same year they proudly reported that Rachel gave charity to a poor Jewish family in Lyon.53 Heinefetter is absent from the pages of the Archives Israélites, a gap that might be explained by the embarrassment of the much-publicized scandal surrounding her dueling lovers in 1842. Still, in 1840 and 1841 the singer suggested on more than one occasion that she had influential Jewish friends. For example, in her first letter to Pillet, while requesting a postponement of her debut, Catinka added that Baron Solomon de Rothschild could vouch for the understanding she had with Duponchel, the production manager, about when she would be ready to go on stage. Whether she was bluffing or not, few names could have been more intimidating in Paris in 1840 than that of the famous Jewish banking family.54 As a “Jewess”, Heinefetter may have felt that her richest coreligionist was a natural ally in her contest with her director. Similarly, when requesting her claque, she informed Pillet that “Monsieur Halévy” had assured her that she would have many enthusiastic fans.55 Of course, Halévy was the composer of La Juive, but he was also a prominent member of the Jewish community. A young Jewish woman new to Paris might easily have imagined the eminent Jewish man to be a source of support, especially as he shared her professional interests, and dropping his name might have been designed to give the director the impression that he was negotiating with an entire people, not simply Catinka Heinefetter. Such patronage would not have been unusual. The previous year, Adolphe Crémieux, the prominent Jewish lawyer and statesman, had sent a letter to Pillet requesting more time for his coreligionist Mlle. Nathan-Treillet (also eventually a Rachel in La Juive) to prepare for her debut.56

ccccccc 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Archives Israélites 1 (1840): 564-65. Archives Israélites 2 (1841): 586. Archives Israélites 4 (1843): 657. Archives Israélites 4 (1843): 458. Heinefetter to Pillet, 26 October 1840. Heinefetter to Pillet, undated. Adolphe Crémieux to Charles Duponchel, 11 May [1839], in “Treilhet-Nathan [sic] (Mad)”, AJ 13 195, Archives Nationales, Paris.

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Similarly, on January 26, 1841, Heinefetter asked Pillet to “facilitate my entry” to the theater in Paris where Rachel Félix was performing the title role in Marie Stuart (by Pierre Le Brun). The performance was that same day, but Heinefetter reasoned that “you will think, as I do, Monsieur, that there will be good lessons for me to take in studying this charming tragedienne.” While there is no doubt that Heinefetter wanted to see the great Mlle. Rachel on stage, she may also have felt an identification with a fellow “Jewess”, and she may have been trying to remind Pillet of the immense success of one female Jewish performer and the possibility that he had a Rachel of his own. After all, Heinefetter sang the role of the belle juive Rachel.57 Even if Gautier and others were wrong to identify Heinefetter as Jewish and the singer herself was simply calculating her advantage when she refrained from denying the writer’s claim, her proximity to Jewish composers and performers and the inescapable association of her name to Rachels both fictional and real made her Jewish in the eyes of her spectators, and this perception took on a reality of its own. It influenced Gautier’s interpretation of her cultural meaning. It increased Heinefetter’s value to culture brokers such as Pillet. It situated the diva in a small but highly visible and privileged sorority of Jewish opera stars, and it reinforced the impression that theater and music were particularly Jewish vocations.

ccccccc 57.

Heinefetter to Pillet, 26 January 1841.

David J. Wertheim

The Political Significance of Anne Frank On Crossing Boundaries and Defining Them

The cutting down of distinctive trees often ignites passionate communal protest, but it rarely occurs that such protests make international headlines. That, however, was the case in September 2007 when the cutting down of a 150-year-old diseased chestnut tree was due. But this was not an ordinary distinctive tree; this was the very same chestnut that had been seen by Anne Frank from the attic window of her hideout during the years of the Second World War. She even dedicated a few lines to it in her famous diary: From my favourite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops glisten like silver, and the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind.1

The so-called “Anne Frank Tree” was supposed to be cut down because a grave illness had weakened it and it therefore posed a hazard to neighboring houses. While news crews from all over the world eagerly awaited the anticipated spectacle of chainsaws hitting a living relic of Anne Frank’s years in hiding, a Dutch judge decided however that cutting down the tree had to be postponed for a number of months to make it possible to search for alternative solutions that could preserve the tree. In the end, it was decided to rescue the tree by building an iron construction around it so that it may stand for another five to fifteen years, even if most of it will consist of dead wood by then.2 The worldwide coverage of the tree has been going on ever since it was clear that the tree has a fatal disease. In 2006, the Anne Frank Foundation made use of the tree’s popularity and launched a six-language website that represents a virtual Anne Frank tree.3 Any visitor to the Anne Frank House, as well as any visitor to the website, can leave a virtual leaf on the site with a message inspired by Anne Frank. ccccccc 1. 2. 3.

Gerrold van der Stroom and David Barnouw, eds., The Diary of Anne Frank, The Revised Critical Edition (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 519. Not long before publication of these proceedings on August 23rd 2010, a storm blew down the tree, in spite of the iron construction. Anne Frank Tree: An Interactive Monument, www.annefranktree.com (referenced 25 May 2010).

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David J. Wertheim Work on the iron construction of the Anne Frank tree. From: www.nu.nl.

Each of the two hundred “Anne Frank” schools may even add a virtual chestnut. Leaves and chestnuts may be made up of texts in any language, but also of drawings or photographs. The idea was that all these leaves together will create a huge virtual tree that cannot die and never needs to be cut down. A so-called “community website”, it also aims at creating a transnational community centered on the memory of Anne Frank. As a major Dutch newspaper put it, through the website “Anne Frank connects the world”.4 The British actress Emma Thompson, who inaugurated the virtual tree, also underlined this transgressing of borders, pointing out in her speech that Anne Frank “would have tried to storm the invisible barriers that separate human beings and keep us in such conflict”.5

ccccccc 4. 5.

“Website Anne Frank verbindt de Wereld”, Telegraaf online, www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland, 2 January 2006 (referenced 2 December 2008). “Emma Thompson placed the first leaf in the Anne Frank Tree”, Anne Frank Tree: An Interactive

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The Anne Frank tree has, however, also been put to a very different use. In 1957 the Jewish National Fund (JNF) decided to plant an entire forest of trees in memory of Anne Frank and flew two cuttings from the chestnut tree at the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam to Israel.6 Far from signifying a universalist hope in the goodness of mankind, these new trees symbolized the more nationalist convictions of Zionism. It can even be said that here the use of Anne Frank to define borders materialized into an actual geographical border between countries. Together with other JNF forests, it became part of the renowned green line that separated Jordan from Israel. As part of this green line, these trees were highly invested with a symbolism that was all about defining the strength of the Jewish state. By planting trees, the desert was “made green”, and they thus contributed to a central element of the territorial claim of the young Jewish state, which held that the Jews deserved their ancient soil as they were the only ones to take care of it. The trees furthermore symbolized the national rebirth of the Jewish ancestral land. Naming the forest after Anne Frank heightened this symbolism even more. It not only added to it the argument that anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish persecutions had made Jewish independence a pressing necessity; it also reinforced further the notion of rebirth. As a living remembrance to Anne Frank, the trees symbolized new life that had come out of Anne Frank’s death. These differences in the way Anne Frank’s tree was given significance reveal that Anne Frank’s legacy was used in different and even opposing ways, especially seen from the perspective of boundaries. In this paper I want to discuss the topic of borders and boundaries by further exploring this paradox. I will question the conviction of the official custodians of Anne Frank’s legacy (in particular Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank, and the Anne Frank Foundation) that the diary of Anne Frank possessed the power to bring people together, to promote tolerance, and thus to overcome boundaries, by showing that this conviction was regularly challenged, usually by a nonauthorized remembrance of the diary. Such remembrances employed the diary to distinguish “us” and “them”, to define communities, and therefore to bring about the very opposite of overcoming boundaries: setting them. I will then proceed with a discussion of the diary itself that is intended to show that there are elements present in the diary itself that validate such nonauthorized remembrances and that the opinion that the diary has the power to unite people does not do justice to it. The universalistic claim that the significance of the diary of Anne Frank lies in its power to destroy barriers originates largely in the views of Anne Frank’s father, ccccccc

6.

Monument, www.annefranktree.com/Story.aspx?themeid=0&storyid=46, 2 January 2006 (referenced 25 May 2010). Anna G. Steenmeijer, ed., Weerklank van Anne Frank (Amsterdam: CPNB, 1970), 99, 119; “Stekjes voor het Anne Frank bos”, Trouw, 2 May 1958.

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Otto Frank, the only survivor of the group hiding in the Secret Annexe. A former German army lieutenant, a Jew, and a businessman, Otto Frank had been a member of strongly defined national communities as well as of more loosely defined cosmopolitan populations. When the National Socialists took over in his native Germany, he experienced firsthand the ruthless consequences of national and religious exclusion. As a Jew, he was excluded from society and had to escape to the Netherlands, until the Nazis occupied it. Then again he had to escape from his former countrymen, this time into hiding. He experienced the help of the Dutch while also experiencing their collaboration. His experiences left him with a drive to change the world, to create more understanding among the different nations, and to tear down ethnic, national, or other boundaries. He also firmly believed his daughter Anne’s memory could and had to be used to do so. When the success of the diary of his daughter resulted in plans to make the hiding place at the Prinsengracht into a museum, it was this message he believed the museum should convey. He therefore made sure that the newly founded Anne Frank Foundation would not only set up a museum at Prinsengracht 236 but also establish an international Youth Centre, which he believed would help the world’s youth to form a common bond and strive together for peace in his daughter’s name.7 Young people from different countries would meet each other there, debate on issues such as discrimination, war, and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and thus help with the reconciliation of the division among nations left by the ordeal of the Second World War, all in memory of Anne Frank. The Youth Centre did not survive long. But the Anne Frank Foundation continued with its internationalist mission. What it is most known for in the Netherlands at present is the research it does to monitor prejudice and racism and its work to promote tolerance. Another of its activities is touring the world with a travelling exhibition on Anne Frank, often with the explicit purpose of reconciling parties that have been involved in violent conflicts and wars, such as in South Africa or Bosnia. But it is not only the Anne Frank Foundation that has seen the diary of Anne Frank in this light. There are many more examples of the use of Anne Frank in efforts to tear down boundaries between people. This idea was for instance behind the project of the Freedom Writers in the United States. In this project, an American high school teacher taught her students from different ethnic minorities who had grown up in tough neighborhoods full of gang rivalry in Long Beach, California to put an end to racial divisiveness at their school and to be tolerant by having them write diaries in the spirit with which Anne Frank had written hers. The project received much media attention, it resulted in a book, and eventually a Hollyccccccc 7.

Carol Ann Lee, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank (London: Viking, 2002), 260; Steenmeijer, ed., Weerklank van Anne Frank, 114-18.

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wood movie was also made about these schoolchildren.8 On a more official level, this conviction also led the United Nations to adopt a special “Anne Frank declaration” against prejudice and bigotry in 1999, signed by the Secretary-General and many world leaders, including Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Nelson Mandela.9 But, as we have seen with the Anne Frank forest, her memory’s power cannot be confined to the ability to reconcile and to tear down boundaries. We should also recognize that her memory has worked for the opposite endeavor of drawing and fixing boundaries. Of this too, there are more examples than that of the trees in the Israeli forest. Whereas the project of attributing a universalist message to Anne Frank originated in the ideals of Otto Frank, the belief that Anne Frank represented a particularistic message originated mostly in the reading of Anne Frank by Meyer Levin, Otto Frank’s representative in the United States. Levin was an American Jewish author and a former war correspondent who witnessed the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. His engagement with the diary of Anne Frank began when he read the French translation of the diary of Anne Frank in 1950 and became convinced that this book could help make the world aware of what had happened to the Jews during Hitler’s reign.10 After having sought contact with Otto Frank, offering to help promote the diary in the United States, he wrote a number of favorable reviews of the English translation and initiated the adaptation of the diary for the theater, writing the first play based upon the diary. Otto Frank, however, decided to reject his play in favor of another play written by the Hollywood writing couple Frances Goodrich and Alfred Hackett. The rejection of Levin’s play caused a break in the cooperation between Levin and Otto Frank and marked the beginning of a long struggle between the two men. Their dispute eventually ended in court with a lawsuit for plagiarism. At the heart of it, however, stood an important ideological issue. The reason Otto Frank preferred a play written by Frances Goodrich and Alfred Hackett over Levin’s play was that he believed the play by Levin was not universal enough. In this new play, everything had been done to make the story of Anne Frank accessible to as large an audience as possible. This meant in particular that – in line with Otto Frank’s universalist ideals – Goodrich and Hackett took out certain Jewish elements to make identification for non-Jewish audiences easier. The line “We’re not the only Jews that had to suffer”11 was changed into “We’re not the only people that had to suffer”, Hanukkah prayers were translated into English, and Anne Frank’s universalist message – her words: “In spite of everything, I still believe ccccccc 8. 9. 10. 11.

The Freedom Writers with Erin Gruwell, The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them (New York: Doubleday, 1999). Anne Frank Trust UK, www.annefrank.org.uk/node/64 (referenced 2 December 2008). Lee, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, 1. Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and The Diary (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 89.

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that people are really good at heart” – became the plot of the play, at the expense of other statements pertaining more exclusively to her Jewishness.12 Levin deplored this universalization of what he believed was essentially a Jewish document.13 He accused Otto Frank, not very subtly, of “killing” the diary and of “betrayal of his daughter’s words”.14 The play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, he held, was bound to fail, if only for the reason that these authors were not Jews.15 He believed his own interpretation of the diary did more justice to the Jewish aspects of it. It would be unjust to describe Levin’s play as made solely to strengthen Jewish identity, to fix boundaries of Judaism. It did not convey an unambiguous message but rather raised questions. These questions, however, were classic Jewish questions. They dealt with topics such as the desirability of assimilation, Zionism, and the importance of Jewish religion – questions which Goodrich and Hackett had hardly touched upon. In a special radio program commissioned by the American Jewish Committee and broadcasted in 1952, he had even explained to listeners why certain passages of the diary were relevant to the important Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and the ten days of penitence in between. In the end, groups concerned with strengthening Jewish identity were the ones most favorable to his play. Levin enlisted a number of rabbis to provide – as he put it – an ethical voice in his fight with Otto Frank.16 When in 1966 Levin finally managed to have his play performed, the group that was found willing to risk such a nonauthorized performance was significantly the Israeli army theater. It tells much that an organization whose primary task was the protection of borders considered staging the Levin play to be part of its responsibilities. Besides Levin’s initial challenge to Otto Frank’s reading of his daughter’s diary, the memory of Anne Frank has proven useful as well to many others occupied with the endeavor of defining borders. These may be borders that have nothing or little to do with Judaism. Many different nations and communities in search of legitimization of their existence and ideologies have often viewed Anne Frank as a suitable icon to identify with and distinguish themselves from other nations or regimes. Although in these cases lip service is often paid to the universalism of Anne Frank, the ultimate reason people refer to her is particularist. A good example is Yasser Arafat’s 1998 visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. As the belief that the diary of Anne Frank needed to be used to destroy boundaries was the raison d’être of the foundation, it could hardly refuse Arafat entrance. But whereas Arafat’s ccccccc 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank in Two Acts (London: French, 1992). Lee, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, 213. Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank, 81,149. Ibid., 53. Meyer Levin, “Anne Frank: A Play”, photocopy of unpublished manuscript, ned. 9. 841, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, Amsterdam, 7.

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Yasser Arafat’s visit to the Anne Frank House. From: www.annefrank.org.

visit could be (and was) interpreted by some as a gesture of good will, to show that he took an interest in Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, it could also be interpreted as provokingly aimed at comparing Anne Frank’s suffering with the fate of the Palestinians – an argument that a number of advocates of the Palestinian cause have made.17 Arafat was diplomatic enough to leave the point unclear. But whatever his immediate objectives may have been, his main goal was always the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, the project of obtaining national borders for his people. The fact that he entered the museum wearing his habitual military uniform suggests that he indeed entered the museum in that spirit. There also exists a long tradition in communism of appropriating Anne Frank and using her memory to state its superiority over Western capitalist society. A good example of this trend is a movie made in the German Democratic Republic in 1958 called Ein Tagebuch für Anne Frank that used candid camera techniques to show how former Nazis still lived in big houses in Western Germany. It called itself a memorial to Anne Frank and argued in her name that “The ‘democratic’ system in West Germany is the old system under a new mask.”18 ccccccc 17. 18.

Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Anne Frank and the Future of Holocaust Memory, Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture (Washington 2005), 16. David Barnouw, Anne Frank voor beginners en gevorderden (Den Haag: Sdu Uitgevers, 1998), 55-58; Lee, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, 251.

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Another interesting case is the exhibition on Anne Frank that the Anne Frank Foundation took to East Berlin in 1989. It is remarkable that the exhibition preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall by only a few months – the seminal case of the tearing down of ideological boundaries. Creating mutual understanding between East and West was surely one of the aims of the Anne Frank Foundation. However, in East Germany, the exhibition was – against the wishes of the Anne Frank Foundation – also used as an opportunity to stress the superiority of communist society. This was done particularly by pointing out the attention the exhibition paid to the rise of the extreme right in the West. The official socialist party newspaper Neues Deutschland reported how in private conversations someone from the Anne Frank Foundation had testified that “there is no basis in this state for discrimination and hate of foreigners” and that documents in the exhibition showed that “the German Workers Movement always successfully fought anti-Semitism and racial hatred”, and that this “legacy still lived on within the German Democratic Republic”.19 Comparable but more extreme is the case of North Korea. The diary was translated and published there with the approval of the Anne Frank Fund, which holds the copyrights to the diary, in the hope that the power believed to be present in the diary to tear down boundaries would do its work there as well. Instead the diary was used by the North Korean authorities to justify their isolationist policy and their animosity towards the United States. When a Dutch television crew was admitted into North Korea specifically to film the reception of the diary of Anne Frank, it discovered how the North Korean government used the diary to teach children the evil of the United States and their president George Bush. It filmed children saying, “After reading this book, I had a hatred for the American Imperialists” or “That warmonger Bush is just as bad as Hitler. Because of him we will always live in fear of war.”20 In such remarks, little remained of the universalistic ideals believed by Otto Frank and others to be present in the diary. We have seen that Anne Frank’s memory has been viewed as enabling a message of universalism, of tearing down boundaries, whilst at the same time it cannot be denied that her memory also has been put to use in the establishment and reinforcement of borders. This brings us to the question of what it has been about Anne Frank’s iconization that made the combination of such opposing views possible. To begin to answer this question, we should establish that the subject of borders and

ccccccc 19.

20.

“Andenken an Anne Frank in unseren Herzen und Taten”, Neues Deutschland, 8/9 July 1989; see also “Besucher-Fachblatt ‘Die Welt der Anne Frank,’” in the clippings archive of the Anne Frank Foundation, Amsterdam. “Nova in Noord Korea”, Nova den Haag Vandaag, www.novatv.nl/page/detail/nieuws/392/NOVA+ in+Noord-Korea, 3 October 2003 (referenced 25 May 2010); “If Anne Frank Only Knew”, CBS 60 Minutes, 26 February 2004, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/26/60minutes/main602415.shtml (referenced 26 February 2004).

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boundaries separating people in a variety of ways is indeed one of the diary’s main themes. Anne Frank often used her diary to reflect on the issue of boundaries in many different ways. In particular, she wrote about three kinds of boundaries: First of all, the boundary that stood between Jews and non-Jews. Her descriptions of anti-Jewish measures, of fears about what was happening to deported Jews,21 and of rising anti-Semitism in Dutch society, but also of emerging Zionist consciousness22 make this issue a constant background to the diary. The passages where she reflects on the existence and the inevitability of the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews have become some of its most celebrated passages. On November 8, 1943, for example, Anne Frank finds words for her confinement, writing, “Now we are so surrounded by danger and darkness that we bump against each other, as we search desperately for a means of escape. We all look down below, where people are fighting each other, we look above, where it is quiet and beautiful, and meanwhile we are cut off by the great dark mass, which will not let us go upwards, but which stands before us as an impenetrable wall: it tries to crush us, but cannot do so yet. I can only cry and implore: ‘Oh, if only the black circle could recede and open the way for us!’”23 In many passages Anne Frank condemns these boundaries, questioning their legitimacy, for example when she writes, “Surely the time will come when we are people again and not just Jews.”24 Her perhaps most famous entry too – “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart”25 – can be read as implying that people should forget about the differences separating them. These observations, although they have often been singled out as representing the core message of the diary, do not give the full picture. Ian Buruma has argued that it “was a mark of her intelligence” that “about the hard questions in life Anne Frank was ambivalent”.26 This applied most of all to the case of her dealing with the boundaries she encountered. Even if Anne Frank often questions the legitimacy of boundaries, sometimes she also justifies them. On the relationship between Jews and nonJews, she also writes for example: “In fact Germans and Jews are the greatest enemies in the world”27 or “If we bear this suffering and if there are still Jews left, then Jews instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example … We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter; we will always remain Jews, but we want to too.”28

ccccccc 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Stroom and Barnouw, The Diary of Anne Frank, 202-3. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 436. Ibid., 622. Ibid., 716. Ian Buruma, “The Afterlife of Anne Frank”, The New York Review of Books 45, no. 3 (1998). Stroom and Barnouw, The Diary of Anne Frank, 294. Ibid., 622.

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The boundaries of being a Jew were not the only boundaries Anne Frank discussed. Another important topic in her diary is the clash between youth and adulthood. First of all, this features in the overall progress of the book. Anne Frank matures in the book, and in reading it, the reader cannot but take notice of the distinctions between youth and adulthood in the change of style and the increasing maturity of Anne Frank’s reflections. But Anne Frank herself writes about this subject in so many words as well. Many of the tensions that she experiences she explains as the result of her not understanding parents or adults, or of adults not understanding her. As a child, she feels she does not understand the constant bickering of the adults in the Secret Annexe. Sometimes this makes her resort to sarcasm: “Little children such as Anne must never, under any circumstances know better than the grown-ups, however many blunders they make, and to whatever extent they allow their imaginations to run away with them.” Sometimes it makes her sad, as in the end of the diary when she quotes a sentence she has read somewhere: “For in its innermost depths youth is lonelier than old age.”29 She feels frustrated that she cannot be a young girl in her confinement. On December 24, 1943, she writes, “Would anyone, either Jew or non-Jew, understand this about me, that I am simply a young girl badly in need of some rollicking fun?”30 At other times she regrets that she is not being treated as an adult. In a letter she wrote to her father and which she copied in her diary, she wrote, “You can’t and mustn’t regard me as fourteen, for all these troubles have made me older.”31 As in dealing with the boundary between Jews and non-Jews, Anne Frank thus both embraces and rejects the boundary between youth and adulthood. A third boundary present in the diary, finally, is the boundary between the sexes. Some of the passages on this subject have also become quite famous, perhaps because of the frankness with which she wrote about them, which was quite exceptional in the years the diary was published and became a bestseller. A number of these passages never even made it into the Dutch edition. Again Anne Frank is full of ambivalence. She writes about flirtations with boys before her time in hiding, she writes openly about the changes in her body, and she confides lengthily about her infatuation with Peter van Daan. But whereas in such passages she often describes her curiosity about the biological differences between the sexes, she is also concerned with the more social side of this difference. After having kissed Peter, for example, she wonders if it is wrong to kiss without talk of marriage.32 When she reads a book about what is wrong with the “modern young girl”, she writes a lengthy de-

ccccccc 29. 30. 31. 32.

Ibid., 715. Ibid., 452. Ibid., 653. Ibid., 631.

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fense on the subject.33 At times Anne Frank reveals herself to be a genuine self-made feminist, as when she writes, “I can’t imagine that I would have to lead the same sort of life as Mummy and Mrs. van Daan and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten. I must have something besides a husband and children, something that I can devote myself to!”34 We may conclude then that the diary of Anne Frank deals with boundaries in many ways and that her dealing with the subject is always complex enough that it allows for a defense of boundaries as well as for a defense of their destruction. Other books too have such qualities, however, perhaps even every good book. But not every good book has been so politicized and instrumentalized as the diary of Anne Frank. To understand why Anne Frank’s diary has worked so well in efforts to destroy and to reinforce boundaries, we will, therefore, have to search further. We will need to ask what makes the diary of Anne Frank so distinctive. In answering that question we cannot be satisfied by only looking at the contents. Just as important is the fact that the diary is a historical document and not fiction. Even though Anne Frank’s diary has – particularly in recent years – been praised for its literary qualities,35 for all of Anne Frank’s quality as a writer, part of the appeal of the diary is that it records the unusual situation in which it was written. Harry Mulisch once emphasized this aspect, writing, “Her book … affected me for several days with a devastating emotion … But this has to do with reality, not with art. She has remained precisely one murdered girl who longed so much to live and become a writer.” Mulisch described this aspect of the appeal of the diary by designating it as a “work of art made by life itself … a ‘found object.’”36 The diary’s appeal, therefore, exists not only in the ideals and reflections of Anne Frank, but also as a testimony of her specific historical experience, and when looked at in such a way, the topic of boundaries, again, becomes inescapable. After all, the very boundaries Anne Frank wrote about also caused this historical experience. They created the situation in which this particular book was written in the first place. These boundaries were present in many ways. They were most present, of course, in the fact that the diary was written in hiding. Anne Frank wrote it as a persecuted Jew who was locked up for her own safety. The walls and windows of the Secret Annexe were the most concrete boundary imaginable. As a German Jew in Nazi occupied Amsterdam, Anne Frank knew well that the walls confining her stood for the boundary between

ccccccc 33. 34. 35.

36.

Ibid., 711. Ibid., 609. For example: Gerrold van de Stroom, “Anne Frank: ‘En die vriendin heet Kitty’”, in De vele gezichten van Anne Frank, ed. Gerrold van de Stroom, 254-63; or Marc Chavannes, “Anne Frank, schrijfster”, in Van de Stroom, De vele gezichten van Anne Frank, 271-79 (Amsterdam: De Prom, 2003). Harry Mulisch, “Death and the Maiden”, in Anne Frank: Reflections of Her Life and Legacy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 96.

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Jews and non-Jews. This boundary was present enough for her as well. She had enemies in the German occupiers and their Dutch collaborators, and friends in the Dutch helpers. But the particularity of her situation was also in her age. She was a teenager, moving from youth to adulthood, transforming from a girl into a woman. These experiences were all intensified by the experience of hiding, since that entailed having to live together closely with her parents, her sister, another family, and another man while she herself was the youngest person in the house. The fact that she was forced to live so close to all these people must have made her experiences much more intense than those of other teenagers her age, especially when it came to her experiences of boundaries between people, as she had no opportunity to take distance from those she had to live with. It is also important that these boundaries worked two ways. They made Anne Frank’s life miserable and eventually caused her death, but they also protected her during the time that the diary was written. In that sense, the diary is also a work about living in a safe haven, protected from the hostile world on the outside. It is this aspect of the diary which has caused some authors such as documentary maker Willy Lindwer or psychologist Bruno Bettelheim to regret that the diary has become so representative of the Jewish experience during the Second World War in Europe.37 Still, as definite as these existing boundaries were, the diary may also be seen as a single grand effort to transcend them. Critics after the war appreciated it for its purity and the fact that Anne Frank did not restrain herself from writing what she wanted. In doing so, she managed to produce a work with unmistakable literary qualities that appealed to many generations in many different parts of the world. As such, the diary also constitutes a testimony of the freedom of the mind that cannot be imprisoned even when the body is. Thus not only did Anne Frank’s entries reflect on the issue of boundaries, but the reason the diary existed in the first place has everything to do with boundaries. In both cases this presence of boundaries was equivocal. In her diary entries Anne Frank discussed their existence and the need to destroy them, but also the need to draw them. And as an object, the diary testified to the existence of boundaries in the reason it was there in the first place, as well as to the possibilities to transgress them in the openness with which it was written. Of course both aspects worked together. Anne Frank’s reflections on various boundaries originated in her personal experiences with such boundaries. What she wrote was not merely some “unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl” as she put it herself once,38 but a documentation of the experience of hiding, growing up, and becoming a woman. ccccccc 37.

38.

Bruno Bettelheim, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank”, in Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy, ed. Hyman Aaron Enzer and Sandra Solotaroff-Enzer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 185-91; Willy Lindwer, De laatste zeven maanden (Amsterdam: Bakker, 1994). Stroom and Barnouw, The Diary of Anne Frank, 200. This quote did not appear in the first English translation and is taken from version B.

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It is the combination of these two elements – the contents of the diary and the situation that created these contents – that brings us to what is in my opinion the heart of what has elevated the diary into such a unique work to so many readers and that has endowed it with its power that is behind its political uses in both fixing and crossing borders. Anyone may argue that in spite of everything people are really good at heart. But when a girl secluded from the rest of the world in fear of discovery and death writes down these words right before she is indeed discovered and killed, such words obtain to many a high moral authority. This authority does not come from the assumption that Anne Frank happened to be an exceptionally wise person. Her moral authority does not work like the moral authority of a Socrates or a Confucius. Rather than wisdom, in her case her moral authority is based upon experience: the fact that she was such a normal girl put in circumstances that were not normal, but very real nevertheless. And so are the boundaries she wrote about, as well as the way she wrote about them. What made her experience so compelling is that in spite of her will to transgress boundaries, between Jew and non-Jew, man and woman, she also discovered the need for them. Therefore using the diary only as a moral claim for the transgression of boundaries, as the official heirs of the diary have done, is always at risk of running into its darker side, the necessity of setting boundaries, which has been the hallmark of Anne Frank’s unofficial afterlife, whether it be in Israel, East Berlin, or North Korea. This article is based upon research within the project The Dynamics of Cultural Remembrance: An Intermedial Perspective, financed by the Netherlands Research Council (NWO) and the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC) of Utrecht University.

Part III Crossing Borders

Manuela Franco

The Twentieth-Century Portuguese Jews from Salonika “Oriental Jews of Portuguese Origin”

During the Second World War, Portugal was called upon to exercise its duties of protection towards the Portuguese Jews in the territories under the German Reich. Known as “Oriental Jews of Portuguese Origin”, most of these people had received Portuguese documents as a result of a 1913 decision to grant provisional nationality to a number of Ottoman Jewish families from Salonika at the time of the Balkan Wars. Thus “Oriental Jews of Portuguese Origin” became a label applied to all those Jewish subjects of the Ottoman Empire who had been issued with Portuguese papers from 1913 onwards. In the following decades, Portuguese governments tried several times unsuccessfully to rescind such titles. The result was that during World War II, Portugal was called upon to protect these nationals from the anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich and of the Vichy government and ended up allowing some three hundred to come conditionally to Portugal. The many questions raised by the files of the Second World War period led me to further research the circumstances and terms under which the First Republic had granted such certificates of nationality. It turns out that instead of just the few hundred people repatriated between 1943 and 1945, papers were originally given to some 500 families. Moreover, during the 1913-57 period, archival documents echo the difficulties that Jews were experiencing in Europe and allow us to follow the attitudes of the Portuguese authorities in a question that appears linked both to Portugal’s foreign policy and to the juridico-political conditions for granting and/or holding Portuguese nationality. 1

The Return of the “Portuguese Nation” to their First Homeland Let us now look at how the subtle web of history is woven in this story over which, and above all else, hovers the idea of a backward flow – the link to those Jews who fled the Portuguese Inquisition, the notion of “restoring justice”, the granting of

ccccccc 1.

“Portuguese nation”, “nation portugaise”, or “nação portuguesa” was an expression widely used in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards to refer to Portuguese Jews who had been forced out of Portugal.

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certificates of nationality which returned them to their “original nationality”. “Original” for some; “a myth”, others argued. We will look at how the idea of tacit consent – the issue of passports, renewal of passports, consular registration – functioned between 1912 and 1936, and how the required mention of “provisional documentation” slowly fell into disuse at a time when a passport – then as much a laissez passer as a certificate of nationality – consisted of an iffy piece of paper, usually covered with border stamps, made true by force of another identical paper obtained in the same consulate or any other. We will show how the legitimacy of nationality papers handed out in the former Ottoman territories was denied between 1936 and 1943. We will also consider the protection given by the Portuguese consulates in France and the legation in Vichy and the reluctance of the authorities in Lisbon to accept these nationals, “repatriated” in extremis and who, after the war, were encouraged to move on to other nationalities.

Creating a Portuguese Community in the Balkans Instability in the Balkans, the result of nationalist and independence aspirations, had been growing since the mid-nineteenth century and came to a head in the Balkan Wars (1912-13) during which Salonika, the Macedonian capital of Turkeyin-Europe, was annexed by the Greeks. Salonika had long been “the” Jewish city of the Ottoman Empire. Out of a population of around 150,000, there were 80,000 Jews.2 As the hub of Sephardic Judaism, Salonika had provided for four centuries a replica of life as it had been in the Iberian Peninsula under Arab rule. The Jews were second-class citizens in precisely the same way as all other non-Turks and non-Muslims. Present in all the professions, with a lively press, schools, and hospitals of their own, the Salonikaim stood as a symbol of the possibilities that existed for Jews in Europe. The community’s prosperity was the result of its secure political position, which in turn was governed by other factors such as overseas trade connections and the continued special relationship with the port’s Macedonian hinterland, almost an economic monopoly. This combination of conditions evaporated in the wake of the Balkan Wars. With the expulsion of the Turks and with Macedonia split, Salonika became a divided city, occupied by Greek and Bulgarian troops, awaiting a final international decision on who would be assigned sovereignty.3 Whatever the final decision, the Jewish community of Salonika was keenly ccccccc 2.

3.

Joseph Nehama, Histoire des Israélites de Salonique, vol. 7 (Paris: Library of Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1978); Alexandra Yerolympos, “La part du feu”, in Salonique 1850-1918: La “ville des juifs” et le réveil des Balkans, ed. Gilles Veinstein, Série Mémoires no. 12 (Paris: Autrement, January 1992). Mark Levene, War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914-1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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aware that none of the prospective sovereignties would give them the autonomy they had enjoyed in a society that was structured on difference, for the Ottoman authorities had allowed them to maintain their religion’s social and cultural characteristics and customs. Until recently, to be an Ottoman subject had been an administrative matter, which, while allowing conviviality, did not involve assimilation. The community ensured tax collection; only at the beginning of the century was military service extended to cover the whole population, but exemption was possible if one paid a redeeming tax. Thus, the Jews were not forced to violate dietary laws or observance of the Sabbath, nor did they suffer economic losses by not working on Saturdays.

“Jews have no fatherland; it follows that they do not properly belong to any state”4 Since the 1878 Congress of Berlin had pushed the frontiers of Europe far towards the Mediterranean, the problems related to assimilation of the former Ottoman population by new states organized on the basis of the national principle were becoming ever more serious. The most flagrant example of this was Rumania where (in spite of the guarantees demanded by the great European powers as a condition for confirming its independence) narrow-minded nationalism, on the rise since the autonomy of the Danubian Principalities, had become ever more strident. The consequences of this for the large Jewish population were disastrous. The more the triad of population–territory–state was unachievable in those “nations”, the greater was their wish to “nationalize” the territories being claimed, either by “nationalizing” the way of life of the different communities living in them or by using other means to show these communities that perhaps it would be a good idea if they were to go and find somewhere else to live. In the absence of a state body to defend the rights of the Jewish minority, the idea of obtaining consular protection from other countries emerged as a solution.5 It was a well-established tradition in the system of capitulations that still prevailed in Ottoman lands,6 and it was in the Christian powers’ tradition to confer that advantage, albeit with some restraint. For the recipients, a European nationality

ccccccc 4. 5. 6.

“Ruling of a Rumanian Court in 1877”, in David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe 1789-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p490n14. Élisabeth Antebi, Les missionnaires juifs de la France, 1860-1939 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999), 181. In the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, like other Christian powers, benefited from the regime of capitulations, also known as “protection”, which provided papers of European nationality exempting bearers from the yoke of Turkish law. Between 1843 and 1912 there were instances of Portuguese nationality being given to Ottoman Jews in numbers that were possibly insignificant yet important for the precedent set.

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brought real benefits and carried a certain social aura, setting people apart to some extent from the ordinary Turk. With the demise of Ottoman rule and the prospect of Greece’s annexation of Salonika, it became exponentially more important to have a nationality that would avert Greek assimilation. At the very point in time that a power vacuum and expectations of loss occurred in Salonika and in other cities of former European Turkey, the search for protection coincided with an interest in conferring it. Thus, protection papers were issued to a large number of Ottoman Turks, the main issuers being Austria, Spain, and Portugal. The Central European Powers, in sympathy with the Turks, had an interest in stopping territorial acquisitions by Serbia and Greece, which, in addition to local quarrels, were being seduced into the Entente’s sphere of influence. Austria (which by then had already issued Austrian papers to a number of Rumanian Jews) had economic interests and was seeking Jewish support for its plan to internationalize Salonika. Germany, pursuing a policy of influence within the Ottoman Empire and egged on by German Zionist Jews, was issuing instructions to its consul to prevent Greek excesses.7 Spain too was offering protection. At the turn of the century, Senator Angel Pulido had traveled throughout the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, fact-finding on the Sephardic communities in the Balkans and Turkey and the fact that they spoke “Spanish”. Pulido estimated that in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the New World there were at least two million Jews of Sephardic descent exercising influence on their respective governments. Hoping that they would attract new sources of trade to Spain, which would at least partially offset the painful losses of the American empire and increase influence in Morocco, he launched a campaign aimed at recognizing them as members of the “Spanish race” forced into exile. He suggested that the way to achieve this was to simplify naturalization procedures for foreigners who wished to or were entitled to become Spanish nationals.8 Like the Spanish Jews, Portuguese Jews had lived for some four hundred years in Salonika, the quasi-mythical Sephardic capital of the Mediterranean. In 1879, out of a total of thirty-seven synagogues, four were Portuguese, known respectively as the Évora, Old Lisbon, New Lisbon, and Portuguese synagogues.9 The Portuguese consul was Isaac Modiano, a member of one of the most prominent Jewish families of Salonika.10 ccccccc 7. 8.

9. 10.

Joseph Nehama, letter to Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris), 20 November 1912, microfilm IC 1 a 52, AIU. Haim Avni, Spain, the Jews, and Franco (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 5742/1982); also Antonio Marquina Barrio, “Spanish Policy and the Sephardic Jews, 1918-1940”, in Ethnic Groups in International Relations, ed. Paul Smith (New York: NYU Press, 1991). Nehama, Histoire des Israélites de Salonique. Appointed in 1872, see Diplomatic Historical Archives [hereinafter AHD] of the Portuguese Con-

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For a couple of years there appears to have been a hiatus. Then, in 1887 the Spanish consul in Salonika wrote to Lisbon asking to be appointed Portuguese consul “by virtue of the services rendered to a number of families originally from Portugal whose interests were not being respected by the Turkish authorities because they lacked someone to represent them.”11 In 1890, the Portuguese representation in Salonika was again entrusted to the Modianos, this time in the person of Samuel Modiano. In 1909, after a gap of almost two decades, another consul, Jacques Missir, was appointed. He too was a Jew, a lowly clerk in the French shipping firm Messageries Maritimes. Until the First Balkan War, this was the sum total of a Portuguese presence in Salonika. The idea that Portugal ought to grant nationality papers to the Salonika Jews of Portuguese origin was the brainchild of the very republican Portuguese chargé d’affaires and consul in Constantinople, Alfredo Mesquita.12 Arguing that in legislating to open the Angolan uplands for Jewish settlement,13 the young Republican government had “already shown that it thought the Israelites were to be welcomed”, and invoking “the regime’s humanism and the generous sentiments of the Portuguese nation”, Mesquita argued specifically in favor of targeting the consolidation of Portugal’s international prestige, then severely marred by the excesses of Republican revolutionary zeal, daily and loudly reported in all the European press. Acting swiftly to create an interest group that would establish a Portuguese influence in the Levant, expanding Portugal’s export trade, and gaining a market share for Portuguese goods would accomplish this. Within the Lisbon revolutionary government, the consul’s idea fell on fertile ground. Between March and November 1913, provisional Portuguese consular registration certificates were issued to several hundred Jewish families.14 It is difficult to state with any certainty the number of these Portuguese. In one specific official document, the consul mentions a record of 384 families from Salonika; on other occasions he speaks of 500. As a result of the objections raised by the Greeks to accepting “nationalities” acquired after their entry into the city and the fire which devastated Salonika in 1917 leaving behind no papers, we will now never know the number. The oldest list we found contains 580 names of people organized by families, and, although not dated, the correspondence leads us to infer that it was drawn up between 1926 and 1927. Although some 55 names are noted as “devenu héllene” ccccccc 11. 12. 13. 14.

sulates in Turkey-in-Europe, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lisbon, box 870. AHD: 3P A 35. Alfredo Mesquita was appointed to Constantinople in November 1911. João Medina and Joel Barromi, “The Jewish Colonization Project In Angola”, Studies In Zionism 12, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 1-16. By way of comparison, in 1916 there were 180 heads of family registered in the Israelite Community of Lisbon, a number that remained the same in the 1920s.

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or “parti à Paris”, it is possible that this list no longer includes those people who left in the great emigration wave of 1915/1916. However, what is certain is that there are people who appear registered in Paris as being “born in Salonika” whose names do not appear on the above-mentioned list.

Leaving Salonika It does not appear that there was any plan to integrate these people into the Portuguese nation. Granting the Jews Portuguese nationality in the Balkans or in Angola sounded rather like investing in shares on the stock exchange: paper titles, eminently negotiable. However, for the new Balkan states the matter of who did or did not belong to the nation was not viewed with the same “cool”. Rejection of Ottoman influence was an intrinsic part of the reinvented national sagas that sustained the newly founded, much yearned for, nation state. As soon as they had marched into Salonika, the Greeks deftly assumed that they were there to stay. With international decisions still pending, they immediately began to install civil authorities, issue Greek papers, import police forces, and carry out censuses – in other words, take things into their own hands. As the Greek nation expanded towards its mythological frontiers, so did its commitment to the hellenization of its new territories. Even though the “European” documents which were about to be issued to the Jews – the soon-to-be former subjects of the Ottoman Empire – were presented as part of a legitimate naturalization process, the Greeks staunchly refused to accept any scheme that bore any similarity to the terrible regime of capitulations, the very negation of the national state. Thus, they immediately set about replacing Ottoman birth deeds with Greek certificates, seriously discouraging people from choosing Ottoman nationality and refusing to recognize freshly minted Austrian, Spanish, and Portuguese nationalities. Greek sovereignty put an end to the glory of Salonika. From being the capital of Turkey-in-Europe and a regional economic powerhouse, it became a not particularly Christian city in a Greek province. Continuous instability in the Eastern Mediterranean – the First World War, the fire that devastated the city in 1917 and completely destroyed the Jewish Quarter, and the Greco-Turkish War of 1922-23 – together with progressive economic stagnation resulting from hellenization of the economy produced successive waves of Jewish emigration. Those with Portuguese documents headed mainly for Italy, France, and the Ottoman Empire. Again, numbers are elusive. Between 1917 and 1936, the Portuguese consulate in Milan registered 269 “Levantines” under the aegis of Consul Agenore Magno.15 ccccccc 15.

AHD: 3P A37 M67; RPA 1034. The continued renewal of these consular registrations – examined, forbidden, and cancelled in 1936 by the diplomatic inspectors sent to verify and control “inaccurate

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In 1943, the consul-general in Paris says that “of the Levantine Jews of Portuguese origin documented by the Portuguese consulates in Turkey, the majority came to settle in France, mainly in Paris, where, during the period 1915 to 1922, some thirty or forty families registered in this consulate-general.”16 In the dozens of letters of complaint sent to Lisbon between 1936 and 1941 protesting against the refusal of the consulate to revalidate passports and consular registrations, some 130 individuals were named. Other important centers in France were Marseille and Toulouse, and at certain times Nice, Lyon, and Pau. Consulates in Trieste, Genoa, Lausanne, Barcelona, Latin America, New York, and Istanbul also accepted registrations.

Cancellation of Registrations In 1934, all sorts of schemes for selling passports to Jews expelled from Germany prospered and flourished. In Lisbon, the MNE (Ministry for Foreign Affairs) realized that Portuguese passports were being advertised in a Swiss newspaper as being “the quickest and cheapest”. Panic ensued. There was a legitimate and major concern with the credibility of the state – a dread of the constant headlines in the international press in earlier decades of political and revolutionary upheaval – which was carefully pondered and calibrated in all the Portuguese government’s choreographed external actions. Defense of the dignity of the State was dogma and praxis. This would become a true fairy godmother for the “Levantine Jews”. Discretion was maintained. In the first phase, all such consular registrations were cancelled, with consuls prohibited from renewing them. International police forces were quietly called upon and all sorts of measures were taken, including consular inspections of at least ten consulates in Europe and the Levant.17 It was later discovered that the scheme involved the consul in Athens, the vice-consul in Vienna and a certain Sam Elias, who was himself the bearer of Passport no. 247 issued by the consulate-general in Vienna “based on a passport issued by the consulate in Athens”. Although having no conclusive material evidence, we cannot refrain from speculating here that, over their many years of service as Portuguese consular officials, these gentlemen had come to realize how automatic and uncontrolled a ccccccc

16. 17.

registrations” (said to be 400 in number) – led to the dismissal of Consul Magno, a dismissal that never actually happened; see also Rui Afonso, “Count Giuseppe Agenore Magno”, in Portuguese Studies Review 5, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1996): 12-21. “The Question of the Portuguese Levantine Jews in France”, dated January 1943, António Alves Júnior, the consul-general, AHD: 2P M40 A50. AHD: 3P A14 M99.

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process the annual renewal of the provisional registration certificates and passports of the “Levantines” was. And they, like many others, eyed an opportunity and sold German Jews these precious “identity papers”. In Vienna, fifty out of a total of seventy-five registrations were cancelled. Apparently, the vice-consul had given passports to informers whom he had hired to follow communist activities, allegedly on behalf of the Portuguese secret police. To others, he sold passports for 50,000 krone to be deposited in a secret Swiss bank account. When faced with the imminent inspection, the consular archives caught fire. The most important of these inspection missions was conducted in the consulate in Athens. The consulate was taken over by a specially appointed diplomatic officer, Marcello Mathias, who went through everything with a fine-tooth comb and who realized the complexity of the situation. What to do with the hundreds of Jews registered in the consular registers who had been encouraged to take Portuguese nationality through an active campaign (including advertising in the local press18) led by Alfredo de Mesquita, the former consul in Constantinople, in accordance with “patriotic” instructions received from Lisbon? These were people who had been in possession of Portuguese papers for twenty years, who had registered marriages, births, deaths, and contracts, who had paid all the due consular fees and military taxes. Worse still, in the countries where they lived, they were accredited as Portuguese subjects! Mathias ended up proposing a pragmatic solution,19 which was to respect expectations and rights acquired in good faith and to make an amendment to the recently approved Civil Code, allowing for exceptional naturalization procedures. Decree 26598 of 16 May 1936 served this purpose. However, it served no more than that, since the majority of those it was supposed to help were in no position to collect all the required documentation. Of those who managed to remain “provisional”, some obtained opportune entry into Portugal, while others were subject to a six-monthly renewal (whilst this remained possible) pending a final decision from Lisbon – that, under much pressure, came to allow their “repatriation” (the link to the nationality always questioned by quotation marks) in 1943 and 1944.

Trapped in France France, between 1936 and 1945, is indeed a “textbook case”: because of the significant number of Levantines (the majority registered at the Consulate-General in ccccccc 18.

19.

“Ce document me fut délivré à l’époque ou les journaux locaux menaient une campagne pour engager les descendants des émigrés portugais à réintégrer leur nationalité d’origine.” Ino Levy, letter of 20 September 1939 to the Portuguese Embassy in Paris, AHD: 2P A67 M63. Ino Levy was documented by the Consulate of Portugal in Salonika, 23 August 1913. AHD: 2P M40 A50.

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Paris) who had taken refuge there since 1915, because the anti-Semitic policies were applied to these Portuguese Jews by both the Occupation and the Vichy authorities, and because of the constant attention that the conjugation of these two circumstances required of both diplomatic agents and the Portuguese government. As is common knowledge, anti-Semitic policy was roughly the same inside the occupied zone as it was outside it. From the end of the summer of 1940, citizenship rights were lost, as were jobs and other means of support. Internment in work camps, forced recruitment for work in Germany, and seizure of businesses and property (the “Aryanization” of economic life) followed. The following year, 1941, saw the speeding up of spoliation of assets and transfers to internment camps (Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande, Pithiviers, and Compiègne). From 1942 until 1944, there was the wearing of the Star of David, internment in camps, and deportation to concentration camps. Portugal remained neutral during the war. For the Germans, the general rule was to avoid problems with “allied, friendly, or neutral” states in that order. Another general rule was that what one of the neutral states managed to obtain benefited the others. It was a well-organized machine, and the Germans functioned with greater planning capabilities than their French counterparts in the “free zone” where greed inspired a reckless pace for economic “Aryanization”, as they liked to call their spoliation programme. The Jews registered in occupied France as Portuguese were treated by the Germans as foreign Jews, nationals of a neutral country with which there was interest in maintaining good relations, including commercial relations, with very relevant flows and the ever present tungsten trade. On this research point, no record has yet been found of Portuguese documents not being accepted – on the contrary, what has been found are replies that are favorable to the efforts made by diplomatic and consular agents in defense of these Portuguese Jews.20 On the Vichy side, Portuguese protests were also heeded, but it was made clear, and enforced, that the laws were applicable to all Jews irrespective of their nationality. Portuguese diplomatic and consular action in defense of Jews who were their nationals took place on three fronts: the Occupied Zone, Vichy, and Morocco. ccccccc 20.

The case of the Dutch Jews of Portuguese descent on whose behalf Portuguese protection was sought is not covered in this paper. The case is fully documented by Dr. J. Presser in Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, trans. Arnold Pomerans (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 305. I will just add that, upon a representation made to him by Moses Amzalak, the well-known leader of the Lisbon Jewish community, Salazar cabled to the legation in Berlin: “[A] most prominent Portuguese Jew asked for our intervention with the German government to let out of the Netherlands a number of Dutch Jews who claim Portuguese descent. Before any decision whatsoever, we need to know if the German government will allow departure of the families to whom the Portuguese government may recognize said ancestry.” The difference here was that no “question of nationality” was involved. And the negative answer from Berlin closed the case.

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The Occupied Zone Following the surrender of France and her political-administrative division, diplomatic representation in the Occupied Zone passed to the legation in Berlin on which all the affairs of the Reich, protectorates, and occupied territories depended. Thus, from 1940 on, the consulate-general in Paris reported to Berlin.21 Locally, the main interlocutors were the Prefecture of the French Police, the German Military High Command and the Department of Economic Aryanization, in the hands of the French.22 Distance, communication difficulties, and not infrequently the somewhat unreceptive attitude of the minister in Berlin together with a very human, intuitive refusal to accept the German occupation – in fact a whole series of circumstances – led the consuls, first José Archer and then António Alves Júnior, as well as and always Vice-Consul Carvalho Silva, to keep a parallel channel open for informal yet constant consultations with the minister of Portugal in Vichy. Thus, in January 1943, Paris Consul-General António Alves Júnior stated: Thanks to the intervention of this consulate-general, not one single Portuguese Jew is interned in a concentration camp, not one has been deported to Eastern Europe, not one has been compelled to wear the badge showing his race which was imposed on other Jews by the German and French authorities, all the seals appended to their houses have been removed by the German police, and finally, all their commercial establishments are being managed by the administrator nominated by this chancellery with the agreement of the German authorities. It can, therefore, be said that the situation at the moment is as favorable as it can possibly be.23

Vichy After July 1940, a Portuguese legation was set up in Vichy under the command of José Caeiro da Matta, former representative at the League of Nations and former Minister for Foreign Affairs. Salazar found the French situation an embarrassment and wished to help by collaborating in covering up the obvious limitations of Vichy’s sovereignty, in the hope that the French regime might recover independence. He began by sending a high-ranking, direct, Portuguese political representa-

ccccccc 21.

22.

23.

There is interesting material on this at the Yad Vashem Archives, JM/ 2661; see also Haim Avni, “L’Espagne, le Portugal et les Juifs sépharades au XX siécle. Proposition pour une étude comparée”, in Mémoires Juives d’Espagne et du Portugal, ed. Esther Benbassa (Paris: Publisud, 1996). See, for instance, at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (Paris): documents CDJC (État Major) IV-182 – 28/2/42 (Aktenzeichen: Vpol 290/882/41); CDJC- LXXV-82, Le Militärbefehlshaber en France, Paris, 13 février 1941, Etat Major Administratif, Section: Administration; CDJC XXXVI-116, stamped 28 MARS 1941. AHD: 2P A50 M40.

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tive. It should also be remembered here that this was a moment when Portugal was exporting political refugees and unqualified workers. Benefiting from the access and prestige that thus befell him, Caeiro da Matta had no difficulty in reaching Pétain or Laval and he had a vast network of influence at his disposal.24 A reliable jurist, it was to him that the MNE turned for principled opinions on matters of sovereignty and Portuguese citizenship, and the consequences which could be suffered, as well as on the adverse effects of assuming, politically, situations that Portuguese domestic law did not cover (e.g., doubtful nationalities). He was quite active, generally in a balanced and beneficial way, both in opposing economic Aryanization and in the whole process that would result in the authorization to evacuate to Portugal the 300 or so “Levantine Portuguese”. The consulates in Marseilles and Toulouse reported to him, and, upon instructions, they too ended up being involved in the repatriation of persons and goods, corresponding directly with French regional authorities and even with the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of France.

Morocco When Vichy extended the anti-Semitic laws to Morocco, legal memorandums from Caeiro da Matta and the Portuguese consulates in Morocco provided clear support in defense of the Portuguese Jews, who were particularly threatened by the brutal expropriations. This case warrants further research. However, it seems opportune to mention it by way of comparison. Why? Because here nationality was not in doubt: these were certified Portuguese citizens whose rights had been recognized by international treaties.25 To sum up: The doubts the Portuguese authorities had were not made apparent. Over everything, it must be remembered, reigned the prestige of the state and ccccccc 24.

25.

See for example Telegram 223, of 2 October, from the Portuguese Legation in Vichy: “Confidential – In the light of the difficulties that the French authorities are constantly making for Jews to exercise any corporate economic activity in respect of administration of their assets, which was entrusted to French nationals, I resolved to take up the situation of the Portuguese Jews directly with President Laval. There is in fact nothing more troublesome or vexatious than [the] intervention [of] French administrators as is being done. I obtained from Laval a concession that represents an exception for Portugal, which seems of interest to emphasize. [The] French Head of Government told me that he was going to annul the nominations of all the administrators of Portuguese Jews’ assets and he asked me to indicate names of Portuguese individuals who I believe could assume this administrative function. Any name that I might indicate would have his prior approval. And he left it up to me to direct the Commissaires in the way that seemed best to me in everything that, from an economic point of view, concerns the Portuguese Jews in France. Caeiro da Matta.” Fonds of the Portuguese Legation to France (AHD). The Franco-German accord and the Act of Algeciras (1906), on which basis Portugal gave up its rights to capitulations in the protectorate of Morocco.

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conditions of sovereignty – a preoccupation that also meant that no lack of respect was allowed towards Portuguese nationals. In practice, the government’s policy consisted of doing nothing before third parties that could lead them to realize a problem existed. Thus, measures were taken to avoid the offensive spoliation by the French and the wearing of the star and other emblems as the Portuguese state did not accept that these be imposed on its citizens, among whom it did not make differences either of race or of religion. At home, the well-guarded secret – and one not in the interest of either side to divulge – was that the Portuguese Jews of Levantine origin registered in the consulates in France received in fact no passports or documents that allowed them to leave. Only as a result of German pressure in 1943, urging friendly and neutral countries to remove “their” Jews from the territories of the Reich or their nationality would no longer be respected, was there any movement. This was primarily due to the brave efforts of Consul António Alves Júnior, who, using every means at his disposal, sought to convince the MNE to honor its de facto, even if not legal, obligations. It is to his above-mentioned report on “The Question of the Portuguese Levantine Jews in France”, dated January 1943 and sent to Lisbon, that we owe the most complete picture we have of this episode. Equally important was the decisive action taken by delegates of the Jewish refugee aid organizations based in Lisbon, who undertook before the Portuguese government to pay the expenses of all those who could not provide for their own subsistence. Also let us not forget the war which was now turning in the Allies’ favor.

After the War In 1947, the MNE set about solving the problem of the nationality or the naturalization of the Levantine Jews. However, continuous difficulties were placed in their path. One year later, Salazar laid down general political criteria for naturalization: the registration of Jews of alleged Portuguese descent in some Portuguese consulates had created various de facto situations which, even though they might not have sufficient grounds from the legal point of view, were sometimes worthy of consideration from a moral point of view since they were the result of acts that had been carried out in good faith. The solution to be found for the problem could not be strictly legal but rather one of equity.26 Under these terms, those Jews who could prove they had been registered in the Portuguese Consulate in Salonika, under cover of the instructions given to the Portuguese legation in Constantinople in 1913, would be considered Portuguese, as would their descendants by the male line already registered in another consulateccccccc 26.

AHD: Proc. 32, 6 23/8/48 M121-A-A49 Pasta VI.

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general who had opted, or who were to opt at that time, for Portuguese nationality. It also seemed that Portuguese nationality would not be denied to those Jews who had done military service in the Portuguese army. Deliberately or not, Salazar forgot that it was impossible to prove anything related to papers handed out in Salonika before 1917. It was not until 17 January 1957 that Decree 40.980 established the juris tantum presumption that those individuals who up to that date had continuously benefited from national protection as a consequence of their consular registration as Portuguese were in fact Portuguese (even though they might be unable to prove it), as were their descendants, if they had been registered as Portuguese at birth or had opted for Portuguese nationality in general terms. The widows of individuals who had been considered Portuguese up to that date would also retain Portuguese nationality as long as they had lost their original nationality through marriage and had not later regained it. The people who “presumed” they had Portuguese nationality had to request the Ministry of Justice to ratify this nationality within one year. If this were not done, their registration and the registration of their birth as Portuguese, which had possibly been made in consulates or civil registry offices, would be cancelled. The same would happen if ratification was refused or if the individuals did not fulfill the requirement that they should have enjoyed national protection for 25 years as a result of their consular registration as Portuguese.

Conclusion There were a significant number of holders of Portuguese certificates of nationality, which between 1912 and 1945 upheld their civil status and that of their families as Portuguese and with which they celebrated contracts with third parties of other nationalities. Firstly, the authorization for such Portuguese consular registration corresponded to political objectives and was granted in the context of consular rules that considered “consular registration equivalent to a certificate of nationality”. Secondly, these registrations were maintained in 1913-14 before the Greek authorities; in 1917, during the First World War; and in 1936, despite a decree-law which set impossible conditions for naturalization and a series of consular inspections which identified multiple cases in many consulates. In fact, the problem only disappeared through the naturalization of some and the departure of others towards other nationalities. The fact that the majority of these Portuguese Levantines had settled in France, thereby finding themselves submitted to anti-Semitic legislation in 1940, and that Portugal was a neutral country relatively in tune with the French regime created the opportunity/need for the Portuguese government to take a concrete and individualized stance towards the protection of its nationals. Less obviously, we found the

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Salazar regime’s belief that this nationality was not legitimate and, therefore, it did little to legitimize it; instead it tried to rid itself of the problem. After the 1934 case involving document trafficking, denial of responsibility ensued but was never taken to its ultimate consequence, primarily for fear of discrediting the Portuguese state and its diplomatic agents but also because the government feared the possibility of civil litigation owing to the fact that over the years it had accepted payment of consular fees and military taxes. But the more the German danger spread and the more serious the measures against the Jews became, the greater the difficulty in maintaining this refusal. Protection was provided in counterpoint, at first by diplomatic and consular agents using the functional freedom allowed to them and which was finally accepted by the MNE in 1943-44. Thus, in 1940-41, the Portuguese refused most of the passport renewal requests made by Portuguese Jews in France. It limited its response to authorizing some consular offices to give six-month provisional registration to people whom they knew well. For instance, one man who was refused a passport for a simple round-trip journey from Paris to London in 1935 later found himself being helped by the consulate in Pau and by the Portuguese Legation in Vichy in 1941 against the expropriation process initiated against his business by the Commissariat aux Affaires Juives. Thus it was that three hundred Portuguese Jews in France treaded the path to the final solution but were extracted from the Holocaust by the not so affirmative, certainly, but nonetheless timely action of the Portuguese government.

Chaya Brasz

Dutch Jews and German Immigrants* Backgrounds of an Uneasy Partnership in Progressive Judaism

For many years, Dutch Jews widely held the opinion that during the 1930s Jewish refugees from Nazi-Germany introduced “Liberal” Judaism – nowadays called “Progressive” Judaism – to the Netherlands.1 The earlier beginnings of Liberal Judaism as a genuine Dutch development seemed to be forgotten. The same was true for its struggle to preserve an independent Dutch character when confronted with a massive influx of German refugees from 1933 onwards.2 This forgetfulness cannot be explained only by a traditional inclination among Dutch Jews to define modern forms of Judaism as “foreign import” or “not really a Dutch development”. The distorted picture was indeed strongly confirmed by postwar realities: it was an overwhelmingly German group of survivors that revived and continued the Liberal congregation after the Holocaust. As a result of this postwar reality, the notion that Liberal Judaism was a German import was confirmed. Consequently, we fail to see not only that the beginnings of the Liberal community were a genuine Dutch development, but also that the development of Liberal Judaism before and after the war was strongly influccccccc *

1.

2.

In the title of this article, the word “immigrants” is chosen instead of “refugees” since a significant number of German members of the Liberal Jewish community had arrived before 1933. Of the refugees who came later, those who stayed as members in fact also became immigrants. Abbreviations used in the notes: SAA: Stads Archief Amsterdam (Municipal Archives of Amsterdam) PA: Personal Archive AJA: American Jewish Archives WUPJ: World Union for Progressive Judaism Man.Coll.: Manuscript Collection Based on my personal observations between 1968 and 1985 and during visits to the Netherlands in later years as well. “Progressive Judaism” comprises all different forms of Liberal, Reform, and Reconstructionist Judaism. In the Netherlands, the older and more limited term “Liberal” was officially replaced by “Progressive” in 2006, the year of the 75th jubilee of the community. In that year, the Union of Liberal-Religious Jews in the Netherlands was renamed ‘Dutch Union for Progressive Judaism.’ The first book written on the prewar origins: D. Michman, Het Liberale Jodendom in Nederland 19291943 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1988); see also C. Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov: Impressies van 75 jaar Progressief Jodendom in Nederland 1931-2006 (Amsterdam: Verbond voor Progressief Jodendom, 2006), 19-74.

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enced by the uneasy relationship between Dutch Jews and German immigrants. In this article, I will sketch how Progressive Judaism developed in the interaction between Dutch and German Jews.

Torah im derekh eretz In order to understand the establishment of the first Dutch Liberal congregation in 1931, it is necessary to elaborate on the character of Dutch Judaism as such. Dutch Jews received equal citizenship at the end of the eighteenth century (1796), long before most of them spoke, read, and wrote Dutch. Like in France, this early emancipation, followed by a long process of acculturation, led to a rather petrified type of Orthodox Judaism. Dutch Jews in general were hostile to German Reform Judaism. During the nineteenth century, they perceived it as part of the political struggle of German Jews to achieve the equal citizenship they themselves already had. There was no need for a similar movement in the Netherlands. In Dutch synagogues, no dramatic changes occurred beyond the introduction of sermons in the vernacular, clothing for rabbis similar to that of Protestant clergymen, and other adjustments in the decorum alone.3 In their contacts with German Jews, Dutch Jews were proud of that position, but German Jews, who envied them for their freedom, showed disappointment at their low cultural development and lack of creativity.4 Dutch Jews succeeded in keeping Reform Judaism on the other side of the border, among others by adopting the neo-Orthodox model for coping with modernity. This alternative to the more radical forms was developed by Rabbi Dr. Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-88) in Germany.5 Basing his discourse on modern, rational arguments, Hirsch continued a strictly halakhic Judaism, which he combined with open possibilities for his followers to develop themselves – also professionally – into useful citizens of the non-Jewish society they lived in: Torah im derekh eretz. Since neo-Orthodox Judaism denied pluralism, it organized itself in Germany in Austrittsgemeinden. Those congregations stood apart from the mainccccccc 3. 4.

5.

J. Frishman, “Gij, Vromen, Zijt Nederlanders!”, Studia Rosenthaliana 30, no. 1 (1996): 137-50. T. Kollatz, “Fascination and Discomfort: The Ambivalent Image of the Netherlands in the Jewish-German Press in the 1830s and 1840s”, Studia Rosenthaliana 32, no. 1 (1998): 43-66; idem, “‘Holland is a country which provokes serious reflection…’: Images of Dutch Jewry in the German Jewish Press”, in Dutch Jewry in a Cultural Maelstrom 1880-1940, ed. J. Frishman and H. Berg (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007), 97-102. J.C.H. Blom and J.J Cahem, “Jewish Netherlands Jews, and Jews in the Netherlands, 1870-1940”, in The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, ed. J.C.H. Blom, R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld, and I. Schöffer (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 254; M.A. Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 2, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 139, 140; M. Breuer, The “Torah im derekh eretz” of Samson Raphael Hirsch (Jerusalem: Feldheim publ, 1970); M. Breuer, Modernity within Tradition: The Social History of Orthodox Jewry in Imperial Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

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stream unified communities, the Einheitsgemeinden, in which moderate German Orthodox congregations existed in relative harmony together with a Reform majority, each having their own prayer services, education, and the like. In the Netherlands however, neo-Orthodox Judaism became mainstream and excluded all alternatives. This also isolated Dutch Jews from developments elsewhere in Europe. Although the well-respected rector of the Rabbinical Seminary in Amsterdam, Chief Rabbi Dr. J.H. Dünner6 (1833-1911), sympathized with the positive-historical Theological Seminary in Breslau and with Zionism, the influence of neo-Orthodoxy on Dutch rabbinical students remained dominant. Dünner’s pupils, who formed the Dutch rabbinate in the decennia around 1900, were hostile to any type of reform and equally hostile to Zionism.7 By taking Hirsch as their example, efforts to create a more liberal alternative could only meet repression. So-called “liberal Jews” in the Netherlands simply were the non-observant ones. Most of them stayed united as members in the official Dutch Israelite Church organization, but in 1920, of the 115,000 Jews living in the Netherlands, the really observant formed only some 10% of the community. By then, the isolated character of Dutch Jewry had been clearly weakened by better transportation, an increasingly better-educated and well-traveled middle class, and the establishment of international Jewish organizations in which Dutch Jews met with other Jews. Three developments that were causing a worldwide Jewish revival reached the Netherlands as well and were pushing for dramatic change in Dutch religious Judaism. The first one was Zionism – especially by expressing itself in the Orthodox Mizrakhi movement with its popular youth movement Zikhron Ya’acov. The second was the emancipation of women. The third was a growing interest in Liberal forms of Judaism. These three movements sometimes intertwined, but more often they stood well apart from each other or even showed mutual hostility. In this article, I will leave the influence of Zionism on the side and concentrate on the other two developments.

Progressive Judaism In the beginning of the twentieth century, the largest Liberal and Reform communities in Europe existed in Germany and England. In the United States, modern ccccccc 6.

7.

Rabbi Dr. Joseph Hirsch Dünner was born in Crakow (1833) and studied in Germany. He lived and worked in Amsterdam from 1863 till 1911. A comprehensive biography meeting academic standards was never written about him. See J. Melkman, “Dr. J.H. Dünner 1833-1911”, in H. Heymans and J. Melkman, eds., Menorah 5701 (Amsterdam: Nederlands Zionistenbond, 1940), 125-33; J. Meijer, Rector en Raw: De levensgeschiedenis van Dr. J.H. Dünner 1833-1911, part 1 (Heemstede 1984); J. Michman, “De strijd om de benoeming van dr. J.H. Dünner”, Studia Rosenthaliana 22 (1988): 165-85. The most important Zionist exception was Rabbi Simon Philip de Vries of Haarlem. See E. Dasberg, Rabbijn Simon Philip de Vries 1870-1944 (Lochem: De Tijdstroom, 1973).

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The Dutch delegates to the World Congress of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, standing before the West London Synagogue in 1946. In the center of the picture: Levie and Milly Levisson, principal founders of Progressive Judaism in the Netherlands. Around them from left to right dr. M. Goudeket, Theodor Metz, Otto Frank, Arthur Lehmann. From: Private collection Lex Levisson.

forms of Judaism were growing into an overwhelming force and were radicalizing. A radical version had also been introduced to London in 1902 with the establishment of the Jewish Religious Union, followed by the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in 1912, which had an American rabbi, Dr. Israel Mattuck. In France, the first Liberal congregation was established in Paris in 1907.8 It was equally radical, with mixed seating, Sunday services, and men who came bareheaded. Those congregations were very different from Liberal congregations in Germany. They could only be compared with the radical Reform synagogue in Berlin, which existed outside the mainstream unified congregations.9 In this same period, a change was taking place in the intellectual Jewish elite in Germany. German Jews had acquired full citizenship in 1871. As a result of the continuation of anti-Semitism, part of the community persisted in its struggle to become more German than the Germans themselves. Others however, like Dr. Leo Baeck and Dr. Caesar Seligmann, started to rebuild Jewish self-respect, bringing renewal to German Liberal Judaism. As a result, Liberal congregations became more “positively Jewish”.10 They were among the founders of the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ) when its establishment was realized in London in 1926 by ccccccc 8. 9. 10.

M.A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 223. Ibid., 338. Ibid., 212.

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the leadership of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, Miss Lily Montagu and Sir Claude Montefiore. The name “Progressive Judaism” was introduced as the collective name for the different variations of Liberal and Reform Judaism in the world.11 The WUPJ soon became active all over Europe, even drawing some attention in the Netherlands. However, a decade before the establishment of the WUPJ, a change in atmosphere in the Netherlands could already be clearly identified when, between 1917 and 1920, a group of modern Jews organized around a small, independent, Jewish newspaper Het Oude Volk. The participants were assimilated Jews. Women were openly active in significant positions. The members of this group were in search of a modern Jewish identity, but one that was anti-Zionist. They had a highly idealistic social program for the existing Jewish community and saw the elevation of the Jewish proletariat as one of their main goals. Moreover, they sought to modernize the Dutch Israelite Church organization by separating the religious domain from general community work and opening the way to pluralistic forms of education. There were rumors that they would establish a Liberal congregation, but whatever their plans, they never materialized. The group met fierce opposition and disappeared in 1920.12 Yet the influence of progressive ideas continued to exist in other parts of the community. This is clearly illustrated by the promotion of the emancipation of women in the 1920s. A visit to the Netherlands by Mrs. Rebecca Kohut and Miss Elinor Sachs of the American Council of Jewish Women in 1921 became an event significant to Dutch Jewish women. Although Kohut and Sachs came to help poor migrants from Eastern Europe on their way to America, their visit led to the establishment of the Joodse Vrouwenraad, the Dutch Jewish Women’s Council.13 Dutch Jewish women were late with this development. This was no doubt caused by the slow advance of a significant bourgeois Jewish culture in the Netherlands. The Jewish community was characterized by a large proletariat, ruled over by a tiny middle class which was growing only slowly since the second half of the nineteenth century. Early nineteenth century developments in the far more numerous Jewish middle-class families in Germany and the changing roles of women (and men) there reached the Netherlands much later.14 Around 1900, a disproportionate num-

ccccccc 11. 12. 13. 14.

Ibid., 335-37. L. Schimmel, Towards a Future of Sincerity and Harmony: Dutch Jews and the Appeal of Reform Judaism (MA thesis, Utrecht University, 2007), 89-94. Maandblad van den Joodschen Vrouwenraad te Amsterdam 1, no. 2 (February 1923, Adar 5683). On Germany, see B.M. Baader, Gender, Judaism and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800-1870 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). In 1871, over 60% of the Jews in Germany had attained a middle-class income level and poverty had become marginal (Baader, p. 9). In the Netherlands, most Jews still belonged to the low-income classes or were outright poor, even in 1940.

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ber of Dutch middle-class Jewish women were active in the general women’s rights movement, but within the Jewish community they lagged behind and barely had a role beyond their homes. As soon as the Dutch Jewish Women’s Council was established in Amsterdam in 1921, women in England, Germany, and the United States eagerly sent over their periodicals and reports. In those days, the development of social work was an important way for women to engage in volunteer activities or even create a professional career outside the walls of their private homes. For this matter, Dutch Jewish women soon looked overseas. Not only did they visit social projects organized by the radical Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London, but they also took them as an example for their own social work.15 In the meantime, some of these women were exposed to a different type of Judaism. Dutch women became well informed about the emancipation of women in Judaism as a religion in other ways as well. In 1923, a historical overview written by the American Estella Sternberger was translated and published in the monthly of the Amsterdam Jewish Women’s Council.16 Sternberger described “mixed seating” in synagogues (by men and women together), the “confirmation ceremony” (although something quite different from bar mitzvah ceremonies, this was translated into Dutch as “bar mitzvah for girls and boys”), women singing in synagogue choirs, women included in the minyan, and even the possibility for women to become rabbis. Also, the struggle by women in Germany to become elected in synagogue boards was an example for Dutch Jewish women, and when the United Synagogue (Orthodox) in England introduced that right in 1927, the news was warmly welcomed in Amsterdam.17 In the Netherlands itself, similar efforts to include women on synagogue boards were promoted by men and women together. As early as 1913, several Jews in Maastricht wrote a letter on this subject to their local congregation.18 Immediately after Dutch women acquired the right to be elected in the Dutch parliament – in 1919 – Jews tried to apply the same right to the synagogue board of Rotterdam.19 However, all these efforts were suppressed by the Dutch rabbinate. The same happened with continuous requests concerning modern forms of Jewish education. It ccccccc 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

Maandblad van den Joodschen Vrouwenraad te Amsterdam 2, no. 4 (April 1924); ibid. vol. 3, no. 11 (November 1925, Cheshvan 5686): 1-4. E.M. Sternberger, “De Joodsche vrouw, haar emancipatie en haar werk”, in Maandblad van den Joodschen Vrouwenraad te Amsterdam 1, no. 3 (March 1923, Nissan 5683): 2-3; ibid. vol. 1, no. 4 (April 1923, Iyar 5683): 2-3; ibid. vol. 1, no. 6 (June 1923, Tammuz 5683): 2. Maandblad van den Joodschen Vrouwenraad te Amsterdam 5, no. 12 (December 1927, Kislev 5688). Dr. Salvador Bloemgarten drew my attention to the document. Among the fourteen signatures are those of his grandparents Salvador Hertog and Heintje Hertog-Cohen; J.M. Lemmens, Joods Leven in Maastricht (Maastricht: Stichting Historische Reeks Maastricht, 1990), 49, 50. Het Oude Volk 2, no. 23 (14 May 1919): 137.

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resulted in an ever-growing gap between the strictly Orthodox character of official Dutch Judaism and those Jews who wished to continue their Jewish identity in a modernized form. The efforts of the latter can be traced back – among others – in their contacts with the WUPJ, which were slowly established from 1928 onwards. From correspondence in that year between Miss Lily Montagu, the secretary of the WUPJ in London, and a Mrs. Connie Elias in Rotterdam, it appears that Arnold Hartog, an industrialist in Nijmegen, must have been engaged in an early attempt to establish a Liberal synagogue. In 1928 some remnants of his efforts still existed: a children’s service and lessons, both of a liberal character.20 In 1929, Miss Montagu corresponded with a “Mr. van Zwanenberg”, also in Nijmegen.21 Arnold Hartog and the Van Zwanenberg family were both part of the quickly developing meat and fat industry. Salomon van Zwanenberg founded Organon in 1923. Hartog was incorporated in the Margarine Union in 1929 (just before it became Unilever). These modern but religiously involved Jews were aware of Jewish life in London, the main market of their businesses. They had close relatives living there. In 1930, Salomon van Zwanenberg declared that he should be able to get together in Nijmegen a group of twenty to thirty Jews who were interested in Liberal Judaism.22 These plans never materialized, but two years later he still was a participant in the Governing Body meeting of the WUPJ in The Hague.23 Another example of growing sympathy for the WUPJ came from a different side, namely the Jewish Women’s Council. Its journal published an article by Caroline Wijsenbeek-Franken about the WUPJ’s First World Conference, held in Berlin in 1928.24 In earlier years, Wijsenbeek-Franken, who alternately was the ccccccc 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

Correspondence between Connie Elias in Rotterdam and Miss Lily Montagu in London, 1928 (AJAWUPJ-Man.Coll.16:D7/7). A key to abbreviations used in source references can be found at the beginning of this article. It is very unlikely that this was Arnoldus van Zwanenberg, mentioned by D. Michman (p. 36 of his book) and in several biographical encyclopedias and books afterwards. Michman himself was in doubt, since A. van Zwanenberg lived in Enschede from 1923. From my own more recent research, I learned that the source Michman used (AJA-WUPJ-Man.Coll.16:A1/15) only mentions “Mr. van Zwanenberg from Nijmegen”. In my opinion, this must have been Salomon van Zwanenberg, who lived in Nijmegen and whom I found elsewhere as an active participant during the first years of the movement in Holland. I thank Dr. E. Hannivoort for his information about the Van Zwanenberg family. AJA-WUPJ-Man.Coll.16:D24/6, dossier M. Lasker, letter 13 December 1930. Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 36; Nieuw Joodsch Leven (August 1932), 3. Van Zwanenberg withdrew from later activity for unknown reasons, but one of them might have been that his wife was not very happy with it. “Vernieuwing of Vernietiging”, Maandblad van den Joodschen Vrouwenraad te Amsterdam 6, no. 9 (September 1928, Tishri 5689). The article was not signed, but Wijsenbeek was editor-in-chief and unsigned articles were her own. She herself did not attend the conference. She might have received a report from Paula Ollendorf (Deutsche Jüdischen Frauenbund) which she turned into an article to her own taste (as occured on other occasions).

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Council’s president and chief editor of its monthly, had not hesitated to attack Reform Judaism as a destructive force. In this article, however, her tone had changed. With sympathy she mentioned the involvement in the WUPJ conference of a majority of American Jews, and she became deeply impressed by Dr. Leo Baeck. She positively noted new developments in German Liberal Judaism, and she also described – not with approval, but at least with sympathy – how Miss Lily Montagu from London, dressed in a “lilac-colored gown”, delivered the first synagogue sermon ever delivered by a woman in Germany. Wijsenbeek concluded that Progressive Judaism in its new form could certainly grow into a positive force in the Jewish world. She would never join it, but her article again shows a change of atmosphere in the Netherlands. This became even more obvious in The Hague when in that same year, 1928, a discussion on Jewish education ended with the establishment of a Neutral Youth Club. It offered social activities in addition to some form of enlightened Jewish education. This club was an initiative of the local Jewish Women’s Council. A certain Milly Levisson-Simons had voted against its establishment,25 not because she opposed the initiative, but because no suitable teachers were available. There were only Orthodox teachers in the Netherlands. She presented herself as a “conscious liberal Jew” and suggested that, just like Mrs. Montessori had done when she developed her alternative education system, the group first had to train its own teachers. Soon after, however, the Levissons were active participants in the Neutral Youth Club.26 So far they were not in contact with the WUPJ, but Milly’s husband Levie Levisson had a printing house with international connections, and during a business visit to London in 1929, a friend took him to the Liberal Jewish Synagogue.27 From this group of people in The Hague finally came the founders of the first Liberal congregation and the Union of Liberal-Religious Jews in the Netherlands (1931). Levie Levisson was, no doubt, its most prominent leader. Seven persons signed a first announcement in 1930. Three of them were women. Their names were put above the names of their husbands, beginning with A. Levisson-Simons.28 One of them, Betty Loeb-Levenbach, was a lawyer, also active in the Jewish Women’s Council and the Neutral Youth Club. The congregation soon had some 70 members.29 As one can guess, the first congregation in The Hague was a radical one in ccccccc 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Maandblad van den Joodschen Vrouwenraad te ’s-Gravenhage 3, no. 11 (February 1928, Shevat 5688). She signed as M.L.-S. Ibid. vol. 4, no. 1 (April 1928, Nissan 5688) and vol. 4, no. 6 (September 1928 - Tishri 5689). Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 22. A. Levisson-Simons is Amalia (“Milly”) Levisson-Simons. The original document can be found in the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. Michman, Het Liberale Jodendom, 142.

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which most men came bareheaded (at least in the beginning). Mixed seating was introduced from the very start.30 Taking the role of women in this group into consideration, it is logical that they did not set German Liberal congregations as their example. In those congregations, women sat apart from the men, mostly on a balcony. Mixed seating in synagogues on the European continent in those days only existed in the Liberal synagogue of Paris and in the independent radical Reform congregation in Berlin.31 Unlike most other radical Progressive congregations, the Dutch one was sympathetic to Zionism.32 From all these developments, it is clear that Jews in the Netherlands were involved in a serious and authentic struggle for a modern Jewish identity.33 Their intentions and initiatives were genuinely Dutch and not imposed upon them from the outside, although, in order to succeed, they were in need of guidance and support. The relevance of the WUPJ was that it offered them an alternative framework when they were totally rejected by the Dutch Israelite Church organization. The typically Dutch character of the first congregation is strongly confirmed by letters from its first rabbi, the American Meir (Max) Lasker, who worked with them for half a year. In his correspondence with WUPJ secretary Montagu, he complained about the self-complacency of the Dutch founders.34 Lasker felt that his opinions as a rabbi were not respected by them, and he also voiced regret that the Dutch group simply never made the slightest effort to involve an “interested German group” living in The Hague. The reason for this was however quite obvious. At least one of these German Jews, Mr. Mayer-Wolff, had expressed the opinion that he preferred a “German Liberal congregation” and that was exactly what Dutch Jews did not want.35

ccccccc 30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35.

M.L. Lasker, Een korte uiteenzetting omtrent de Joodsche Reformbeweging (Den Haag 1930); idem, Levend Gelooven (Den Haag: Het Genootschap voor de Joodsche reformbeweging, 1931); Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 39-42; Michman, Het Liberale Jodendom, 42-45. There existed one egalitarian khavurah in Berlin as well (Prof. M.A. Meyer); see M.A. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 338; D. Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Ktav, 1967), 398-400; M. Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), 162-64. The French Liberal congregation was also sympathetic to Zionism. In the Netherlands, the Zionist movement opposed the congregation, but one of its most prominent founders was M.J. Simons, editor of the Zionist movement’s journal. Abel Herzberg, chairman of the Dutch Zionist Union (1934-39) never hid his sympathy. His wife, Thea Loeb, was a sister (in-law) of the lawyers couple Alfred and Betty Loeb-Levenbach, both among the seven founders. Earlier noted for this period by J. Frishman, “De Vrijdagavond as a Mirror of Dutch Jewry in the Interbellum, 1924-1932”, in Dutch Jewry in a Cultural Maelstrom 1880-1940, ed. J. Frishman and H. Berg (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007), 86-96. AJA-WUPJ-Man.Coll.16:D24/6, dossier M. Lasker, letter 12 December 1930. Ibid., exchanged letters between Lasker and Montagu.

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German Jews Despite the evidently Dutch roots of Liberal Judaism in the Netherlands, it nevertheless gradually became identified with the presence of German Jews. It would be a mistake however to reduce this increasing German influence to the arrival of Jewish refugees after 1933. German Jews had entered the Netherlands well before the Nazi period. Some 4,000 German Jewish immigrants settled in the Netherlands before 1933, most of them in Amsterdam.36 They were not refugees in the narrow sense of that word, but had entered the country out of free choice after the First World War and through the 1920s, for reasons including the need to safeguard their businesses from the economic and political chaos in Germany. Most of these German Jews were assimilated and had no desire to join a congregation, but others, who were used to attending weekly services of Liberal synagogues in Germany, felt homeless. They were uncomfortable in Dutch Orthodox synagogues and the Dutch rabbinate was causing them problems by not recognizing decisions on halakhic matters taken by the German Einheitsgemeinde. For them, the establishment of Liberal synagogues in the Netherlands was a welcome idea. During the 1931 initiative in The Hague, it already became clear that Dutch Jews did not always welcome the interest of German Jews in a Liberal congregation. Still, German Jews played an important role in the Liberal congregation that was established in Amsterdam in 1932.37 But here as well, Dutch and German Jews did not get along very well. Although several specific characteristics of the Dutch initiative in The Hague – like mixed seating and a positive attitude to Zionism – were adopted and never abolished in Amsterdam, the more radical Dutch Jews, who pursued the creation of a Dutch congregation, were soon at odds with these German Jews, who took the Liberal synagogues in their original hometowns as an example.38 Although these conflicts also had an ethnical anti-German flavor, rooted in cultural differences, they no less involved a true ideological struggle on the question of which type of Progressive Judaism would dominate the congregation: the radical type, like the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London, or the more traditional type, imported from the German Einheitsgemeinde. All this was already obvious before 1933, yet the arrival of a large group of Jewish refugees from Germany exacerbated the problem. After Hitler’s rise to power, two waves of German refugees entered the Netherlands, in 1933 and in 1938.39 In between, there was a continuous trickle as well. Many ccccccc 36.

37. 38. 39.

D. Michman, “Migration versus ‘Species Hollandia Judaica’: The Role of Migration in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in Preserving Ties Between Dutch and World Jewry”, Studia Rosenthaliana 23, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 67. Michman, Het Liberale Jodendom, 38-39. Ibid., 116-17. See for this subject: D. Michman, The Jewish Refugees from Germany in the Netherlands 1933-1940 (PhD diss. in Hebrew, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1978); B. Moore, Refugees from Nazi Ger-

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traveled on to other destinations, but in 1940 there were still some 16,000 German Jews living in the Netherlands. Many German refugees felt unwelcome in the Dutch Jewish community. Some expressed astonishment about the well-preserved and intolerant Orthodoxy they found. Eva Numan-Leffmann described later how German refugees were put in the back of the Orthodox synagogue of Arnhem and were never called up for the Torah.40 She was the daughter of Ernst Leffmann, a Liberal Jewish lawyer from Berlin, who took his family to the Netherlands in 1933. The same congregation distributed warnings to Jewish organizations in the area against people, “especially from Germany”, who wanted to enjoy the services of the Jewish community without being members.41 The Folkingestraat area in Groningen, in which Jews still lived around their synagogue, amazed Alfred Löwenberg and Siegfried Grünewald and reminded them of “some sort of last ghetto”.42 For them this neighborhood was rather backward, also economically. They felt mistrusted about the reasons for their arrival as well as for having non-Jewish friends. Dutch Jews perceived German Jews as “noisy” in public and “superior” and “always taking the best places.” They were “not modest”, and their own attitude might have been the cause of anti-Semitism in Germany.43 For most religious Jews from Germany, the Dutch Orthodox congregations were too Orthodox, but both Dutch Liberal congregations were too radical. To many of those who entered the Liberal congregation in Amsterdam during the High Holidays of 1933, it must have been a first confrontation with mixed seating. They also were confronted with a Dutch liturgy, different from their German Einheitsgebetbuch. Some Dutch gentlemen from The Hague who attended services in Amsterdam provocatively refused to cover their heads.44 However, more Germanfriendly members welcomed the refugees with open arms. A German rabbi, Dr. Ludwig Jacob Mehler, was nominated in 1934, and although he started out in both congregations, he soon became the rabbi of the Amsterdam congregation alone. Rabbi Mehler was a modern Liberal rabbi who was a Zionist and welcomed women’s participation, but in Germany he would have belonged to a unified congregation and not to the radical Reform one. He actively tried to involve more German refugees and introduced the German Einheitsgebetbuch in addition to the already existing Dutch liturgy. Such initiatives resulted in a tendency among Dutch Jews to leave the Amsterdam congregation disappointed. ccccccc

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

many in the Netherlands 1933-1940 (Amsterdam: IISG, 1986); C.K. Berghuis, Joodse vluchtelingen in Nederland 1938-1940 (Kampen: Kok, 1990); K. Dittrich and H. Würzner, eds., Nederland en het Duitse Exil 1933-1940 (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1982). M. van Praag, “Een lidmaatschap van zeventig jaar”, Kol Mokum 1, no. 1 (2004/5765): 16-18. Michman, The Jewish Refugees from Germany, 297. S. van der Poel, Joodse stadjers: De joodse gemeenschap in de stad Groningen, 1796-1945 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2004), 126-27. Michman, The Jewish Refugees from Germany, 287-309. Michman, Het Liberale Jodendom, 112-17.

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As a German rabbi with a considerable number of German congregation members, Mehler could not help that his congregation – soon the largest of the two(!) – had a far more German character than the one in The Hague. He understood, however, that the purpose of his presence was the development of Dutch Progressive Judaism and made serious efforts to achieve that goal without becoming more radical than he really was. He soon knew Dutch and held his sermons in Dutch. German refugees, who had entered the country with the first wave in 1933, started to adjust. Their children went to Dutch schools. The congregation’s journal Ha-Or, of which several issues appeared in 1937, had a Dutch editor and was – with some minor exceptions – in the Dutch language. Meanwhile, in The Hague it was proven that a Progressive congregation also could exist without relying on the influx of German refugees. That congregation continued to keep German Jews at a distance and preserved both its radical and its Dutch character. With the help of an excellent teacher, Tirtsah Rothbart, it mainly fulfilled the burning desires for education of the members’ children.45 For their infrequent services they made use of an anthropology student, Werner Münsterberger from Berlin, who had served as shaliakh tsibur in the radical Reform congregation and thus fitted the character of their services very well. As a matter of fact, two quite different types of Progressive Judaism seemed to stabilize on Dutch soil, but even the more German one in Amsterdam was clearly meant to serve the Dutch community. This became particularly evident when, in 1936, the Orthodox community in Amsterdam, in view of the growing success of Rabbi Mehler, started a campaign to draw in German refugees as members.46 The chairman of the Liberal congregation in Amsterdam, Walter Jacobsthal – a German Jew who had settled in Amsterdam in 1929 – could not refrain from initiating a similar campaign. By doing so, he made himself impossible with the Dutch members and also with the Dutch leadership in The Hague.47 Jacobsthal was forced to step down, and Levie Levisson from The Hague – a genuine Dutchman indeed(!) – replaced him as chairman of Rabbi Mehler’s congregation in Amsterdam. It was probably during this new conflict over German refugees that some Dutch members of Rabbi Mehler’s congregation started their own independent minyan, with the name Beshem Shomayim.48 We know very little about this tiny and short-lived group, but it must have been radical Reform, since it even introduced Sunday services.

ccccccc 45. 46. 47. 48.

Ibid., 90-91. Ibid., 107-9. AJA-WUPJ-Man.Coll.16:D5/8. Weekblad voor Israëlietische Huisgezinnen, 29 April 1938; Michman, Het Liberale Jodendom, 117; Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 63.

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Negotiations Levisson had always wished to establish a unified congregation (Einheitsgemeinde) under the roof of a more pluralistic Dutch Israelite Church organization, but in The Hague his efforts had been in vain. Shortly after he became chairman in Amsterdam, he and Rabbi Mehler initiated negotiations with the Orthodox community of Amsterdam. In those days, in 1937, two German Jewish leaders came to Amsterdam to join the negotiations: Herr Heinrich Stahl, president of the Berlin Einheitsgemeinde and Rechtsanwalt Heinrich Stern, president of the German Union for Liberal Judaism and representing the WUPJ as well.49 These German Jewish leaders were very eager to interfere in the relationship with the Dutch Orthodox community. Their purpose was to help former members of the Berlin Einheitsgemeinde who had moved to Amsterdam and were confronted with the halakhic consequences of the Dutch situation.50 The acceptance of Mehler’s congregation in a Dutch Einheitsgemeinde with the Orthodox would solve their problems. In a first contact, the Orthodox Chief Rabbi Lodewijk Sarlouis of Amsterdam demanded that the organ be done away with and that Friday evening services start in time for Shabbat. He would tolerate “another gathering”, later on Friday evenings, as long as it would be called “a lecture”.51 Stahl and Stern, under the pressure of the urgent circumstances caused by the Nazi-regime in Germany, were clearly willing to offer more concessions than Levisson. Stern wrote to London – “risking that I might be stoned in England” – that the organ was not an absolute necessity: in Palestine a recently founded Liberal congregation also had services without the use of an organ.52 Levisson however, would never compromise on the organ. The negotiations did not even enter the more complicated halakhic questions, since the Orthodox all of a sudden ended them, without mentioning a reason.53 After this failure, the two Progressive congregations went their separate ways. They established two independent “Liberal Jewish Church Organizations”, each representing a different type of Progressive Judaism.54 Under pressure of the WUPJ, the Union for Liberal-Religious Jews in the Netherlands continued to represent both congregations, with Levie Levisson as their leader. In 1938 and 1939, when a new wave of refugees came in, the Amsterdam congregation organized separate services for them in German, once a month. Rabbi and members were very active in refugee ccccccc 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

AJA-WUPJ-Man.Coll.16:D5/8. Their marriages, performed by the Einheitsgemeinde in Germany, were not accepted in the Netherlands, and children of mothers converted to Judaism by the Beth Din of the Einheitsgemeinde were not recognized as Jewish children. AJA-WUPJ-Man.Coll.16:D5/8, letter from Stern to Montefiore, 18 May 1937. Ibid. SAA-1312/23, Annual Report LJG Amsterdam, 7 March 1937 to 27 March 1938; Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 59. Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 58-64.

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work, but by organizing these separate services, they clearly made an effort not to compomise too much on their own regular services and to continue their original policy to become a Dutch congregation.55 In spite of these intentions, the number of German Jews they had to integrate and the heavy, orderly, and intellectual – in fact German – character of their services made that a quite impossible task.56 In 1940 the two Progressive congregations had some 900 to 1,000 members all together; 70-80% of them were of German origin.57 Both had their own German rabbi: Mehler in Amsterdam and Dr. Hans Andorn in The Hague, who arrived in 1938. Although Andorn soon spoke Dutch, he naturally attracted more German refugees even in The Hague. In a report, one of the original founders of that congregation expressed his frustration that both congregations were unable to attract the liberal-minded Dutch Jews they were originally meant for.58 In general, Dutch Jews now seemed estranged from their own initiatives and needs. It was certainly not what they had wanted when they started their efforts.59 It should be noted however that these two congregations never developed into complete “refugee congregations” comparable with Belsize Square synagogue in London, founded in 1939, as a copy of an old-fashioned German Liberal congregation. One of the reasons might well be that a real Liberal German refugee congregation, named Ahawas Tsedokoh, also came into being in Amsterdam-South.60 Little is known about it, but it was the initiative of German refugees and had a completely German character. It functioned from 1938 till 1941 or 1942. Its existence must have offered some relief for the internal tensions in and between the existing Liberal and Orthodox congregations.

Radical and Dutch Again After the war, the only Liberal congregation that made its immediate comeback was the one in Amsterdam. Both rabbis of the Liberal congregations – Rabbi Mehler and Rabbi Andorn – had been murdered and so were most of the members. In The Hague, some Dutch founders had survived, including Levie Levisson, but they had become old by now. Levisson’s son Robert A. Levisson had become a Zionist and initially showed no interest in reestablishing Liberal congregations in the Netherccccccc 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

AJA-WUPJ-Man.Coll.16:D5/8. Bericht der Liberaal Joodsche Gemeente Amsterdam aan de World Union for Progressive Judaism, 12 July 1939. Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 70. Ibid., 75; M. Meyer, Response to Modernity, 340. Michman, Het Liberale Jodendom, 131. Dr. M. Goudeket in his review of Michman’s Het Liberale Jodendom. Source: SAA-PA-1505, box 14; Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 70. Algemeen Joods Weekblad 1 (23 February 1940, 14 Adar I 5700), Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. See Michman, Het Liberale Jodendom, 132; Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 62-64.

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The radical leadership of Dutch Progressive Judaism in the 1960s. From left to right: Lawyer R.A. (Bob) Levisson. From: archive NIW; Rabbi Jacob Soetendorp. From: archive LJG Amsterdam; Dr. Maurits Goudeket. From: private archive J. Goudeket.

lands. In Amsterdam, a young Dutch member, Dr. Maurits Goudeket, at first became the leader of the Liberal community, but he left for Curaçao in 1946.61 Therefore, in the end, the surviving German Jews were the ones to rebuild the congregation. Two of them, Louis Jacobi and Herbert Rosenthal, while in BergenBelsen in 1944, had even sworn to each other to restore the Liberal congregation in Amsterdam if they would survive. The overwhelming majority of its members originated in prewar Germany, and they were extremely isolated from the remaining Dutch Jewish community. They prayed from the German Einheitsgebetbuch and wrote the protocols of their Board meetings in German.62 The historical events of the period had molded them into “Dutch survivors of the Shoah”, but as a foreign element – and speaking the much hated language of the enemy – they failed to attract Dutch Jews to their community. Some of them were remarkably talented people, surrounded by a flavor of the cultural wealth of pre-Nazi Berlin, like composer Hans Krieg and opera singer Paula Lindberg. The latter’s husband, Prof. Dr. Albert Salomon, served the congregation as mohel. His daughter, Charlotte Salomon, had fled to France from where she was deported and killed in Auschwitz in 1943. Thanks to her father’s survival in the Netherlands, her gouaches Leben? Oder Theater? Ein Singespiel are now treasured in the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam.63 Among the other members was Anne Frank’s father Otto Frank, the lone survivor of his family, which had come from Frankfurt am Main and joined the ccccccc 61. 62. 63.

Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 98. The immediate postwar history of Dutch Progressive Judaism is described in Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 92-103. G. Schwartz, ed., Charlotte Salomon, Life or Theater: An Autobiographical Play (New York: Viking Press 1981).

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congregation in 1934.64 Frank represented the postwar congregation in the World Union for Progressive Judaism for several years. The isolated position of German Jewish refugees in the Netherlands is well illustrated by an account written in 1953 by one of them, Dr. E. Philippsthal from Overveen near Haarlem. Nearly twenty years after his arrival as a refugee from Nazi Germany, he addressed his frustrations in a private letter to Dr. Shlomo Rülf, a German-speaking Liberal rabbi from Israel, who at that moment was serving the small Liberal congregation of Amsterdam: I live in Holland since 1934 and to my regret I have to conclude that the – from the very beginning – so extraordinary reserved attitude of the Dutch Jews towards us, has not changed a bit over the years. If we wanted to achieve something, we could always better do it with the Christians in this country, this in spite of the undeniable existence of anti-Semitism… I have the impression that the Dutch Jews never read anything about the history of Diaspora Jewry and that they honestly believe that they themselves descend from the old Batavians. It seems fortunate to me that there exists a good relationship amongst the German Jews in Amsterdam. This will at least prevent them from joining up with the Christians.65

Rabbi Shlomo Rülf, to whom Philippsthal’s letter was addressed, had come to Amsterdam for a year at the request of the WUPJ. He was impressed by the stubborn way in which these German Jews held to their ideals, describing them as “Eidgenossen” (sworn confederates).66 Against all odds, they had succeeded in reviving a small congregation along the lines of Rabbi Mehler’s prewar accomplishments, but in spite of their resolve they also understood it had no future as long as it attracted German members alone. They agreed with Rabbi Rülf and with “Bob” (R.A.) Levisson that the congregation could only survive if it would become a Dutch Progressive congregation. A Dutch rabbi had to be found, and it would – no doubt – become a painful process to which the German Jews complied. In 1954 they nominated Jacob Soetendorp to this job. Soetendorp had been an Orthodox rabbinical student before the war and finished his studies in 1955 under the leadership of Dr. Leo Baeck in London. He had lived in Israel for several years and traveled to the United States. In both countries he had become acquainted with different variations of Progressive Judaism.67 Once he entered

ccccccc 64.

65. 66. 67.

Otto Frank appears in prewar archives. SAA-PA-1505, box 18. Early members testified to me that the family joined the congregation in 1934. Interview with Mrs. L.H. Isselmann-Flatow, The Hague, Nov. 2007. SAA-1312/165. Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 102. Ibid., 104-16. In Jerusalem he had attended the services of the Mevakshei Haderekh on a regular basis. This was a Reconstructionist congregation affiliated with the WUPJ. In the United States he had visited Reform temples.

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his job and started a journal, the congregation soon attracted more Dutch members and embarked upon a period of growth. A successful youth group was established, the synagogue became packed on special occasions, and in 1957 it moved to a larger building of its own, in which a hall was dedicated in memory of Anne Frank. Nevertheless, at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, it was clear that things were not going as well as they should. The biggest problem was the Shabbat morning service, still completely dominated in style by German Jews and utterly unattractive to modern Dutch Jews. The Dutch rabbi knew the truth: “My congregation is so very Orthodox”, he wrote to an American friend.68 “It looks in many ways like a [Liberal] congregation in Germany of thirty years ago.” Far more radical Dutch Jews were knocking on his doors, even demanding “gatherings without God”, which he refused. His sons started to read material coming in from the United States. One of them practiced his new knowledge during the services in the synagogue. He was called before the Torah and came up without a prayer shawl, causing the president of the community, Louis Jacobi, to throw one over his shoulders.69 Again, things were clearly heading for a collision between traditional German Jews and far more radical young Dutch. Decisive in this process became the fact that – in 1961 – Maurits Goudeket came back from Curaçao, where he had served the Reform congregation of Willemstad as a rabbi.70 He knew the world of American Judaism and the WUPJ from within now. Soon after his return, Goudeket, Soetendorp and Bob Levisson – who had never left for Israel – grabbed their chance and modernized the congregation.71 Levisson still was just as fond of the radical Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London, as he had ever been. One of the German board members asked him in fear: “What will come of us now, how far will you go? Will it be: no prayer shawls, no yarmulkes and no minyan?”72 It did not go that far, but it is true that the Liberal congregation of Amsterdam now entered the most radical period of its existence. It soon had a fast growing Dutch membership, which justified the chosen policy. In a certain way, this new, radical start was – after 30 years – a return to the beginnings of what Liberal Judaism in the Netherlands was meant to be. The older members had to adjust and they were willing to do so, but sometimes, even many years later, when another border was crossed and – for example – a woman ccccccc 68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

Ibid., 174. Ibid., 176. The son was Awraham Soetendorp, later rabbi in The Hague 1968-2008. Goudeket was a teacher in physics and also working as such in Willemstad. At the same time he was the unordained “rabbi” of the congregation. His experience and knowledge became so extensive that he was ordained as a rabbi much later in life. Ibid., 174-86. Ibid., 178.

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for the first time was called to read from the Torah, it became a bit too much. Someone would get up and walk out of the building loudly saying in German: “Schande, Schande”.73

Conclusion The first generation of Dutch Progressive Jews in the 1930s was radical by choice with a strong interest in British and American Progressive Judaism. Together with Zionists, emancipating women, and others, they participated in a genuine search for a modern Jewish identity in the Netherlands. However, the presence of German migrants, followed by a flood of German refugees with a more old-fashioned understanding of Liberal Judaism soon overwhelmed their largest congregation in Amsterdam. This created an uneasy partnership in Progressive Judaism and disturbed the Dutch in the continuation of their own development. Although the oldest and smaller congregation in The Hague succeeded in preserving its Dutch character at least till the end of 1938, it was no doubt hampered in its development by the enduring conflict and the lack of a strong partner of similar character in Amsterdam. Therefore, we will never know how successful or unsuccessful the Dutch Jews would have been without the presence of German refugees in the 1930s, nor what course their internal development would have taken. It is interesting, however, that with the successful “Dutchification” of the community in the 1960s, the pattern of radicalism returned to it. A radicalism particular to the Dutch Jewish setting seems to have been a condition for success for the establishment of Progressive Judaism in the Netherlands.74

ccccccc 73. 74.

“Shame, shame!” See: D. Lilienthal, “Vijfendertig jaar positief en betrokken Jodendom”, in Brasz, In de tenten van Jaäkov, 255. Later on, radicalism was left behind again, as happened worldwide in the World Union for Progressive Judaism. The Dutch congregations are among the most conservative today. The emancipation of women was continued, however, and women serve as rabbis. In 2006 the Orthodox had a membership of 4,750. The Progressives had just over 3,100 members in nine congregations. There are some 30,000 to 40,000 Jews living in the Netherlands.

David de Vries

Burnishing the Rough The Relocation of the Diamond Industry to Mandate Palestine

The birth of the Israeli diamond industry in the 1940s was a watershed event. While all the efforts to create a diamond cutting center during the first third of the 20th century failed, in the early stages of World War II it suddenly emerged and within a few years turned into a world-scale diamond production center. It was during the war and the period that followed immediately after that the entire edifice of the industry was shaped, making diamonds into one of the central exporting branches of the Palestinian and later Israeli economy and often affecting what had been going on in the diamond industry around the world.1 However, it changed more than the traditional Eurocentric map of diamond cutting and trading centers. Capitalism – as a system of ideas and practices – had been advancing in Palestine since the end of the 19th century. It surged between the two world wars following accelerated industrialization, and it peaked during the Holocaust period. In this process, the foundations were laid for the strength of private capital in Palestinian and Israeli society, and the diamond industry had a crucial role to play in it. Its economic centrality, its tremendous profits, the immense income of hard currency it accrued to the sterling bloc, its managerial and business practices, its approaches to workers unions, its effects on urban society, and last but not least its international networking, even during the war, clearly placed the diamond industry at the center of Palestine’s and the Yishuv’s capitalist formation.2 More significant perhaps was the association of this dramatic emergence with the state: the British colonial Mandate state and the embryonic state institutions in the Yishuv. The notion of state and state building was advancing in the region – as is well known – during the Ottoman period. But in Palestine it turned into a formative factor, mainly following the immense institutional and economic intervention of the British in Palestine and in the wake of the wide range of institutional acccccccc 1.

2.

M. Szenberg, The Economics of the Israeli Diamond Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1973); D. De Vries, Diamonds and War: State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). Y. Estheron, “The Development of the Diamond Industry in Palestine during World War II” [Hebrew], (seminar paper, Department of Economics, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1975).

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tivity in the Jewish sector during the Mandate. In the process in which Palestine became acquainted with state power and state building, the mutual and reciprocal relations between the state and private capital had a crucial role to play. This mutual use that state and capital were making of each other greatly intensified during the 1940s, and again it was here that the diamond industry had a major impact. It was, if you like, one of the main sites in which relations between state and capital were learned, thought of and practiced, and by and large bequeathed to the post-1948 bureaucrats and industrialists.3 I emphasize this last point because of the tendency in the literature on diamonds and their political economy to stress their enclave-like and exclusionary character at the expense of the multifaceted institutional frameworks which allowed the Jewish presence in the diamond industry to happen and persist. The pervasive presence of Jews in financing diamond mining in Africa, in diamond cutting in the Low Countries and beyond, and in the trading halls of the diamond bourses created a perception of ethnic exclusivity that failed to appreciate the cultures of negotiation they developed with other ethnic and religious groups and the frequent social proximity that these exchanges produced. Moreover, the longstanding autonomous character of the way business has been done in the diamond trade, its trust- and reputation-based rituals, not to mention its communal and relational corollaries, have so fascinated historians and social scientists that they have tended to underestimate their penetrability and diversification over time. The diamond industry never fully opted out of social frameworks and state structures. On the contrary, they mutually fed on each other, and the story of the relocation of the industry from the Low Countries to 1940s Palestine well bears this out.4 Relocation can be a misleading term, as nothing moved in its entirety into just one place. Dispersion could be better used to describe the splintering of the traditional diamond centers, the creation of their industrial diasporas, and the often forgotten fact of their temporary and transitional nature. However, the important point is that the diamond industry in Palestine was part of a historical continuum of dislocation and relocation of know-how, of craft traditions, and of occupational cultures. After years of small scale development in diamond trading and manufacturing, the diamond industry took off in the Netherlands in the last third of the 19th century. Following World War I and the Great Depression it declined, and its own extenccccccc 3. 4.

Government of Palestine, Report of a Committee Appointed by Government to Examine the Question of Post War Regulation of the Palestine Diamond Industry, written by Geoffrey Walsh (Jerusalem 1946). S. Kanfer, The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995); B. Richman, “How Communities Create Economic Advantage: Jewish Diamond Merchants in New York”, Law and Social Inquiry 31 vol. 2 (2006): 383-420.

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sions in nearby Antwerp and distant New York gradually surpassed it.5 In the 1920s and 1930s, Antwerp became hegemonic, but after the Nazi seizure of power, a German diamond industry quickly emerged which not only surpassed the Dutch one but also turned into the lifeline of the Belgian merchants and producers. The outbreak of the Second World War, the German occupation of the Low Countries, and the Holocaust gave this “dislocated” history its dual dramatic turn: first, in multiplying the diamond diasporas in Latin America, New York, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Palestine; secondly, in the eradication of thousands of Jewish diamond experts, manufacturers, and workers. After the war, the wanderings of the industry continued. Palestine entered a crisis, Antwerp recuperated, the Dutch first made a small recovery and then further recovered, and Germany rose again, in particular in the American zone of occupation until it was boycotted in 1949-50.6 In this winding continuum, Jews had of course a central role, quite reminiscent of ethnic occupational groups that fill in all kinds of niches in today’s global economy: first, because of their longstanding presence in diamonds; secondly, because war, fascism, and war again made them move, disperse, and play formative roles in creating centers of production; and thirdly, because of the destabilization which followed the transfer. This was clearly borne out in the impact that the post1945 return of Jewish refugees to Antwerp and immigration to Palestine had on the diamond cutting and trading centers they created in 1940-41. Any exploration of the modern diamond industry must take into account these inherent border-blurring movements, its strong dependence on Jews, and its deep exposure to wars, ideological extremism, and political change. However, these trajectories are largely structural. They tell us only part of the story. What was moving, how it moved, and what was actually taking place in these border crossings – these tell us a lot more, and also much beyond the diamond industry. It was not just relocation that came to characterize the transnational history of diamonds but also the changes in business and occupational cultures that the relocation brought about.7 For the planners of the new diamond industry, Palestine was originally thought of as a mixed venture: it was to be an alternative to Antwerp and a warfare lever against Germany. It was meant to save Jews, but also from the British point of view to gain hard currency for the sterling bloc. From the viewpoint of the local entrepreneurs in Palestine who drew all the threads together, it aimed to industrialize ccccccc 5.

6. 7.

J. Arnon (van Amerongen), “The Jews in the Diamond Industry in Amsterdam”, in Dan Michman, ed., Dutch Jewish History (Assen u.a.: Van Gorcum, 1984), 305-13; S. Edelman, ed., The Jews of the Diamond City – Amsterdam: A Legacy of 400 Years [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan: H. Oppenheimer Diamond Museum, 1988). M. Berman, “The Location of the Diamond-Cutting Industry”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61, vol. 2 (1971): 316-28. D. Federman, “Diamonds and the Holocaust”, Modern Jeweler (May 1985): 41-46.

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Netanya. Considered a longstanding Jewish occupational niche, the diamond industry could well fulfill these multiple functions. This was particularly the case in Palestine, which was distant from the main theatres of war, controlled by the British, turned recently into a supply center for the war effort, and above all a strategic post for hampering the smuggling of stones from Africa and Egypt to Syria and Istanbul and from there to Germany. This coalescence of interest brought together old partners – the British Empire, the De Beers diamond cartel, and Jewish diamond circles – with private entrepreneurs and municipal activists in Palestine. The Zionist movement as such – that is, the Jewish Agency and its emissaries in Amsterdam, Antwerp, and London – were tied in only partially, thus allowing the British to cooperate with Jewish private capital without compromising their White Paper policies curtailing Jewish immigration to Palestine and land transactions. The notion that an ethnic group with a presumed occupational specificity could serve British and Allied interests was a key to the entire migratory project under discussion here.8 Once designed and planned, the implication was that the entire operation would be run as a state-supervised monopoly. None of the liberties practiced by the diamond people in the Low Countries would be allowed; manufacturers had to be licensed and had to join an organization, and, most significant of all, the function of the manufacturer was united with that of the merchant and the dealer. All rough diamonds were to be bought directly from the diamond cartel in London, and all polished stones had to be exported, mainly to the USA so as to gain dollars. This functional unity meant two things: that Palestine was created as a center of diamond manufacturing rather than as one of trading; and secondly, that the traditional social and economic divisions embodied in the function of the middlemen were therefore changed. The concentration of manufacturing and organizational power and the deep involvement of the British in making it work were not simply bureaucratic. They meant to make the transplanted industry viable, to have it controlled so that no stones would reach the Germans, and to ensure that the expansion of the industry would be limited so as not to endanger the future recovery of the industry in Belgium. The entire affair was therefore politicized from the start. Excluding the middlemen, even though it was a temporary measure of the war, turned this politicized control into a social act with further social implications.9 Adaptation to war conditions did not stop here. As all diamond cutting was to be done in factories, a central feature of the traditional diamond industry was paralyzed – home work and domestic labor. This meant that the apprenticeship expe-

ccccccc 8. 9.

E.J. Epstein, The Diamond Invention (London: Hutchinson, 1982); C. Newbury, The Diamond Ring: Business, Politics, and Precious Stones in South Africa, 1867-1947 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Government of Palestine, Report of the Diamond Control Sub-Committee, written by Solomon Horowitz, John L. Fletcher, and David Andreson, 21 June 1944, Central Zionist Archive, S40/269/1.

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rience would cease to be a family affair, something that the Polish and Rumanian immigrant networks in the Netherlands and Belgium had cultivated for quite a while.10 The know-how of the craft was brought with them, as the Dutch and Belgian experts testified. So did the model relations of the industry with specific banking institutions, as prominent banking figures such as Albert Ehrenfeld expressed. However, a significant component of the social culture surrounding apprenticeship, the immigrant family, and negotiations between Jews and non-Jews in the cities and the villages was cut off. The factory-based teaching of skill followed tradition. So did the Platzgeld, the money the apprentice had to pay for hiring table space and tools. However, the concentration on a small number of inductors with workers barred from moving from one factory to another shaped an atmosphere of efficiency and regimentation.11 Social engineering followed. The Colonial Office and the Ministry of Economic Warfare on the British side and the local entrepreneurs in Palestine agreed that the industry would be Jewish only. This was quite an unprecedented understanding in the British Empire. State and capital agreed here formally not only on maintaining an ethnic occupational tradition but also on ethnic segregation and Arab exclusion which impacted labor market tensions between Arabs and Jews. The diamond cutters were therefore to become Britain’s and De Beers’ special natives, similar to the tribal groups and chiefs chosen to mine diamonds in Sierra Leone by the British-backed Selection Trust Company. The Jews were tasked with a particular role, and relying on them was based on the perception of their historical occupational niche and on the application of the ethnic-trust system in trade to production itself. In this way an interesting coalescence of interest was created by Britain and Zionism, in which Palestine was serving the needs of the war by replacing paralyzed Belgium on the one hand, and Britain was serving the economic foundations of the Zionist polity in Palestine on the other. If some religious plurality existed in diamonds in Amsterdam and Antwerp, with some interesting expressions in joint trade union activity and collective action in Palestine, the lines were clearly drawn.12 Clearly the shaping from above of the industry was greatly facilitated by the ccccccc 10.

11. 12.

K. Hofmeester, Jewish Workers and the Labour Movement: A Comparative Study of Amsterdam, London and Paris, 1870-1914 (Aldershot, Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2004); S. Leydesdorff, We Lived With Dignity: The Jewish Proletariat of Amsterdam, 1900-1940 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994); S. Lipschitz, The Amsterdam Diamond Exchange (Amsterdam: Stadsuitgeverij Amsterdam, 1990). Y. Mazur, “The Diamond Industry”, in Palestine’s Economic Future: A Review of Progress and Prospects, ed. Joseph B. Hobman (London: P.L. Humphries and Co, 1946), 229-37. N. Shapira, “Jews in the Diamond Trade and Industry” [Hebrew], Gesher 2 (April 1956): 84-104, and 3 (August 1956): 118-35; A. M. Shainberg, “Jews and the Diamond Trade”, Jewish Directory and Almanac 1 (1984): 301-11; G. Yogev, Diamonds and Coral: Anglo-Dutch Jews and Eighteenth-Century Trade (New York: Leicester University Press, 1978); R. Shor, Connections: A Profile of Diamond People and their History (Ramat Gan, Israel: published for the WFDB by International Diamond Pub, 1993).

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identity of the capital involved in the project. Because of the swiftness of the German occupation, the capital and diamonds expected to arrive from Belgium was too small, and capital owners and manufacturers had to be selected locally. This diversified the composition of capital in the diamond industry, mixing in many with no background in diamond-making or trading. The owners and manufacturers, many of whom totally lacked background in and knowledge of diamonds, were therefore dependent on the monopoly: on the British who gave them licenses, the cartel that sent them the rough stones to cut and polish, and the manufacturers’ organization presided dictatorially by Oved Ben Ami. We reach now the more interesting part. In contrast to tradition, Palestine asked De Beers to specialize in one type of stone, namely the small stone or Sand. This used to also be Antwerp’s specialty and lever in surpassing Amsterdam, but it also catered to the need of the diamond cartel to dispose of large reserves of such stones created by the paralysis of the Low Countries. The specialization in the small stone turned Palestine into one of the world’s leading suppliers, but it also narrowed the spectrum of skills held by the traditional cutter. Moreover, in the Low Countries it took at least three years to induct an apprentice cutter and polisher, and apprenticeship usually covered all types of stones and all cutting and polishing skills. In Palestine, the labor process was fragmented now into a system called the Chain or Phases, in which the apprentice learned just one phase of the cutting and polishing process. This “Taylorization” of production enabled the shortening of the learning process to three to six months and the quickening of the entry of the cutter to production and earning. The chain division of the labor process which made the worker perform just one part of the diamond cutting process did away with the integral character of the worker, and in deskilling the traditional worker seriously impinged on the autonomy the diamond workers enjoyed in their traditional setup in the Low Countries. Taylorization could add to profit and to quick expansion, but it could also contract the knowledge and multiple skills of the worker. His body became the extension of efficiency, wrote one diamond worker in 1943: “The specialization of the worker in one part of the diamond processing which acquires the worker dexterity and great speed in a narrow and limited part of the profession, and considering that this is piecework, reduced the worker to the level of a machine without him being able to acquire for himself full and wide knowledge of the profession.” Together with the shortening of the apprenticeship, this further weakened the prewar cultural correspondence between the cutting centers of Antwerp and Netanya.13 An entire work

ccccccc 13.

See the articles in the bulletins of the diamond workers: Hasapir (The Sapphire), information bulletin of the first diamond factory in Jerusalem, 1943 (in Hebrew); Hatzohar (Aperture), the bulletin of the diamond workers in Jerusalem, 1943 (in Hebrew); and Niv Poalei Hayahalomim, bulletin of the Histadrut Diamond Workers’ Union (in Hebrew).

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culture was undergoing a transformation. Notions of time, of the wholeness and totality of the skill, of the character of those initiated into the craft and of the traditional solidarities created by the old system – all these were changing now, blending technological change and efficiency for the sake of profit maximization with Zionist time considerations.14 The “Taylorization” of the labor process not only accentuated the supplanting of home work by the factory but also accounted for a new kind of paternalism in the diamond industry which was less known in the Low Countries. First, it meant that labor unionism and representation of the workers would be weakened and the longstanding consensual relations between employers and unions in the diamond industry were altered. Secondly, it was a paternalism based not on the owner and employer just as a capitalist, but also as the source of inspiration for the linking of capital and nation, and the harnessing of capital accumulation to the Zionist cause. This merging of capitalist efficiency with considerations of time and international competitiveness interested the Zionist economists who propounded the association between Herzl and Taylor, between national home for the Jews and efficiency, and could thus be referred to as the Zionization of the labor process. It also attracted the attention of the diamond people in London, some of them Jewish Belgian exiles, who feared that Palestine’s consequent specialization in small stones would not only surpass Belgium’s prewar supremacy but practically hamper its postwar recuperation.15 These adaptations did not remain uncontested. Experts and manufacturers attacked what seemed to them not only a change of traditions but a dangerous turn that might make the polishing of diamonds in Palestine a temporary episode. The “deskilling” of the traditional diamond worker seemed to many not just to be an ominous harming of the craftsmen and the craft but also to harbor potential harming of the quality of production. Diamond merchants and dealers protested the interdiction of their free activity and turned to informal dealings, the black market, and the underworld of private commercial clubs. Many feared that weakening workers’ representation missed the great potential in consensual employment relations demonstrated in the Netherlands and Belgium. The narrowing of production to the small stone seemed self-defeating in the long run, and there were those who looked at the “Taylorized” chain system as a contamination of a craft which has been developing its managerial and production techniques for many years.16 ccccccc 14. 15.

16.

H. Goldmann, The Diamond and Its Making [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv 1946). V. Laureys, “The Belgian Government in Exile in London and the Jewish Question during the Second World War”, Historical Research 67, no. 163 (June 1994): 212-23; E. Laureys, “De joodse diamantdiaspora en de versnippering van de Antwerpse diamanthandel en -nijverheid tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog”, in Jaarboek van het Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (NIOD), 2003. Histadrut, The Diamond Worker in Palestine, submitted to the International Congress of Diamond Workers by The Executive Committee of the General Federation of Jewish Labour in Eretz-Israel

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This myriad contestation joined three significant tensions that the transplantation of the industry to Palestine provoked. The first originated with diamond circles among the Belgian exiles in London who feared that Palestine’s expansion would compromise the capacity of the Belgians to recover their industry after the war. The second was institutional. Zionist institutions objected to the independence of the industry and to the intimate ties with and dependence on the British. The dictatorial running of the monopoly of diamond manufacturers by Netanya’s mayor was harshly criticized by both the Jewish Agency and many diamond manufacturers in Tel Aviv who longed for the liberties they enjoyed in Antwerp. The third tension was less centered on power but concerned a no less powerful issue: for many in the Yishuv, the diamond industry seemed anathema to their social perceptions. After all, many claimed it was a luxury industry, it catered mainly to the American middle classes, it had not much to do with land and building, and, as some described it, there was something deceptive in the glitter of diamonds. It was reminiscent of the association of Jews with big money invested in diamond mining and with great profits, with social self-enclosure, and with a variety of stereotypes which contributed to Jewish social alienation and delegitimization. It was, as some said, a bastard, and to become kosher it must lend itself to Zionist use and institutional state building control.17 The diamond manufacturers and the workers battled against these images. Their argumentation focused on the industry’s high productivity and great income from foreign trade, both part of the tremendous boom Palestine was experiencing during the war. They were part of the Allies’ war effort and had a role to play in absorbing refugee cutters and polishers from the Low Countries otherwise turned into forced labor in diamond cutting in Bergen-Belsen or exterminated. They advanced the moral legitimacy of the Zionist economy in Palestine to inherit the German industry, and they played a key role in relaxing economic competition with Belgium through weaving international connections among the manufacturers and the diamond unions. The diamond industry therefore imagined a world in which Zionism, despite the war and the Holocaust, did not reject its Jewish and European pasts. In practice, the industry earned its social legitimacy through its tremendous economic success. And indeed, measured in terms of production, absorption of new workers, technological advances, and of course marketing and gaining American

ccccccc

17.

(Tel Aviv 1946); H. Boas, “Jews and the Amsterdam Diamond Trade”, Studia Rosenthaliana 26, vols. 1/2 (1992), 214-22; E. Laureys, Meesters van het diamant: De Belgische diamantsector tijdens het nazibewind (Tielt [Belgium]: Lannoo, 2005). O. Ben Ami, “The Diamond Cutting Industry in Palestine: A Report Presented to His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies”, October 1942, The National Archive (UK): PRO CO 852/457/2.

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dollars, no one doubted the enormity of the material success, let alone its contrast to what was going on in Europe.18 Moreover, the association of the industry in Palestine as an alternative to Antwerp and justified inheritor of the German diamond industry turned the material advance of the industry into a solid presence in world diamond production and a significant part of the industrial boom Palestine was experiencing. The liberation in autumn 1944 and the actual ending of the war a few months later began however to reverse the fortunes of the industry and exposed the fragility of the adaptation. Once hostilities were over, the historical energies of relocation in the diamond industry reemerged. The trigger was of course Belgium’s return to business but more significantly the reversion of both the British and the diamond cartel to supporting Belgium’s recuperation of its world hegemony. Jewish refugees were now called back to Antwerp (though not many returned), the industrial diasporas were to pay back their gains from the German occupation of the Low Countries, and postwar economic nationalism ushered in a fierce competition over the American markets for diamonds. Among the manufacturers in Palestine, the joy of liberation was mixed now with great anxiety. After a few more months of Belgian recuperation, a crisis hit the factories.19 Once the war ended, the diamond industry in Palestine was again in turmoil. If war conditions shaped the industry in an abnormal way, what was normality now that war conditions had ended? Abnormality was defined in many ways: the quick expansion, the fragmentation of the labor process, the enmity between private capital and the Jewish Agency, the contrast between the boom in Palestine and the fate of Jews in Europe, even the unending labor strikes which came to characterize the industry. Above all, abnormal development was the distancing of the industry in Palestine from tradition, the centralized nature of power, production, and management, and the threat that Palestine’s unlimited expansion of production and gain posed on the recovery of Antwerp. The debate on what was – and should be – a normal diamond industry produced an in-depth investigation at the end of 1945, conducted by the British and occasioning dozens of witnesses from within and outside the industry and ending with the need to normalize the industry by deregulating it, to liberalize controls, and to free the constrained energies of the industry to orient themselves independently in

ccccccc 18.

19.

O. Ben Ami, “Die Diamantindustrie in Palestina”, Schweizer Goldschmied 5 (May 1948), 32-33. See also D. De Vries, “‘The Bastard is Rendered Kosher’: Diamonds, War, and Legitimization of Private Capital in Mandate Palestine” [Hebrew], in Essays in Honor of Anita Shapira, ed. M. Chazan and U. Cohen (forthcoming). A. Ehrenfeld, “Problems of the Diamond Industry in Palestine”, sent to D. Horowitz at the Jewish Agency, 24 September 1946, Central Zionist Archive, S40/269/1.

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the competitive conditions of the postwar era.20 However, the real change came when the recovery of Antwerp reached the stage in which it started to cause the collapse of the diamond diasporas created during the war. In parallel, the American market for finished stones contracted greatly following a change in consumption patterns, and the competition between the diamond cutting centers over the American market climaxed. Palestine too entered a period of crisis, and between the end of 1946 and the first half of 1947 it almost totally collapsed. The collapse of the industry was no less dramatic than its emergence. Many of the cutting and polishing factories closed down, masses of diamond workers in Netanya and Tel Aviv were forced to seek another occupation or became unemployed, and the central role the industry held in the country’s foreign trade and in the financial and social prospects of the investors, owners, and experts that populated the industry almost dissipated. A quick glance at what was changed reveals the reversal of the picture we had on the emergence of the industry early in the war: deconcentration of power, great financial loss, bankruptcies, inability to protect the industry, black market, and the reemergence of home industry, domestic labor, and illegal import and export of diamonds. Moreover, while labor strikes disappeared, the power of the unions increased, with the Histadrut practically buying diamond factories or simply merging with private capital to form producers’ cooperatives run jointly with the workers. In these conditions of crisis and pending collapse, the debate over normality now took a new turn. To survive, the industry in Palestine would have to take into account not just Belgium’s recovered world hegemony but also the revival of the German cutting industry, the backing the diamond cartel gave Antwerp, and, last but not least, the pending departure of the British from Palestine and their support of the diamond industry. The solution came from two directions. First, a series of visits were made to Belgium in 1946 and 1947 by both diamond experts and advisors from Palestine and London. In these visits, the Belgian models of management of the diamond industry, relations between manufacturers and workers, and a variety of other issues were learned and discussed. Secondly, in Palestine itself, a process of tying the diamond industry to a new state authority, namely the Jewish Agency and soon the state of Israel, was taking place, largely under the guidance and direction of Albert Ehrenfeld and Jaap van Amerongen, in which the models of operation traditionally practiced in prewar Amsterdam and Antwerp and revived in particular in Antwerp after 1946 were adopted.21 The historical memory of the traditional diamond cutting ccccccc 20. 21.

See the articles in Hayahalom (The Diamond), bulletin of the Palestine diamond industry (in Hebrew); and Hayahalomai (The Diamantaire), bulletin of diamond experts in Palestine (in Hebrew). M. Vermandere, Adamastos: 100 jaar Algemene Diamantbewerkersbond van België (Antwerp 1995); H. Binneweg and M.J. Walgrave, Beurs voor Diamanthandel: A Hundred Brilliant Years 1904-2004 (Antwerp: Archief en Museum van de Socialistische Arbeidersbeweging (AMSAB), 1995).

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centers would be revived now again as a point of departure for another cutting center – albeit in competition with the mother center but also as a barrier against the Germans.22 After all, Palestine was demanding after the war to be considered not as a competitor to Belgium but an inheritor to the German diamond cutting industry which threatened Belgium before the war. This reversion to traditional models of operation would however be deeply influenced by the backing the diamond industry in Israel would be enjoying now in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a backing designed and guided by the same figures that knew the traditional models so well. The backing that the state of Israel gave the industry and the nature of that backing shaped by Ehrenfeld and Van Amerongen further incorporated private capital in Zionist building and state-making. Later it would be expressed in the expectation of the state that the industry should absorb immigrants and build a diamond industry in developing towns.23 The functions the industry was endowed with early in the 1940s were now reproduced, albeit in a different guise. In the Netherlands and Belgium, the massive presence and activity of Jews in diamonds facilitated their incorporation in social and political life. In early 1940s Palestine, the British made use of this ethnic dimension by entrusting the diamond industry with fulfilling imperial and military functions. A decade later, the state of Israel asked to transform these relations into a model of reciprocity between state and capital.24

ccccccc 22. 23.

24.

R. Viala, “Labour Conditions in the Diamond-Cutting Industry”, International Labour Review 66, vol. 4 (October 1952), 354-78. A. Ehrenfeld, “Israel Diamond Industry”, Israel Economist Annual, 1952 (Jerusalem 1953), 137-40; Y. Arnon, “The Diamond Industry”, Haaretz, 8 June 1955; D. Einhorn, “The Development of the Diamond Industry” (MA diss., Baruch School of Business and Public Administration, City College of New York, 1957). R. Berger, Trust, Exchange and Social Embeddedness: The Case of the Israeli Diamond Industry (PhD thesis, City University Business School, London, 1998); C. Even-Zohar, From Mine to Mistress: Corporate Strategies and Government Policies in the International Diamond Industry (Edenbridge, Kent: Mining Journal Books, 2002; new edition London 2007).

Part IV Jews in Limbo

Krzysztof A. Makowski

Some Reflections on Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Poznania and Jewish Relations with Poles and Germans* Jewish identity and Jewish relations with Poles and Germans in postpartition Poznania (incorporated into Prussia during the first and second partitions of Poland – in 1772 and 1793 respectively) is not an easy subject to analyze. The main reason is the lack of thorough research. This does not mean, however, that historians and publicists have not expressed opinions on Jewish identity and Jewish relations with Poles and Germans. Indeed, they continue to do so to this day. Many statements devoted to the subject contain an ideological subtext as well as emotions that tend to be characteristic of writings devoted to Jews (for example an anti-Semitic or antiPolish subtext). The resulting myths and stereotypes that afflict historiography make it that much more difficult to hold a discussion on the merits. I have encountered the lasting impact of these myths and stereotypes on many occasions, both while studying the literature and during numerous discussions on nationality issues in Poznania. Whenever I noted the necessity of considering Poznania’s Jewish population, I usually met with the riposte that this was not necessary, since there were, in principle, no Jews in this area, for, like in the rest of Germany, the Poznanian Jews became Germans (sometimes my interlocutors added the qualification “of Mosaic faith”). This observation is generally accompanied by the conviction that the Jews joined Poznania’s German population in its support of the Prussian administration’s anti-Polish policies and German imperialism. Thus the main aim of this article is to debunk these two “fundamental” myths. I would like to argue that the Poznanian Jews as a group did not become Germans but remained a conscious Jewish community, as well as that most of the Poznanian Jews not only did not support the Prussian administration’s anti-Polish measures but maintained entirely normal and sometimes even friendly relations with Poles.1 ccccccc *

1.

This is a modified and expanded version of an article that was published in the volume M. Jaroszewicz and W. Stępiński, eds., Żydzi oraz ich sąsiedzi na Pomorzu Zachodnim w XIX i XX wieku (Warsaw: Wydawn. DiG, 2007), 87-97. The reflections presented in this article are based on my research described in detail in the book K.A. Makowski, Siła mitu. Żydzi w Poznańskiem w dobie zaborów w piśmiennictwie historycznym (Poznań: Wydawn. Poznánski, 2004). The book includes more on the myths and stereotypes mentioned

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As usual, there is, of course, some truth in these views; however, overall they suffer from gross oversimplification. Just after the partitions, Jews made up 6-7% of Poznania’s population. Moreover, up to the mid-1840s this number grew constantly, so that over 80,000 Jews lived in Poznania at the height of the Jewish presence there. Only later did the number begin to fall steadily, mainly as the result of emigration, so that there were 27,000 Poznanian Jews before the outbreak of World War I.2 It goes without saying that a population of this size was not homogeneous. It was characterized by socioeconomic differentiation. As the result of emancipation and modernization, Poznanian Jews gradually shifted from small trade and handcrafts to industry, larger-scale trade, administrative positions, and the free professions. Simultaneously, however – and this fact is often overlooked – the number of Jewish wage laborers grew. Nor was Jewish society in Poznania homogeneous as far as religion was concerned. Besides Orthodox Jews (among whom were probably Hassidim), there was a steadily growing number of adherents of Reform Judaism. This degree of internal differentiation renders problematic the assumption that all Poznanian Jews had a unified identity and that they took the same position towards the Prussian state and its policies, or that all Jews evinced the same attitude vis-à-vis the Poles and the Germans. My own analysis of the literature and my archival research allow me to formulate certain conclusions on this matter.3 I maintain unequivocally that, at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the decided majority of Poznanian Jews did not feel any connection whatsoever to Germandom. A telling example of this fact is a letter sent in 1791 from the Jews of the Netze District, the part of Poznania which was annexed by Prussia in 1772, to the Prussian king. Its authors not only expressed themselves positively about their life in the Polish Commonwealth, but also emphasized that their ancestors had come to Poland from … Spain(!). The Israeli historian Jacob Toury, who published the letter, seized on the reference to Spain to ccccccc

2.

3.

above, as well as an exhaustive bibliography of the literature concerning the history of the Poznanian Jews and history of historical writing on the Poznanian Jews. For more on the Jews in Poznania in the nineteenth century, see for example K.A. Makowski, “Die jüdische Bevölkerung im Posener Land in der Teilungszeit”, in Ernst Kantorowicz (1895-1963). Soziales Milieu und wissenschaftliche Relevanz. Vorträge des Symposiums am Institut für Geschichte der Adam-Mickiewicz-Universität Poznań, 23.-24. November 1995, ed. J. Strzelczyk (Poznań: Instytut Historii UAM, 2000), 33-41. In the monograph cited in note 2, I presented a thorough and comprehensive survey of the existing historical writing on the history of the Jewish population in Poznania in the era of the Polish Partitions from its beginnings up to the present time. The analysis covers all types of publications, from textbooks and monographs to brief articles, reviews, biographical notes, and obituaries (in total about 3000 works), concerning this topic in entirety or in part, and authored by historians as well as nonscholars. The scope of my interest includes not only scholarly works but also literature for popular audiences and for educational purposes, as well as historical essays and historical journalism. I analyzed also numerous archival sources, for example from the archives of the Centrum Judaicum Neue Synagoge Foundation in Berlin and the State Archives in Poznań, as well as other primary sources, e.g., reports, memoirs, and interviews with the authors.

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make a biting commentary. He noted that at that time Spanish roots were often mentioned, because the Sephardic Jews made up the Jewish aristocracy, while the patriotic declarations of the nineteenth century – according to which Polish Jews, because of their language and culture, were representatives of the Germandom – were unknown to the Netze District Jews at the time they wrote the letter.4 Right after the partitions, the Poznanian Jews also did not embrace the Haskalah. Even the religious reforms affected only a small group.5 During the period of Southern Prussia (1793-1806) and the Duchy of Warsaw (1807-1815), the Jews in Poznania continued to feel closely linked to their coreligionists in the other parts of the Polish lands. Together with them, they protested against the actions of the authorities and sought to recreate the old autonomous structures, including the central Jewish Diet (Va’ad Arba Arazot). Poznanian Jews communicated universally in Yid˙ dish. Only a few of them knew German. The situation did not change much after 1815 when the Grand Duchy of Poznań/Posen was created by the Vienna Congress and placed again under Prussian rule. Many of the government’s decisions, especially the school reform of 1824, which foresaw the liquidation of the cheders, deepened the sense of disappointment among the Jews, and led them to protest. Poznanian Jews also did not rush to join the Prussian army, in which they could serve voluntarily between 1833 and 1845. Only five Jews served in this period – much fewer than for example in the Polish army of the Duchy of Warsaw or in the Polish uprisings (1794, 1830-1831).6 Tales of Jews’ alleged Prussian hyperpatriotism can thus be treated as fairy tales. They continued to have only a weak command of German. Telling evidence of this latter fact can be found in the numerous language dispensations given to Jews who on the strength of the special order issued in 1833 applied for naturalization. In the first half of the nineteenth century, traditional religious and cultural models continued to prevail among Poznanian Jews. When describing his hometown Kępno/Kempen in the mid-nineteenth century, the well-known journalist Isidor Kastan noted for example that Yiddish was the sole language of communication there and that the older generation continued to wear traditional dress.7 ccccccc 4. 5.

6.

7.

J. Toury, Der Eintritt der Juden ins deutsche Bürgertum. Eine Dokumentation (Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Institute, 1972), 344-50. See, for example, N. Lippmann, Leben und Wirken des am 25. Dezember 1839 in Posen verstorbenen jüdischen Literaten David Caro, in besonderer Beziehung auf den Culturzustand der Juden des Großherzogthums Posen während der letzten 50. Jahre (Glogau: J. Gottschalk, 1840), 13. S. Simon, Żydzi inowrocławscy za czasów Księstwa Warszawskiego (1807-1815) (Inowrocław: Naki, Gminy Wyzn. Zydowskiej w Inowraclawiu, 1939), 50ff; E. Ringelblum, Żydzi w powstaniu kościuszkowskiem (Warsaw: Ksie˛ garnia Popularna, 1938), 73, 82, 85; E. Stocki, “Żydzi w służbie zdrowia powstania listopadowego”, Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 21 (1957), 107. I. Kastan, “Alt-Kempen. Eine Kulturskizze aus der Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts”, Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur 25 (1923-24): 89, 105.

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During the Spring of Nations, which is often portrayed as a turning point in the history of Poznanian Jews, the overwhelming majority of Jews maintained a neutral posture. Their support for the German cause can be described as insignificant. Although Jews from the emerging bourgeoisie in Poznań/Posen and some other German-dominated towns lent their support to the Germans, it would be wrong to characterize these pro-German Jews as Prussian loyalists, since most of them held liberal views and did not support the continuation of an absolute monarchy. Nor did the profile of Poznanian Jews undergo much change later. Even in the second half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is difficult to find traces of a pronounced German patriotism among them. The sizable number of young Jews who emigrated across the ocean, undoubtedly in order to escape military service, provides the best evidence here. Furthermore, in their memoirs from this period, Poznanian Jews only seldom used the phrase invariably used by Germans themselves – “Provinz Posen”. Instead, they tended to refer to the “Grand Duchy of Poznań/Posen”, or just the “Duchy”. With a few exceptions, Jews also refrained from participating in the anti-Polish Germanization policies of the Prussian government. To the contrary, they wished to avoid any deterioration in their relations with the Poles. For example, Caesar C. Aronsfeld, a Jew born in Kcynia/Exin, who later worked for the Wiener Library in London, told me in an interview that Jews kept themselves far away from the German nationalism. He also never heard his father express support for the authorities’ anti-Polish steps, a position he described as widespread among the Jewish population.8 To be sure, Jews did undoubtedly acculturate, but within the smaller Jewish communities both religious and cultural traditions continued to exert a strong hold, all the way up to 1918. This is the picture which emerges, for example, in an anonymous article published in 1880 in the United States in the journal The Jewish Progress. Its author, who nota bene referred to the Jews as Polish, wrote that in smaller towns they lived as one family. Most of them communicated among themselves in Yiddish. The article clearly indicates that the life of these Poznanian Jews did not distinguish itself much from the life of their coreligionists in the border regions of the Congress Kingdom, then under Russian rule.9 Other sources confirm that Poznanian Jews used Yiddish much more widely than is often assumed by historians. Even in the western part of the province, which the Germans dominated, the Jewish population used its own peculiar form of German with a large dose of Yiddish as late as the turn of the century. It means that the process of “Germanization” of the Poznanian Jews was not as advanced before the outbreak of World War I as is commonly believed. Similarly, with the exception of Poznań/ ccccccc 8. 9.

Interview with Caesar C. Aronsfeld held in London on 7 August 1998 (in the author’s archives). J.M., “Pictures of Poland. Jewish Social Life”, The Jewish Progress 5, no. 48 (1880): 4.

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Posen, change affected Jewish religion and dress much more slowly than is usually assumed in historiography. It is also a myth – formulated mainly by the authors with a weak grasp of the material – that Zionism did not emerge in Poznania.10 Indeed, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer from Leszno/Lissa and Rabbi Elijahu Gutmacher from Grodzisk/Graetz belonged to the ranks of leading proto-Zionists. Furthermore, a 1909 report documents that Poznania’s Zionist organization had 500 members, which was 2% of the total Jewish population.11 If the population estimate were confined to adults only, then this percentage would grow considerably. Poznanian Jews, especially those on the eastern fringes of the province, maintained lively contacts with their coreligionists in the Russian and Austrian partitions, which means with the Polish Jews, up to 1918. These contacts were, above all, of a religious and family nature. In spite of the prohibitions against crossing the border, rabbis, hazanim, and Talmudic scholars constantly came to Poznania from the other two partitions. There were also extensive economic contacts. On the other hand, German Jews tended to keep Poznanian Jews at arm’s length. At least until the 1880s, they – like the Germans – regarded the Poznanian Jews as Polish Jews, or Ostjuden. Later, they started to use different euphemisms to refer to the Poznanian Jews, for example “from the Fifth Army Corps”, the headquarters of which was located in Poznań/Posen. Relations between Jews and Germans and between Jews and Poles in Poznania were not particularly intensive throughout the entire partition period. It must be emphasized, however, that, notwithstanding verbal polemics, violence was never a part of this equation. The doctor Arnold Straßmann, who came from Raszków/ Raschkow, captured the essence of Polish-Jewish-German relations. Describing life in his small town, he noted that each side was aware that the others had their own ways of seeing things; however, this realization did not in any way interfere with daily life, which ran its own course.12 Examples of harmonious cooperation, although not well known or emphasized, can be found in other areas as well. The three groups usually cooperated well at the level of local self-government. In many localities, the practice of having each group designate an equal number of representatives to city councils remained in place for a long time. In a few cities, this principle remained in effect until the end of Prussian rule.13 One also finds examples of

ccccccc 10.

11. 12. 13.

See, for example, D. Matelski, Mniejszość niemiecka w Wielkopolsce w latach 1919-1939 (Poznań: Wydawn. Naukowe, 1997), 257; Z. Borzymińska, Dzieje Żydów w Polsce. Wybór tekstów źródłowych. XIX wiek (Warsaw: Zydowski Instytut Historycznyw Polsce, 1994), 17. Jüdische Rundschau 14, no. 46 (1909): 517. A. Straßmann, “Verlorenes Land. Reiseeindrücke aus Posen”, Posener Heimatblätter 4, no.10 (1930): 77-79; no. 12: 93-95. See, among other publications, L. Trzeciakowski, Walka o polskość miast Poznańskiego na przełomie XIX i XX wieku (Poznań: Wydawn. Poznańskie, 1964), 199ff.

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cultural, social, and – especially – economic cooperation. Polish, German, and Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs cooperated above all in various economic organizations – for example, in the Chamber of Commerce.14 Turning to bilateral relations, it is worth emphasizing that Jews tended to be the active side, which means that it was much more often the Jews who tried to establish relations with Christians than Christians with the Jews. The historical literature offers an unsymmetrical description of the Jewish relations with Germans and Poles. Historians clearly exaggerate and overestimate the Jews’ relations with Germans. In reality, however, these relations were anything but ideal. Of course, the Jews did grow closer to German culture than to Polish (mainly through language, because the language of instruction in schools in Poznania became German). But the Germans – to the dismay of the “assimilationists” – never recognized the Poznanian Jews as “theirs”. It is true that Jewish-German political alliances did arise in some localities, but they usually had a purely tactical character. We find evidences that closer contacts in the private sphere remained rare, especially in the province. In Kępno/Kempen, to which I referred earlier and where we have a relatively good understanding of the situation, in the mid-nineteenth century the Germans (mainly state officials) remained at best neutral towards the Jews. Because of their arrogance and pride, the Germans were viewed as strangers, which prevented any kind of closeness.15 The situation apparently did not change over time. Caesar C. Aronsfeld informed me that Jews in Kcynia/Exin did not maintain social contacts with Germans throughout the entire partition period.16 Indeed, the situation began to deteriorate with time, as anti-Jewish views became more and more common among Poznanian Germans. The appearance of nationalistic organizations such as the Eastern Marches Society (Ostmarkenverein) played a key role here. Up to now, the overwhelming tendency in historiography has been to downplay or ignore the Jewish population’s relations with the Poles, which often are simply reduced to a bipolar question: Polish anti-Semitism versus Jews’ anti-Polish disposition.17 It would, of course, be wrong to deny that such attitudes existed on both sides in Poznania. It suffices to mention the activity of Stanisław Knapowski – the founder of the journal Postęp (Progress) (1890), who himself in his articles described the journal as anti-Semitic – or the Jews who nonetheless joined the Eastccccccc 14. 15. 16. 17.

K. Hampke, Festschrift der Handelskammer zu Posen aus Anlaß ihres 50-jährigen Bestehens 1851-1901 (Posen: Decker, 1901), 165-67. I. Kastan, “Alt-Kempen”, 89. Interview with Caesar C. Aronsfeld. In the last decades particularly the German historians stressed the “Polish anti-Semitism” in Poznania, for example, A.A. Bruer, Geschichte der Juden in Preußen (1750-1820) (Frankfurt/M and New York: Campus, 1991), 146, 163; on the Jews’ anti-Polish disposition, especially J. Krajewski, Białe karty w sprawach Polsko-Żydowskich na przełomie XIX/XX wieku do 1939 roku (Warsaw: Polskie Wydawn. “Ojczyzna, 1989), 5.

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ern Marches Society. But there was also a second, virtually unknown side to the issue. After the partitions, the Poznanian Jews continued to maintain contact with Polish culture. The majority of them spoke Polish, at least to some degree, which they learned – and this is worth emphasizing – in school, also in Jewish schools. The Jews’ relations with Poles were also generally good. Jews had especially close relations, though obviously not based on partnership, with the Polish landowners. Economic contacts predominated, but there were also other kinds of contacts. Polish landowners liked, for example, to invite klezmer groups to their palaces and manors. Nor did Jews abstain from supporting Polish national initiatives. At least a few scores of Jews contributed money towards the erection of a monument to the first Polish rulers in the Poznań/Posen cathedral.18 Jewish book dealers and publishers displayed a special sympathy for the Poles. The Scherks, Merzbachs, and many others did a great service to the development of Polish literature and press in Poznania. Jews were also to be found in the ranks of the Poznanian Poles who went to support the November uprising in the Russian partition (1830-31), and after the defeat of the uprising they aided the conspiratorial movement. The Poles returned the favor by supporting Jewish demands for equality during the provincial diet of 1845 and the United Prussian Diet of 1847. Despite the picture painted by the existing historical literature,19 the Spring of Nations did not radically alter this situation. It seems that the sympathy for the Poles and support for the Polish cause were by no means less than that lent to the Germans and their cause. In particular, the democratically oriented Jewish intelligentsia – like its German counterpart – saw the chance for a Polish-German alliance, a common struggle against a tsarist Russia that was oppressing Poles and Jews, and finally for the rebirth of Poland. Over twenty Jews sat on the Polish national committees.20 Doctors made up the most active group in those days, especially Marcus Mosse, who led the defense of Grodzisk/Graetz against the Prussian army.21 Thus, at least until the mid-nineteenth century, the leadership of the emerging Jewish secular intelligentsia (doctors, booksellers, and publishers) – which was democratically oriented – supported the “Polish cause”, i.e., independence of ccccccc 18. 19.

20.

21.

A. Hinc, “Akcja składkowa na pomnik pierwszych królów polskich w Katedrze poznańskiej”, Kronika Miasta Poznania (2001), no. 2: 60-61. See, for example, R. Jaworski, Handel und Gewerbe im Nationalitätenkampf. Studien zur Wirtschaftsgesinnung der Polen in der Provinz Posen (1871-1914) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 132; J. Bartyś, “Grand Duchy of Poznań under Prussian Rule: Changes in the Economic Position of the Jewish Population 1815-1848”, in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 17 (1972): 198. F. Paprocki, “Wykazy imienne członków powiatowych i lokalnych komitetów narodowych w Wielkopolsce w 1848 r. (Materiały do dziejów powstania 1848 r.)”, Kronika Miasta Poznania (1948), no. 1: 26-49. E. Stocki, “Udział lekarzy żydowskich w powstaniu poznańskim 1848 r.”, Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (1954), no. 11/12: 109-22.

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Poland or at least autonomy of the Grand Duchy of Poznan. The often-highlighted Jewish activity against Poles in 1848 was, in fact, limited to isolated incidents. Parenthetically, the scale of anti-Jewish actions by the Poles has also been completely mythologized. They assumed larger proportions in three places only, and here they were connected directly to military actions.22 Despite the previously mentioned tensions during the Spring of Nations, after 1848 the Jews’ relations with the Poles quickly normalized again. The two groups cooperated in various areas. Examples are known in which they supported one another’s candidates during elections to the Prussian Diet and the Reichstag up to the beginning of the twentieth century. They also collaborated in both bodies. The most active and encompassing Polish-Jewish relations existed undoubtedly in the economic sphere. Above all, many Poles found employment with Jews. Many Jewish homes had Polish servants. The Polish national movement’s slogan “each to his own”, which it began to propagate in the 1880s against Germans and Jews, was never fully respected by Poles. Jews tried to ensure that there was always somebody in their store or business who spoke Polish. Poles represented such a numerous clientele that in many regions it was virtually impossible to succeed in business without their patronage. The Poznanian Jews continued to maintain good relations with the Polish landowners. We also have quite a few examples of good relations between them and the Catholic clergy. In this respect, it is worth mentioning Archbishop Florian Stablewski, who met with rabbis while touring the Gniezno/Gnesen archdiocese in 1893 and used his speeches to accent the ties between Christianity and Judaism, to condemn growing anti-Semitism, and to appeal for love of one’s neighbor.23 Quite a few memoirs contain information about close contacts between children and young people from both nationalities, among them the writings of playwright Ernst Toller and of Alfred Wiener, the founder of the well-known London library that bears his name. Wiener writes that in Zbąszyń/Bentschen, where he grew up, the degree of toleration was such that Jewish boys participated together with their Catholic counterparts in blessing of the Easter baskets with traditional food and then on Easter Monday in pouring water on girls.24 After 1848, the Poznanian Jews by no means severed their ties to Polishness.

ccccccc 22.

23. 24.

K. Makowski, “Żydzi wobec Wiosny Ludów w Wielkim Księstwie Poznańskim”, in Żydzi w Wielkopolsce na przestrzeni dziejów, ed. J. Topolski and K. Modelski (Poznań: Wydawn. Poznańskie, 1995), 43-63, 159-60. See, for example, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 57 (1893), no. 27: 1; no. 41: 1. E. Toller, Eine Jugend in Deutschland (Leipzig: Reclam, 1970), 8ff; A. Wiener, “Bentschen vor 60 Jahren. Aus dem Leben einer kleinen jüdischen Gemeinde”, in K.C. Blaetter. Festschrift zum 70-jährigen Bestehen der Viadrina und zum 60-jährigen Bestehen des K.C. 1886 – 1896 – 1956 (New York: American Jewish K C Fraternity, 1956), 23.

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Many of them spoke Polish quite fluently up to the end of the partition period. Jewish booksellers and publishers continued to make a great contribution to the development of Polish culture. Many examples of polonica, including the press, appeared in their houses. Nor is there an absence of pro-Polish activity among Poznanian Jews during this period. They participated in the wave of patriotic manifestations that swept through the Polish lands before the January uprising of 1863 in the Russian partition. Some Jews also supported the insurrection, primarily by delivering weapons, uniforms, and food. There are also examples demonstrating that Poznanian Jews did not refrain entirely from activity in the Polish national movement later as well. Summarizing, it is possible to say that by the end of the nineteenth century the process of acculturation (mainly to the German but also to the Polish culture) was definitely much more advanced among Poznanian Jews than was the case in the Russian and Austrian partitions. However, assimilation – which the historical literature so frequently emphasizes – was an infrequent occurrence. In my opinion, the writings of many authors about the assimilation of the Jews in Poznania to the German society (or Germanization) have tended to reflect a misunderstanding of this concept. After all, assimilation denotes the complete loss by a given group of its own identity and its “melting into” the majority society. In addition, the fact is entirely overlooked that assimilation can occur only when the group in question is completely accepted by the assimilating society. There can be no question that neither in Poznania nor in Germany as a whole did Jews “melt into” the German nation. Furthermore, it is impossible to speak of the Germans accepting them as “their own”. The acculturation of Jews in Poznania (understood as the abandonment of certain elements of one’s own culture for the sake of another culture – German or Polish) was not as universal and advanced as is generally assumed. The main, but not sole cause was mandatory school attendance, introduced as early as 1825. However, up to 1919, the Poznanian Jews did not become Germans. The overwhelming majority of Jews grew closer to German culture, mainly through language (German was the language of instruction in schools). But a numerically significant group did speak Polish. Some of them associated themselves with Polish culture. There are also examples known of Polonization. However, the state of current research does not enable us to specify the reach of acculturation or the degree of this cultural affiliation (with Germandom as well as with Polishness). Acculturation took place above all among the stratum of the most-well-off and best-educated Jews, above all in Poznań/Posen itself. A portion of the Poznanian Maskilim did indeed seek to integrate with German society and considered themselves to be Germans of the Mosaic faith. It seems, however, that the majority considered themselves to be Jews up to the First World War, but not German Jews, for – as I mentioned – the German Jews never recognized the Poznanian Jews as “theirs”. Rather, the Poznanian Jews were a unique hybrid that formed a bridge between eastern and western Jewry. It

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is also incorrect to ascribe German patriotism – which generally meant readiness to support the state policy, and in Poznania aggressive anti-Polish measures – to all of Poznanian Jews. Rather, it is more accurate to speak of loyalism, which Poznanian Jews undoubtedly did espouse (they were in allegiance to the state authority). The literature clearly overemphasizes the extent of German-Jewish interaction while underestimating the scale of Polish-Jewish relations. Finally, a rather sad reflection with respect to the state of historical inquiry. My research was motivated by an intriguing question: why does the portrait of the Poznanian Jews painted in the literature diverge so starkly from reality? I believe that there was never a social need for the type of picture of Poznanian Jewry that I have sketched here. Jewish historiography, mainly assimilationist in its orientation (i.e., the stream of the Jewish historiography which promoted acculturation and confessionalization of Jews), and a part of German historiography needed the myth of the Jewish German. The Jewish authors represented acculturated Jews who wanted to be treated as Germans, therefore they tried to prove that the Poznanian Jews were Germans from the Middle Ages; the German authors mentioned above wanted to win over the Jews to their side in their conflict with Poles. This simultaneously led to the idealization of the German-Jewish relations in the past and to the construction of a negative image of the Poles as enemies of the Germans. From the end of the nineteenth century, Polish historiography, in turn, tended to depict national minorities, including Jews, in a pejorative light. German anti-Semites also contributed to the negative stereotype of the Jewish population. Apart from the small group of Zionist historians, no one needed a positive image of the Jews as people who had their own identity, who distanced themselves from the policies of the Prussian authorities, or, even more so, as people who maintained good relations with the Poles.

Bart Wallet

Belgian Independence, Orangism, and Jewish Identity The Jewish Communities in Belgium during the Belgian Revolution (1830-39)

The nineteenth century was a period in which nation states with considerable success created strict borders for their countries, thus separating people in border regions who had thus far lived together, speaking the same dialect and often adhering to the same type of religion. National languages were to replace regional dialects, and material signs such as customs offices stressed the borders. This was supported by the rise of nationalism. Intellectuals and politicians constructed national identities in order to strengthen the inner cohesion of the state they envisaged, while at the same time drawing clear borders with those who were considered not to be part of the nation. Nationalism strived for a unified nation, with a minimum of internal borders, which meant for Jews that they had either to integrate into the nation or were considered foreigners who had no real attachment to the national space. As a consequence, the external borders were made particularly strong – which resulted in suspicion of subgroups in society with important transnational networks, such as Jews and Catholics. Against this background, borders might be defined as attempts to define and fix what belongs or does not belong in a given space. Nineteenth-century nationalism challenged Jews in particular, since they were expected to show loyalty and patriotism after acquiring emancipation or in the process of acquiring it. Jews in border regions that changed from one nation to another due to wars were especially confronted with these themes. In this context, they had a variety of options, maybe even more than others. They could choose to remain loyal to the former nation or to take sides with the new authorities. But they also had a third possibility, namely to supersede both national positions by articulating a Jewish national identity. In this article, I concentrate on one such case, namely the attitude of the Jews towards the formation of the Belgian nation state after it split off from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. It was the first territorial change in Europe after the Congress of Vienna, which makes it an interesting case for analyzing what factors determined in this early stage of the nineteenth century the positions Jews chose in reaction to politically motivated spatial changes.

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The Jewish Community in the Dutch period (1815-30) The so-called Dutch period in Belgian history, when the Southern Netherlands were part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-30), was of great importance to the development of the Jewish communities. Although the first Jews had already entered the territory in the Austrian period and Jews acquired civil rights during the French annexation, their numbers remained limited to a few hundred. Only after 1815 did the community start to grow rapidly, and the number of kehillot rose significantly.1 On the eve of the Belgian Revolution, in 1830, there already lived between 3,000 and 3,500 Jews in the territory that became Belgium. They were concentrated in the cities, with most of them – between 700 and 800 – living in Brussels. Other communities had been founded in Antwerp, Gent, Mons, and Liege. One-third of the Jews in Belgian territory were concentrated in the province of Limburg, which had almost entirely joined the Revolution while its capital, Maastricht, stayed in Dutch possession.2 Each of the communities had its own social profile. In general they were composed of three groups: French, German, and Dutch Jews. The smallest group was the French Jews, who had entered the territory during the Napoleonic Era, but many of them had left with their compatriots in 1815.3 The German Jews were very prominent, because they formed the middle class and upper strata of the communities and were therefore overrepresented in the leadership of the kehillot. The largest group was the much poorer Dutch Jews, mostly immigrants from Amsterdam. As a result of Napoleon’s Continental System, the economic circumstances had deteriorated, which also affected the large Jewish population in the city. A process of intranational migration took place; many left the city for the countryside, while others went to the southern Netherlands. In the years 1803-8, under French rule, 30% of Jewish migrants in Brussels came from Germany, while 32% already originated from Holland. In 1817, after the foundation of the United Kingdom, no less than 53% was Dutch and only 16% German.4 In Brussels, there was a fragile balance of power between the German and Dutch Jews. In the board of parnassim, both groups were represented. The most prominent German Jew was Adolphe Oppenheim, a banker originating from

ccccccc 1.

2. 3. 4.

Willy Bok, “Aperçu de l’évolution de la population juive au dix-neuvième siècle”, in La Grande Synagogue de Bruxelles, contributions à l’histoire des Juifs de Bruxelles 1878-1978 (Malines: Communauté Israélite de Bruxelles, Van den Bossche, 1978), 105. Numbers based on Jean-Philippe Schreiber, L’immigration juive en Belgique du moyen âge à la première guerre mondiale (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1996), 71. [Hartog Somerhausen], “Briefe aus Belgien: III”, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 1, no. 14 (1852): 541. Cilli Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues: Migration und ihre Folgen: Deutsche Juden als Pioniere jüdischen Lebens in Belgien, 18./19. Jahrhundert (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 111, 116, 121.

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Frankfurt am Main.5 His foremost Dutch colleague was Alexandre van Lier, who left Maarssen, near Utrecht, for Brussels soon after the reunion of North and South. The difference in regional backgrounds was strengthened by different positions towards modernity. The German Jews, mostly originating from cities in southern Germany, were more open towards modern culture and wanted to adopt social and ritual innovations that were characteristic for German Jewry. The Dutch Jews, on the whole, were of a more conservative strand. This resulted in frequent clashes between the two groups.6 In other cities, the Dutch Jews were clearly in the majority. In Gent, immigrants from the no less conservative Alsace joined them, while in Antwerp, Dutch Jews dominated overall.7 In Liege, most Jews had their roots in nearby Maastricht and were deeply connected with their coreligionists there and in the German border region.8 In 1816, the southern provinces were integrated in the national organizational structure of Dutch Jewry.9 Two districts were created, headed by Supreme Synagogues in Brussels and Maastricht, and subjected to the Hoofdcommissie tot de zaken der Israëliten (Executive Committe for Israelite Affairs) based in The Hague. Maastricht was authorized to supervise the Limburg communities, Liege and Luxemburg, while Brussels had to maintain order in Mons, Antwerp, and Gent. In each district there was a so-called Corresponding Member to the Hague Committee, who delivered information and enjoyed widespread authority in his own district. The two southern districts had to cooperate closely, because they had to share a chief rabbi. Unfortunately, they were not very lucky, because their first chief rabbi Bezalel Levi Glogauer had already left after one year and was not succeeded.10 In its contacts with The Hague, but also in the local societies, the southern Jews proved themselves very loyal to the United Kingdom and to the Royal House of Orange. In a letter, the Gent community wrote about “His Majesty our most honored King”, while the Brussels community described itself as “les sujets ou plutôt les enfants du Prince” and completely committed to “notre auguste Monarque”.11 For the

ccccccc 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

Jean-Philippe Schreiber, Dictionnaire biographique des Juifs de Belgique: Figures du judaïsme belge XIXe-XXe siècles (Brussels: De Boeck universite, 2002), 263-64. Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues, 439. 100. 1893-1993 Hoofdsynagoge Bouwmeestersstraat Antwerpen (Antwerp n.d.), 10. Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues, 127, 428, 434; Schreiber, L’immigration, 150-51. Cf. S. Ullmann, “Les Juifs en Belgique sous le régime hollandais”, in Histoire des Juifs en Belgique 1700-1830 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1934), 50-58. Bart Wallet, Nieuwe Nederlanders: De integratie van de joden in Nederland (1814-1851) (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2007), 131-33. On Glogauer, see J.M. Lemmens, Joods leven in Maastricht: Geschiedenis van de joodse gemeente sedert 1250, opgetekend bij gelegenheid van het 150-jarig bestaan van de synagoge in Maastricht (1840-1990) (Maastricht: Stichting Historische Reeks Maastricht, 1990), 51-54. Both quotations from Schreiber, L’immigration juive, 74.

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Dutch Jewish group within the communities, this patriotism could link up with a long tradition of identification with the Dutch and the Oranges, but the German Jews appeared to identify themselves with the state as well. From the 1820s onward, a process of naturalization took place in which a rising number of German Jews sought to acquire Dutch citizenship. Adolphe Oppenheim, the German Jewish leader in Brussels, was also naturalized in 1829. Becoming a Dutch citizen was both a positive choice for the United Kingdom and at the same time a negative one towards the German state that the migrant had left.12

The Belgian Revolution It is important to stress that the Belgian Revolution of 1830 was not so much a nationalistic revolution of a Belgian nation against Dutch domination, but rather a liberal revolution against the autocratic rule of King William I. The revolutionaries wanted more democracy, a stronger parliament, and less power invested solely in the King. Southern citizens were underrepresented in parliament and in prominent positions. The suppression of Catholic education led to a very broadly based alliance between liberals and Catholics directed against the King. In the first instance, this was just to achieve more civic liberties and a better position for southern citizens, but in the course of the Belgian Revolution, and due to the hesitant reaction of William I, it aimed more and more to achieve independence not only from the King but from the North as well.13 The Belgian Revolution, which started on William’s birthday, 25 August 1830, created from the outset two important borders in the Jewish communities of the United Kingdom. The first is the geographical border between the Jews in the North and the Jews in the South. The second is a political border within the southern communities, between proponents of the Revolution and the Orangists, who remained loyal to the King. For the Jews in the northern part of the Kingdom, the Belgian Revolution provided an excellent occasion to show that their patriotism was no less than that of other citizens. Many Jews decided to volunteer for the army and participated in the 1831 Ten Days’ campaign. In the citadel of Antwerp, which remained in Dutch hands until 1832, there was even a synagogue erected for the Jewish soldiers. Its commander, Baron Chassé, later wrote in a very favorable way about the bravery of his Jewish men. Dutch Jews also declared their love for the country and contempt for the Belccccccc 12. 13.

Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues, 345-49. Some good introductions to the history of the Belgian Revolution are: Rolf Falter, 1830: De scheiding van Nederland, België en Luxemburg (Tielt: Lannoo, 2005); Peter Rietbergen, Broedertwist: België en Nederland en de erfenis van 1830 (’s-Hertogenbosch/Leuven/Zwolle: Waanders, 2005); Roland Van Opbroucke, ed., België: De geboorte van een staat (Roeselare: Globe, 2005).

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Carel Asser, lithograph. From: Jaarboeken voor de Israelieten, 1837 (775Jaar k).

gian revolutionaries via the media. The prominent lawyer Samuel Philippus Lipman wrote no fewer than eight leaflets in which he praised the King, despised the Belgians, and honored Dutch heroes such as commander Jan van Speijk, who blew up his ship together with its Belgian assailants.14 The intellectual Mozes Lemans, an Amsterdam Maskil, rhymed a Hebrew historical poem titled Pesha Belgi – the Sin of Belgium. It was headed by a significant citation from the book of Jeremiah 20:9: “In my heart is a burning fire, shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.”15 The teacher of the Jewish school in Groningen, Isaac Jojada Cohen, also composed a Hebrew rhyme on the Ten Days’ campaign, which was published together with a Dutch translation.16 ccccccc 14.

15.

16.

Lipman was in favor of the separation because he saw an inseparable rift between the “beloved Holland” and the “feared Belgium”; an analysis of his leaflets is provided by A. Smits, 1830 scheuring in de Nederlanden, deel III: Hoofdrolspelers, medespelers en bespelers van de publieke opinie in de Nederlanden (Kortrijk-Heule: UGA, 1999), 161-70. For an introduction and edition of this poem, see Jozeph Michman, “Pesha Belgi le-Moshe Lemans” [Hebrew], in Michmanei Yosef: Studies on the History and Literature of Dutch Jewry (Jerusalem: Institute for Research on Dutch Jews, 1994), 483-526. Isaac Jojada Cohen, Uitboezeming eens Hebreeers na den tiendaagschen roemrijken veldtogt, translated from Hebrew into Dutch by S.J. van Ronkel (Amsterdam: D. Proops Jacobszoon, 1831). For the

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While the Jews in the North unanimously sided with the King, the Jewish communities in the South were deeply divided. Among them we can discern three positions. Each position I will illustrate with the story of a prominent personality. The first position is that of the Belgicists, those in the community who sided with the revolutionaries. It is no surprise that they are mostly to be found among the German Jews, who were in the same social segment of society as the liberal revolutionaries and had no historically rooted attachment to the House of Orange. These Belgicist Jews hoped that the revolution would open even more opportunities for them and create a more equal society. They participated in the revolution, thus fighting on the other side as their coreligionists from the North. Joseph Oppenheim, the younger brother of Adolphe, is a good example of this position. At the age of twenty, he joined the revolutionaries and fought under General Van Delft in the battle of Pellenberg. He was honored for his participation in the revolution by the inscription of his name in the Brussels monument for the independence fighters.17 The Brussels community was proud of the Jewish soldiers, as a letter to the new minister of interior affairs made clear: “De nombreuses promotions aux grades d’officiers prouvent en même temps le dévouement de nos jeunes coreligionnaires à la cause sacrée de la liberté et que la patrie dans les témoignages de sa reconnaissance ne fait pas de distinction entre ses enfants.”18 Jews with their origins in the northern provinces of the United Kingdom, however, overwhelmingly sided with the Orangists. They remained loyal to the King, which was more difficult in a city like Brussels than in more Orangist cities such as Gent and Antwerp. One of them, Carel Asser, a very prominent Jew working in the government, a member of the Hoofdcommissie living alternately in The Hague and Brussels, wrote a letter to the King on 6 September 1830 expressing “my love for our country and attachment to Your Majesty’s Hereditary House”. He advised the King to send his son William to Orangist Gent in order to create a counterweight to the developments in Brussels.19 When the Belgian Revolution proved to be successful, many Dutch Jews chose to leave the country and returned to the North. One of them was Alexandre van Lier, who had been a parnas in Brussels for many years and had acquired a significant position both in society and in the community. The third position can best be described as neutrality. Both German and Dutch Jews who had been satisfied with their positions during the Dutch period and tried not to become part of the conflicts took this position. When they found out that a ccccccc

17. 18. 19.

stance of Dutch Jewry towards the Belgian Revolution, see also the diaries of Netje and Eduard Asser in I.H. van Eeghen, ed., Uit Amsterdamse dagboeken: De jeugd van Netje en Eduard Asser 18191833 (Amsterdam: Scheltema & Holkema, 1964), 211-21. Schreiber, Dictionnaire biographique, 264-65; Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues, 350. Quoted in Schreiber, L’immigration, 115; on Jews in the Belgian army, see Sulamith 8, no. 2 (1842): 323-26. C. Gerretson, Muiterij en scheuring, 1830, vol. 2 (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1936), 283.

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separate Belgian state had come into being and there was enough international support to keep it independent, they accepted the new situation and cooperated con amore in the development of the new state. Their dependence on the local economy or their position in local society made them prefer to wait first and adapt thereafter to the new political reality. One of the most significant Brussels Jews is a good example of this position: Hartog or Hirsch Somerhausen. The intellectual Somerhausen was originally a German Jew but was living in Amsterdam when in 1817 he was invited by the Brussels community to set up a Jewish school. He left Amsterdam, where he had been a member of the Maskilic association Tongelet and settled in Brussels. The school he founded was distinguished as a “model school” by the Dutch government because of its modern methods and stress on the Dutch language.20 He also became the Corresponding Member of the Executive Committee and thus was the link between The Hague and Brussels. After the Belgian Revolution he stayed in Brussels, accepted the new situation, and was active in the reconstruction of Jewish life in Belgium.21

The Internal Consequences of the Belgian Revolution The positions taken towards the Belgian Revolution were chosen very much along ethnic lines. The divide between German and Dutch Jews, differing in religious and cultural affairs, was politicized. The Belgian Revolution thus had large consequences – internal, organizational and ideological – for the Jewish communities in the country. I will discuss these consequences one by one. First, many Dutch Jews left, which strengthened the relative influence of the German Jews. The provincial authorities of Brabant were of the opinion that out of 600 Jews in Brussels in 1830 at least 200 had left.22 In Gent as well, one-third of the community returned to the north: before the Revolution there were 155 Jews in the city; in 1832 they numbered fewer than 100.23 In Antwerp, where the Dutch Jews formed the vast majority, many left, including one of the two community leaders. With the state of research at this moment, we could say that roughly one-third of the Jewish population showed its Orangist sympathies by leaving the country. Their places were soon filled with new immigrants arriving from France and Germany.24

ccccccc 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

[Somerhausen], “Briefe aus Belgien: III”, 550-51. Schreiber, Dictionnaire biographique, 319-20. Schreiber, L’immigration, 115-16. Ibid., 155-56. Bok, “Aperçu de l’evolution”, 111. Unfortunately there are thus far no data available on the number of people who left for the North; see Robert André and José Pereira-Roque, La démographie de la Belgique au XIXe siècle (Brussels: Université de Bruxelles, 1974), which provides only numbers from the 1840s onwards.

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Second, the balance of power shifted entirely towards the German Jews who had made the right political choice. In all cities right after the Declaration of Independence, new boards replaced the old ones that had been installed by the Dutch governments. In Brussels, Adolphe Oppenheim was chosen as the chairman of the provisional board, while the other members were almost all of German-Jewish origins as well.25 The ideological background of this new board was made evident in a letter to the new minister of interior affairs, in which it expressed its enthusiasm for the new Constitution, which is “si libérale que le peuple belge s’est donnée et pour laquelle aussi nos jeunes israélites ont versé leur sang dans les glorieuses et mémorables journées de septembre.”26 In Antwerp the old board was replaced as well, but the new one, in which the German-Jewish banker Jonathan-Raphael Bischoffsheim prominently figured, had great difficulties in imposing its will on the community.27 While one of the old leaders left for the Netherlands, the other one, Mozes Kreyn, stayed but was not willing to hand over the ceremonial objects of the kehillah. Until that time, the community had rented a building from Kreyn to use as a synagogue, an arrangement that came to an end as well. Finally, Bischoffsheim had to pay all the expenses for the community and services himself, since in the chaos there was no possibility to collect any money from the members.28 Third, chaos is a good description of the situation just after the Revolution, not only in Antwerp but also elsewhere. The teachers of the Jewish schools in Brussels and Antwerp nearly all left for the Netherlands. As a consequence, the lessons had to be suspended. Only in 1832 did the Brussels school start anew, with its founder Hartog Somerhausen as its president.29 Due to the revolution, chazzan Hirschfeld of the Brussels community also left. As a German Jew, he did not go to Holland but accepted a call from Jamaica to serve there as a chazzan.30 Even as late as 1833, the assessment of the situation in Gent was nothing less than: “l’anarchie règne parmi nos co-religionnaires.”31 Fourth, an important consequence of the changing political situation both outside and inside the community was that the position of the Dutch language

ccccccc 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues, 440. Quoted in Schreiber, L’immigration, 115. Ephraim Schmidt, Geschiedenis van de joden in Antwerpen in woord en beeld, aangevulde herdruk van de Nederlandse uitgave (Antwerp and Rotterdam: C. de Vries-Brouwers, 1994), 93, 96. Schreiber, L’immigration, 132-33; idem, Politique et religion: Le Consistoire Central Israélite de Belgique au XIXe siècle (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1995), 80-81. [Hartog Somerhausen], “Briefe aus Brüssel. V”, Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 2, no. 7 (1853): 274; Willy Bok, “L’école primaire israélite à Bruxelles 1817 à 1879”, in La Grande Synagogue, 125-40. [Somerhausen], “Briefe aus Belgien. III”, 549-50. Carmoly on 14 October 1833, quoted in Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues, 427; cf. Schreiber, Politique et religion, 91.

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among Belgian Jews deteriorated. The Dutch government had advocated the Dutch language and wanted the Jewish communities to conduct their meetings and minutes all in Dutch. The large group of Dutch Jews also continued to use their language. Even before the Revolution, most German Jews adopted French as their daily language, a process that was only strengthened by the new political situation. The new government used French, and the Jewish communities followed its example. The provisory board of the Brussels community used French from its onset, while the Jewish school – once a Dutch-language model school – also gradually changed into a French school.32 Somerhausen greatly regretted this French orientation in community and society. He was among the fierce proponents of the Dutch language and was befriended with Jan Frans Willems, one of the founders of the Flemish movement. Somerhausen also contributed to a number of Flemish journals in Brussels, Antwerp, and Gent.33 In Brussels he could not succeed, nonetheless, in keeping Dutch equally important in the Jewish community as French.34

The Organizational Consequences The political independence from the northern part of the former United Kingdom, the migration towards the north, and the chaos in the communities necessitated a reconstruction of the Jewish communities in Belgium. One of the first things that happened right after the Declaration of Independence was a meeting of the thirty most prominent southern Jews, who suspended all contacts with the Executive Committee in The Hague and decided to found their own national organizational structure. Right after this meeting, they visited Somerhausen, until then the representative of The Hague, to inform him that the communities had ended their relations with the North.35 On 1 November 1832, the new Consistoire Central Israélite de Belgique officially came into being. In its name, it deliberately hinted at the French sister organization, thus distancing itself strongly from the Dutch organization it had separated from. Nevertheless, in its structure both French and Dutch influences are to be detected. Its first president was again the well-known Belgicist Adolphe Oppenheim.36 ccccccc 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

Bok, “L’école primaire”, 125-40. Jean Bloch, “Inleiding”, in 150 jaar jodendom in België (Brussels: Centraal Israëlitisch Consistorie van België, 1980), 7; idem, “Quelques personnalités juives dans la vie publique et dans la vie intellectuelle à Bruxelles au dix-neuvième siècle”, in La Grande Synagogue, 34-35. Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues, 460. A good indication for the decline of Dutch in the Brussels community is provided by the inscriptions on the matsevot: Philippe Pierret, Mémoires, mentalités, religieuses, art funéraire: la partie juive du cimetière du Dieweg à Bruxelles, XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris and Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 119-38. [Somerhausen], “Briefe aus Brüssel. V”, 270. W. Bok, “Het Belgische Jodendom: Heden en verleden”, in Centraal Israëlitisch Consistorie, 12; Schreiber, Politique et religion, 39-47.

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Since the Belgian state was the first to radically separate church and state, thus effectuating the liberal objective of the Revolution, a completely new situation arose. The organizational structure was no longer subjected to the government, but completely free. The communities themselves were free to elect their representatives. The liberal constitution also made it possible for Jews to receive the same amount of funding from the government as that of the dominant Catholic Church recieved. During the United Kingdom, the Jewish community got considerably less financial support than the other denominations. In the first budget of the Belgian state, in 1831, the Jewish community was however not mentioned at all. Therefore a group of prominent Belgian Jews, including Adolphe Oppenheim and Hartog Somerhausen, asked the National Congress to place rabbis on the payroll of the State, just as priests and ministers were. In their address, full of Belgian nationalistic language, they expressed their gratitude towards the lawmakers “qui n’ont vu que des frères dans le peuple belge!” With reference to the principle of “égalité des cultes” they stated: “Vous avez proclamé que les avantages sont égaux, et nous sommes citoyens belges.” The action was successful, and the rabbis and Jewish education were given the same amount of money as their Catholic and Protestant counterparts.37 In the address, the Belgian Jews also made mention of the lack of a chief rabbi of their own. They urged the Congress to subsidize such a position as well, because otherwise the Belgian Jews would remain spiritually dependent on a Dutch chief rabbi, something that must have been a horrible thought for the MPs of the young Belgian state.38 Soon after the positive answer of the Congress, a new chief rabbi was welcomed in Brussels. The young French scholar Eliakim Carmoly was invited to become the first chief rabbi and inaugurated on 26 May 1832. After his introductory sermon, a couple of toasts were made to the new Belgian King Leopold, both chambers of parliament, the prosperity of Belgium under its liberal constitution, political and religious tolerance, and to the emancipation of Jews in other countries which will enable them to enjoy the same rights and prospects as the Belgian Jews under the paternal scepter of Leopold.39

The Ideological Consequences The toasts at the reception in honor of Carmoly hint at the third set of consequences of the Revolution for Belgian Jewry. The Belgian Revolution was a liberal revolution, not a nationalistic one. Before 1830 there hardly existed such a thing as a colccccccc 37. 38. 39.

E. Carmoly, “Essai sur l’histoire des Juifs en Belgique (suite)”, Revue Orientale 1 (1841): 319. Ibid., 320. Cf. “Nachrichten aus der Synagoge”, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift für jüdische Theologie 1 (1835): 136. Carmoly, “Essai sur l’histoire des Juifs en Belgique (suite)”, 421-22, based on Le Moniteur belge, no. 152 (1832).

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Mozes Lemans. From: archive Joods Historisch Museum.

lective Belgian identity. It needed to be constructed when in the course of events Belgium appeared to become an independent state, not a part of the Netherlands or France.40 This is all the more true for Belgian Jewry, of whom the vast majority were born outside the country and many of whom, especially the German Jews, were still not naturalized at all. A liberal variant of nationalism became important in providing the new state with a sense of collective identity, which was in first instance predominantly directed at creating clear borders with the North. Therefore all Belgian politicians had to swear an oath to renounce the House of Orange. Jewish politicians, such as Marcus Deby who became the burgomaster of Laeken in 1834, took this oath as well.41 ccccccc 40.

41.

Cf. Lode Wils, “The Two Belgian Revolutions”, and, as a nice example, Lut Pil, “Painting at the Service of the New Nation State”, in Nationalism in Belgium: Shifting Identities, 1780-1995, ed. Kas Deprez and Louis Vos (Houndsmills, Basingstoke/London/New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), resp. 33-41, 42-50. On Marcus or Marc Julien Deby, see Schreiber, Dictionnaire biographique, 87. Cf. “Belgien”, Der Orient 1, no. 27 (1840): 206.

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Not only did the Belgian state try to construct a national identity, Belgian Jewry did the same. The new chief rabbi, Carmoly, and Hartog Somerhausen were important architects of this new Belgian Jewish identity. It was composed of a Belgian and a Jewish component, which together provided a specific ideological profile for the communities. The Belgian component consisted of elements of dedication and loyalty to the new King and State in the liturgy at synagogue and in educational material for Jewish schools. Belgium was considered to be the best state for Jews to live in, since it was the most liberal one, guaranteeing equality to all its subjects.42 Carmoly described the Belgian nation as “one big family” in which the Jews were recently adopted. He endorsed the liberal conviction that religion had to be a private affair, while the public space was neutral and impartial. But he even went further. He wanted Belgian Jews to acculturate to general moral convictions: “Travaillons à mettre nos intérêts et nos mœurs en harmonie avec les mœurs et les intérêts de tous. Qu’une coopération franche et efficace témoigne notre gratitude envers cette civilisation dont le premier bienfait pour nous, a été notre émancipation!”43 But there was also a Jewish component in the new Belgian-Jewish identity. Somerhausen and Carmoly found each other in their dedication to a new religious profile for the communities in Belgium. During his Amsterdam years, Somerhausen was an active member of the circle of local Maskilim and thus in contact with people like Samuel Israel Mulder, Mozes Lemans, and Gabriel Polak. These people promoted a civilized form of Orthodox Judaism, with more attention for decorum, the vernacular, and sermons. In the Netherlands, however, this civilizing program was only gradually introduced, because the Supreme Committee wanted to keep the whole Dutch Jewish community together. Once Belgium became independent from the Netherlands, Somerhausen and Carmoly saw their chance to introduce a number of innovations at once.44 It is a nice irony of history that precisely the Amsterdam Haskalah provided the ideology for the new Belgian Jewish identity. Implementation was not all that easy. Changes in ritual and liturgy are always with very sensitive issues in religious communities. The architects of the innovations met with considerable opposition from within the communities, especially from the Dutch Jews who had stayed in Belgium and still took the most conservative stance within Belgian Jewry.45 One of the former Dutch Jewish leaders of the community, Jacob Abas, who lost his position after the regime change, was continccccccc 42. 43. 44.

45.

“Belgien”, Der Orient 2, no. 6 (1841): 42; Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues, 410; Schreiber, Politique et religion, 21. “Essai sur l’histoire des Juifs en Belgique (suite)”, 423. Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues p. 457-58; see an extensive discussion of Carmoly’s and Somerhausen’s reform policy in Jean-Philippe Schreiber, “La doctrine du Consistoire: Le libéralisme religieux”, in idem, Politique et religion, 127-49. Marc Kahlenberg, “La modification du culte dans la synagogue de Bruxelles, de 1830 à 1880”, in La Grande Synagogue, 61; Schreiber, Politique et religion, 60.

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uously trying to undermine the attempts of the new leadership to introduce innovations.46 The communities of Gent and Antwerp did not want to introduce the new order for the synagogue service either and kept following the minhag Amsterdam, much to the dismay of Brussels.47 Carmoly met such strong opposition that he barely executed his chief rabbinic tasks from 1835 until his resignation in 1839. Somerhausen, however, stayed in Brussels and even was elected a member of the consistory in 1846. Thanks to his and Carmoly’s efforts, Belgian Jewry’s image was more progressive than that of its northern neighbors, without introducing such far-going innovations as Reform Judaism had in Germany and England.48

The Limburg Case The Belgian nation, and Belgian Jewry as well, was built up in the years after 1830. But the entire time one problem remained: King William I did not accept the existence of an independent Belgian state and was not willing to sign any agreement with the new neighbor. The consequences of William’s inflexible attitude were most sharply felt in the province of Limburg. Almost all of the province had taken sides with the Belgian revolutionaries and had become a part of the new state. Only the city of Maastricht stayed in Dutch hands, thus forming a besieged enclave in Belgian territory. The Jewish community in Maastricht, consisting of nearly 300 persons, was most loyal to the Dutch regime. The commander of Maastricht, General Dibbets, entrusted the Ministry of War “that the Jews in general, here and in the surroundings, have been of great help to me, and, as they say, feel very strongly about the rightful case of Holland.”49 Since the beginning of the Belgian Revolution, thirtyfive to sixty soldiers were in the city continuously to defend it. The Maastricht kehillah did its best to provide them all with matzos during Pesach and even organized separate services during Yom Kippur and Sukkot 1835 for the Jewish military.50 Maastricht was still in contact with The Hague, which continued to reappoint the parnassim time and time again in order not to change a thing during the siege. The kehillot that once were part of the Maastricht district, such as Sittard, Eijsden, and Meerssen, were no longer in contact with either Maastricht or The Hague.51 These Limburg kehillot were integrated in the new Belgian consistorial structure and beccccccc 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues, 417-18. [Somerhausen], “Briefe aus Brüssel. V”, 277. Ibid., 272-73. Quoted in Lemmens, Joods leven in Maastricht, 35. Jac Lemmens, Via assimilatie naar emancipatie: De joodse gemeente Maastricht ten tijde van de Commissie tot Zaken der Israëliten, 1817-1870 [MA thesis, Catholic University Nijmegen, 1988], 41-42. Lemmens, Via assimilatie, 48.

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came subject to the Liege kehillah.52 They formed no less than one-third of Belgian Jewry and differed from the rest of the communities by their rural nature. They participated wholeheartedly in the new structures, which opened new opportunities for them such as governmental funding for several ritual and educational functions.53 Finally, in 1839, King William I accepted in the Treaty of London the existence of the Belgian state and succeeded in getting back parts of Luxemburg and Limburg. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands was officially dissolved and renamed the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Thus the Belgian consistory lost a considerable number of its communities, while Maastricht once again became the supreme synagogue of the Limburg district.54 An evaluation of the situation of Limburg Jewry in 1841 resulted in a total number of 1,020 Jews, with real synagogue buildings only in Gulpen and Maastricht and only a single Jewish school in Maastricht.55 The chief rabbi of Nijmegen, Jacob Lehmans, was entrusted with the rebuilding of Jewish life in the province. In 1846, the first separate chief rabbi of Limburg, Leib Benjamin Schaap, succeeded him. Together with the Maastricht parnassim and Salomon Bloemendal, Corresponding Member of the Executive Committee, he succeeded in reviving the district and rooting it firmly in the national Dutch structures.56

Conclusion In the second half of the nineteenth century, nationalism played an important role in disputed territories between nation states, such as the Alsace, Transylvania, and Silesia. The Belgian case is clearly a different one, in which a liberal ideology motivated the revolution against an autocratic king, with nationalism starting to play a role only in a second stage. The Jews of Belgium therefore joined the revolution primarily because they embraced the liberal agenda, and after independence was acquired, found themselves confronted with the task of constructing a separate Belgian Jewish identity. On the one hand, this new identity was congruent with the construction of the national Belgian identity, while on the other hand, the Amsterdam Haskalah provided an important religious agenda to push forward. A separate Jewish identity, apart from either the Dutch or the Belgian identity, was out of the question. In this era there was still much enthusiasm about the emancipation project, and a Jewish nationalism was therefore not yet a realistic option, as it would become in the second half of the nineteenth century. ccccccc 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

J.M. Lemmens, “De Sittardse joden en hun begraafplaatsen”, in Sittard, uit bronnen geput, ed. P.L. Neve et al. (Sittard: Stg. Historie Sittard, 1993), 526. Schreiber, L’immigration, 168-69; idem, Politique et religion, 98-99. Lemmens, Joods leven in Maastricht, 35-36. Lemmens, Via assimilatie, 60. Lemmens, Joods leven in Maastricht, 38-39, 54-56.

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The creation of a geographical border between the North and South laid open the social and ideological border between German and Dutch Jews in the communities in the South. The fight inside the community was at least as heated as the fights between the Dutch and Belgian armies, although luckily in this fight no casualties were to be mourned. After the new ideological border was erected via the construction of a Belgian Jewish identity, it appeared that the Netherlands were still close by. In 1840, migration from the North had already restarted, this time over a real and an ideological border. The migrating Dutch Jews continued to be aware of that and remained loyal to the Dutch state by not naturalizing to the Belgian nationality until 1881, when a new Belgian law on naturalization was issued.57 Since 1830, Belgian Jewry and Dutch Jewry had become two different communities, with a clear yet surmountable border in between.

ccccccc 57.

Kasper-Holtkotte, Im Westen Neues, 351-56.

Paula E. Hyman

Citizenship, Regionalization, and Identity The Case of Alsatian Jewry, 1871-1914

The case of Alsatian Jews under German rule after the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian war shows the importance of what some border theorists of the past decade have emphasized to supplement the primacy of geography and politics: the relationship of boundaries and cultural identity and the social construction of boundaries.1 Or, in the words of other theorists, “soft borders”.2 Even when Alsace was transferred to German control – and all Alsatians, including Jews, lost their French citizenship – the behavior of Alsatian Jews differed in some ways from that of their neighbors. Before they became French citizens in 1791 as part of the egalitarian enthusiasm of the French Revolution, the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine, two provinces of eastern France, had defined their identities in layered terms. They were rooted in the local customs of their village and rural Jewish communities as well as those of their urban center, Metz, and they were conscious of their ties to the greater western Ashkenazi community of Europe of which they were a part. They were also conscious of French rule and the legal restrictions they suffered on their places of residency and their economic pursuits – restrictions which their neighbors enthusiastically supported. The tensions in their identity, between local and regional, tended to be conceptualized in specifically Jewish terms: were they simply a part of western Ashkenazi Jewry, or specifically Jews of Alsace-Lorraine? That tension was concretized in their decision to maintain their own yeshivot and local customs even as they sent their sons eastward to German lands for Talmudic study and purchased Hebrew books published there.3 ccccccc 1.

2.

3.

David Kaplan and Jouni Häkli, “Learning from Europe? Borderlands in Social and Geographical Context”, in Boundaries and Place: European Borderlands in Geographical Context, ed. Kaplan and Häkli (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 2-3. David E. Johnson and Scott Michaelsen, “Border Secrets: An Introduction”, in Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, ed. Michaelsen and Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1. Jay Berkovitz, Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), esp. chap. 3, “Ritual and Religious Culture in Alsace-Lorraine”, 59-86, and for the yeshivot esp. 60-63.

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The acquisition of equal civil rights as residents of France, combined with a governmental policy that fostered régénération, the remaking of Jews in the model of good French citizens, created a new tension in the identity of Alsatian Jews: a tension between a national French Jewish identity and a regional Alsatian Jewish identity. In the nineteenth century, most of them – especially those outside the major cities of Strasbourg, Mulhouse, and Metz – resisted the most extreme demands of régénération, retaining a strong measure of traditional religious practice, the use of their own vernacular, jeddich-daitch, and some traditional economic pursuits, such as peddling and cattle dealing. It was only in the 1840s and 1850s, when Jewish public primary schools were established in many communities, that large numbers of young Jews mastered French. Unlike Christian elites, though, who often endorsed German as the language of culture, Alsatian Jewish elites promoted French exclusively.4 The Alsatian version of western Yiddish persisted in the rural villages, where about a third of Jews lived, as late as 1931. However, its use was strongly discouraged by urban Jewish elites, and it disappeared as a household vernacular in the region’s cities before the Franco-Prussian war. It did continue to feature as a marker of Jewish identity in the form of sayings, humor, song, and nostalgic references well into the twentieth century.5 The regional Alsatian identity of Jews in the province was distinctly Jewish. Jews shared many customs and artistic styles with their neighbors, but their religious and linguistic differences, as well as their economic pursuits, distinguished them from the Christian residents of Alsace and Lorraine. They were also disparaged in Alsatian folklore and political discourse. As late as 1848, they were the victims of sporadic anti-Semitic violence.6 While retaining a regional Alsatian identity, Jews became increasingly conscious in the nineteenth century of the political advantages they enjoyed as French citizens, in contradistinction to their fellow Jews in Germany. They were proud of being French Jews. When they emigrated from their rural villages, their destination was most commonly Paris (or smaller French cities), or the United States, but not German cities to the east. On the other hand, as marriage records reveal, there was some migration of German Jews into Alsace during the nineteenth century prior to the Franco-Prussian war. After the Revolution, all Alsatians had a hybrid identity, as Alsatians and as citizens of France. Jews in Alsace, however, had a braided

ccccccc 4. 5.

6.

Paula E. Hyman, The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 108. Freddy Raphael and Geneviève Herberich-Marx, Mémoire plurielle de l’Alsace: Grandeur et servitude d’un pays des marges, Collection Recherches et Documents, vol. 44 (Strasbourg: Publications de la Société Savante de l’Alsace et des Régions de l’Est, 1991), 317-51. See Freddy Raphael, “Le Judaïsme Alsacien: Un Judaïsme quêteur de traces”, in Regards sur la culture judéo-alsacien: Des identités in partage, ed. Freddy Rafael (Strasbourg: La nuée bleue, 2000), 238; Paula E. Hyman, Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace, 24-26.

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hybrid identity – as Jews, as citizens of France, and as Alsatians. All Alsatians lived in a borderland, buffeted between France and Germany for more than three centuries, but Jews in Alsace were marginal within the borderland. The annexation of Alsace and part of the province of Lorraine after the German victory in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War provides an opportunity to examine the impact of the traumatic loss of citizenship on the identities of this minority population – Jews living on the margins of two nations and in (at least occasional) tension with their Christian neighbors. The period of the integration of Alsace-Lorraine into Germany, which lasted almost fifty years, demonstrates the ways in which governmental policies and changing political realities jostled with a deep-seated preexisting sense of self to modify the identities of the Jewish population residing in these Franco-German borderlands. Jews shared many attitudes with their fellow Alsatians during the period of German rule, but their experience and self-understanding as Jews led to some important differences. The strength of the identification of Alsatian Jews (as I will call the Jews of the two provinces since the majority of them resided in Alsace) with the “myth” of the French Revolution as the source of their liberation manifested itself in the immediate aftermath of the annexation. Residents of the annexed territories were given the right to opt for French citizenship, which necessitated their emigration from AlsaceLorraine by October 1, 1872. Although the records are not complete, it is clear that in comparison with Christian residents of the provinces, Jews opted for France and emigrated from the Reichsland (as the annexed territory was called by Germany) in disproportionately high numbers. Like Jews, Catholics constituted a higher percentage of optants than did Protestants because they identified with France as a Catholic country, while Germany was predominantly Protestant. The Jewish population of Alsace-Lorraine, which had stood at almost 41,000 in 1871, declined to about 30,000 in 1910.7 However, the extent of emigration was statistically masked, and partially compensated for, by the immigration of German Jews into the Reichsland. As the analysis of my colleague and former student Vicki Caron indicates, the mostly urban and middle-class to upper-middle-class Jewish optants and emigrants seem to have been motivated primarily by patriotic sentiment. As many contemporary observers noted, Jews feared that their political rights would diminish in Germany, even though the civic emancipation of Jews had been one of the innovations of the newly unified German Reich. The use of the tricolore (the red, white, and blue of the French flag) on the mappot (cloths commemorating circumcisions and used to tie Torah scrolls) persisted in the region for at least a few years.8 Like

ccccccc 7. 8.

Statistics may be found in Vicki Caron, “The Social and Religious Transformation of Alsace-Lorraine Jewry, 1871-1914”, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 30 (1985): 322. Robert Weyl and Martine Weyl, “Mappoth d’Alsace”, Saisons d’Alsace, nos. 55-56 (1975): 132.

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other formerly French Alsatians, Jews crossed the border to participate in French national festivals, such as Bastille Day.9 Many Alsatian Jews – like, ironically, the members of the Dreyfus family – identified strongly with France and were rewarded by French civil institutions with positions when they emigrated. Male Jewish optants and emigrants, most of whom were young, were strongly repulsed by the idea of serving in the German army, but many were willing to serve an even longer term in the French military. A large number of Jewish emigrants became officers in the French Army during the Third Republic.10 Emigration was facilitated, moreover, by the fact that many Jews in Alsace had close kinsmen who had already settled in Paris before the war. In 1872, 42% of Jews in Paris had been born in Alsace-Lorraine.11 Emigration was a family choice, rather than an individual one, and the emigrants included large numbers of women and children. When Jews had family businesses in Alsace, they often left one member of the family behind to administer the business while the rest of the family resettled in France. The loyalty of Jews in the Reichsland to France was gradually affected by a number of factors. The mere passage of time suggested that the annexation might prove to be permanent. Living in a milieu in which all public events were conducted in German and children were educated in German public schools, Jews and other Alsatians witnessed the erosion of their facility with French, and most younger members of the population were unable to express themselves in French at all. Moreover, the German government made a special effort to treat Jews with greater consideration than was the case in other parts of Germany. For example, it banned the dissemination in the province of anti-Semitic books, published in Germany. The Kaiser Wilhelm University in Strassburg was willing to appoint Jews to faculty positions at a time when German universities located beyond the borders of the Reichsland refrained from considering Jewish candidates. However, the local government did not go so far as to challenge a discriminatory anti-Semitic policy, such as refusal to accept Jews into the army officer corps, that applied across the Reich. The efforts of the German government to win the cooperation of Jews in the Reichsland were abetted by the anti-Semitism unleashed in France by the Dreyfus affair. The prolonged turbulence of the affair and the failure of French institutions to declare Dreyfus innocent until 1906 tarnished the image of France in the eyes of Jews now living under German rule. If their citizenship did not protect French Jews from anti-Semitic invective and, in the case of Dreyfus himself, from unjust prosccccccc 9. 10. 11.

Vicki Caron, Between France and Germany: The Jews of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871-1918 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 115. Léon Strauss, “1789-1939: les Juifs d’Alsace, la nation et la politique”, in Regards sur la culture judéoalsacienne (see note 6), 159-60. Doris Bensimon-Donath, Socio-démographie des Juifs de France et d’Algérie (Paris: POF Etudes, 1976), 108.

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ecution, then how different was France, really, from Germany? Alsatian Jews’ unbridled French patriotism was muted not only by pragmatic considerations but also by skepticism about France itself. Still, Alsatian Jews, whatever their legal status, were not prepared to fashion a German Jewish identity and kept their distance from the German Jews who had settled in the main cities of the Reichsland – Strassburg, Kolmar, Muhlhaüsen, and Metz – as part of the government’s policy of Germanizing the province. (Needless to say, they were even less receptive to the smaller number of East European immigrant Jews who appeared in the Reichsland).12 In 1910, one-sixth of the Reichsland’s total population was either immigrant or second-generation German, and among Jews the proportion was higher. Almost a quarter of Jews in the Reichsland in that year were from Germany.13 Marriages between immigrant German Jews (mostly male) and Alsatian Jews, however, comprised a small minority of marriages between Jews in Alsace. Alsatian Jews also refrained from integrating German Jews into the administration of their official religious community, the consistory. It was only in 1895 that the first German Jewish immigrant was elected to the Consistory Board in Strassburg and not until 1900 that an “old German” Jew was elected to the consistory of Metz.14 Similarly, Alsatian Jews resisted hiring German-Jewish schoolteachers and German cantors. Only the legal inability to hire French-trained rabbis forced them to resort to German-born and German-trained rabbis and to send their sons seeking rabbinic education to seminaries in Germany.15 According to a 1900 memo from a German governmental official, immigrant German Jews in Strassburg had long desired that an “old German” fill the position of Chief Rabbi of the Lower Rhine, but that wish had yet to be fulfilled.16 The distance between the native Alsatians and the “old German” Jewish residents was exacerbated by the fact that many of the German immigrants were religious Liberals, whose style of worship differed from the more traditional Jewish practice of native Alsatians. As time passed, however, Alsatian Jews, along with other Alsatians, began to accommodate to living in Germany.17 Jewish communal officials like rabbis and cantors, who were dependent on the government for their salaries, were the first to make their peace with the German authorities. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Alsatian Jews had their own German-language newspaper, the Strassburgccccccc 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Jean Daltroff, “1871-1918: En Alsace, l’acceuil contrasté des juifs venus d’ailleurs”, in Regards sur la culture judéo-alsacienne (see note 6), 113-29. Léon Strauss, 161. Vicki Caron and Paula Hyman, “The Failed Alliance: Jewish-Catholic Relations in Alsace-Lorraine, 1871-1914”, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 26 (1981): 9. Caron, Between France and Germany, 109-11. Ibid., 112. Dan P. Silverman, Reluctant Union: Alsace-Lorraine and Imperial Germany, 1871-1918 (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1972).

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er Israelitische Wochenschrift. In 1908, it responded to charges that Alsatian Jews were among the most pro-French groups of the Reichsland’s population with the following statement: “The younger generation of Jewish clergy and of the Jewish population belongs to that segment of the Alsatian inhabitants who express the greatest sympathy to Deutschtum.”18 A year and a half later, in response to a FrenchJewish newspaper’s anti-German article, the newspaper strongly declared that Alsatian Jews had a new perspective on Germany: “For us there can be no talk of struggle between the spirit of conquest and the spirit of justice. More and more are we of the opinion that our provincial and imperial government is guided only by the spirit of justice.”19 Lest you think that such statements were designed simply to mollify German officials, there are internal governmental reports on the increasing decline in antipathy of Alsatian Jews toward Germany. At the same time, Alsatian Jews began to establish local Zionist groups independent of both French and German affiliation and joined German-Jewish institutions. In 1912, Alsatian Jews established a Strassburg branch of the major German-Jewish defense organization, the Central Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens. The local Alsatian leaders of the Strassburg branch, however, asserted their difference from the rest of German Jewry in their religious organization, their relation to the government and the non-Jewish population, and their entire political constellation. It would be an error, they concluded in a message to the national directors of the CV, for the leaders in Berlin to prescribe to those in Alsace what they should do to secure civic equality in the province.20 This appeal, articulated in 1913, is a Jewish variant of the Alsatian movement of autonomism. With the turn of the century, Alsatians increasingly focused on autonomism, a measure of local rule that would legally recognize their right to be regarded as German citizens with a particularist identity rooted in the local experience and culture of Alsace. The Protest political movement that pro-French Alsatians had mounted in the two decades after annexation – seeking to restore the conquered territories to France – declined in favor of a pragmatic recognition that maintaining cultural ties with the past – asserting a regional identity and a measure of political self-rule – was likely the best way, perhaps the only way, to forestall complete assimilation into German society and polity. While Jews had cooperated with the largely Catholic Protest movement in the 1870s and 1880s, that alliance had frayed in the 1890s. In that decade, Catholics first resorted to anti-Semitism as a vehicle to combat the Socialist Party and later expressed strong anti-Semitic invective during the Dreyfus affair.21 Whatever reccccccc 18. 19. 20. 21.

Strassburger Israelitische Wochenschrift, 28 November 1908, as cited in Caron and Hyman, 17. Ibid., 17 February 1910, 2, as cited in Caron and Hyman, 17. Caron and Hyman, 17. Caron and Hyman, 11-15.

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mained of Alsatian Catholic sympathy for France was increasingly identified with an anti-republican French nationalism. It harkened back to the ancien régime, whose values ran against what Jews saw as the defining characteristics of the France to which they owed their emancipation. Catholics envisioned a France that would renounce the Revolutionary slogan of liberté, égalité, and fraternité and would limit Jewish influence. The Dreyfus affair thus led both Jews and Catholics to disaffection with France – Jews because of the anti-Semitism that featured in the affair, the Catholics by the anticlericalism that the Dreyfusards promoted. Their conflicting visions of France prevented political cooperation between Jews and Catholics, not only in the 1890s but also in the later movement for autonomy as a strategy for resisting German political and cultural control. With the separation of church and state that followed the Dreyfus affair in France, Alsatian Catholics were prepared to take the lead in pressing autonomism as their cause. There were seemingly many reasons for Alsatian Jews as well to become supporters of autonomism: their hybrid identity, their romanticized memories of France, their attachment to Alsace as the source of their specific culture, and the recognition of the apparent pervasiveness of German anti-Semitism. The development of the autonomist movement’s ideology under the impact of the Catholic political party, however, prevented their political mobilization for the cause. Jews simply did not play a noticeable role in the autonomist movement. Alsatians promoted some form of autonomy for their province within the German Empire while Germany debated the shape of a new constitution that would finally be adopted in 1911.22 But the form that “autonomy” would take was in dispute even among its supporters. The Catholics, the strongest and best organized political group in Alsace, sought “religious liberty” that would protect them against liberal anticlericalism and would offer support of confessional schools; the poorly organized and politically weak liberals were caught between the stance of continued Protest and an autonomism they never fully defined.23 Alsatian Jews favored a constitution in which they would be granted the same rights as Protestants and Catholics. When the 1910 discussion on the constitutional plan for the regional parliament, or Landtag, mandated officially-named representatives of Protestants and Catholics alone to sit in its first chamber, Jews protested. With the support of nonJewish liberals, and against conservative opposition, they succeeded in gaining a representative on the Landtag. In 1917, as a result of the effort of its then Jewish representative, Rabbi Nathan Netter of Metz, Jews secured the right for Jews to be appointed full professors at the University of Strassburg. The new constitution, how-

ccccccc 22. 23.

Jean-Marie Mayeur, Autonomie et politique en Alsace: La constitution de 1911 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1970). Ibid., 28, 31.

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ever, did not prevent the application in the years immediately preceding the First World War of a more stringent Germanization policy regarding the Reichsland. As far as Jews were concerned, this policy was reflected in the requirement that the consistories use German as their official language, as well as in heated debates about seating non-German speaking elected delegates to consistory boards.24 During the First World War, Jews and other Alsatians manifested mixed feelings about Germany. With the outbreak of war, the German government responded quickly, arresting hundreds of Alsatian males on the charge of being anti-German and deporting them to the interior of Germany or to the eastern front.25 When the war broke out, many Alsatian Jews fled to France and occasionally to Switzerland. In spite of the fact that Alsatian Jews fought in the German army (largely because they were drafted), that about two hundred died in combat, and that some Alsatian rabbis publicly expressed support for the German cause, Jews were overrepresented in the published lists of Alsace-Lorrainers arrested during the war for anti-German activity, including high treason, draft evasion, and assistance to French troops.26 The war and the shared pro-France sympathies of most Alsatians largely erased the tensions between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, enabling the re-creation, however, briefly, of participation in a common cause. The French victory in World War I ultimately brought an end to the struggle between citizenship, cultural memory, and lived reality for Alsatian Jews as well as other Alsatians. Most of the immigrant German Jews and Christians returned to Germany after the armistice. With the restoration of French rule, Alsatians had to negotiate a new relationship with a now laicized France, different from the one they remembered and imagined. This was true for Jews as well, even though they greeted the French victory with fervent celebrations of French patriotism.27 During the period of 1871-1918, Alsatian Jews had to forge an identity that melded their memory of a century of equal rights as French citizens, their current status as German citizens, and their specifically Alsatian-Jewish religio-ethnic cultural sensibilities. They were aware that they were living in a borderland, a reality that they had essentially discounted from the Revolution until the annexation. Until the Franco-Prussian War they had felt secure that they had become French. After all, Alsace had been under French rule for more than two centuries, and they identified strongly with the French state that had emancipated them and guaranteed their rights through every change of regime. Borderlands (or border) theory should apply to the Jews of Alsace. As two editors of a book entitled Border Theory have written, “The model used by liberal-toccccccc 24. 25. 26. 27.

Caron, Between France and Germany, 147-48, 152, 154-55. Ibid., 178-79. Ibid., 180-82. Caron, Between France and Germany, 183-85.

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left scholars, by border theorists, is one in which differences count, make a difference, on which particular constellations of practices are understood to be … organized by some principle of identity.”28 Borderlands are defined not merely by geography and political boundaries, but also by cultural elements such as language, religion, ethnicity, and national sentiment. The difference of Jews from other residents of Alsace with regard to each of these characteristics was crucial to their response to the annexation, to living under German rule, to autonomism, and to the First World War. The books that deal with Alsace in this period tend to overlook the Jews entirely. To be sure, Jews were a very small component of the total population of the Reichsland, just 2.6% in 1871 and 1.6% in 1910 (and the latter figure includes Jewish immigrants from other German states as well as a small contingent of immigrant Jews from further east).29 And Jews did share many of the attitudes of other Alsatians toward the annexation, German immigrants, and the First World War. But the ways Jews differed from their neighbors highlight the centrality of specific social location and the importance of minority status in the formation of political attitudes. Jews continued to differ in language. They understood the dialect of their fellow Alsatians, but their own dialect was a marker both of their rootedness in Alsatian soil and of their separateness from other Alsatians. As the sociologist Freddy Raphael has written, “Judeo-Alsatian[s] … transmitted a system of values and modeled a particular sensibility.” Non-Jewish Alsatians learned some words of the Jewish dialect to do business with Jews, but they often saw it as a symbol of the secrecy, of the difference, of Jews. Yiddish words borrowed from lower class professions like cattle dealing also found their way into Alsatian. Often they were used pejoratively. In the Reichsland, jeddich-daitsch was a fading dialect, a source of nostalgia, while Alsatian was still very much in use among the Christian majority as a vernacular.30 Despite its decline, to non-Jewish Alsatians jeddich-daitch was still a source of Jewish difference. Anti-Semitism was a primary factor in the political choices Jews made during the period of German rule. In the first twenty-five years after the German victory, Jews judged Germany inferior to France because of its anti-Semitism and restriction on Jews’ access to positions in the civil service, the university, and the army officer corps. When anti-Semitism erupted in France during the period of the Dreyfus affair, Alsatian Jews began to see France and Germany as evenly matched. That is, their accommodation to German rule, while parallel to that of many Christian Alsatians, was motivated at least in part by different issues. ccccccc 28. 29. 30.

Johnson and Michaelsen, “Border Secrets”, 4. Caron, Between France and Germany, 76, 167. Raphael and Herberich-Marx, 317-35; condensed in Freddy Raphael, “Le Judéo-alsacien: Témoin d’une culture engloutie”, Saisons d’Alsace, no. 133 (Autumn 1996): 27-32. The citation is from p. 27.

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Finally, the Jews’ reticence to fully endorse the movement for autonomism stemmed from their suspicion of the goals of the Alsatian Catholics who were its main promoters. They realized that Catholics envisioned a return to the traditional Christian values that had characterized prerevolutionary France. Autonomism promised a space for the deployment of religious control, particularly regarding education. They also recognized that the Protestants, who tended to share their liberal politics, had a stronger pro-German sensibility than did the Jews and accepted autonomism only as a way to better the Reichsland’s condition within Imperial Germany – to integrate within Germany, not to assert Alsatian particularism. Because of their particular religious and cultural status in Alsace and their long history as a minority, Jews confronted both external and internal boundaries, not only between France and Germany but also between themselves and their neighbors. The presence of Jews, or other minorities, complicates any investigation of the politics and identity formation of residents of borderlands.

Yaron Tsur

Moroccan Jewry and Decolonization A Modern History of Collective Social Boundaries

At the start of the twentieth century, on the eve of colonial conquest, Moroccan Jewry made up the largest Jewish community in Arab lands, numbering about a hundred thousand. The Jews were deeply integrated into the country’s economy. They lived in virtually every principal location, playing a vital role in the trades and in commerce. Culturally, too, they were an integral part of their neighborhoods – with the exception of the religious sphere. Language – which was the main barrier between ethnic and religious groups in the premodern period – posed no impediment. Jews spoke the languages of their surroundings: mainly Arabic, but in some regions a Berber or Spanish local dialect as well.1 Given this background, the salient social boundary concerned economics: there were large, even huge, differences between rich and poor of the same religion, whether Muslims or Jews, alongside close relations between individual Jews and Muslims of the same economic status. But in terms of collective identity, the religious barrier was the foremost social boundary, and the line dividing Muslims and Jews was noticeable. Both religious groups believed in their essential difference and their superiority over members of other religions, while the religious laws of each required zones of social distance and segregation. This similarity aside, there was a hierarchy that came to the fore in the dominant position of Muslims. Jews were of a protected status – dhimmis – which entailed subordination to the faithful (i.e., the Muslims). Jewish subordination had a number of external, visible expressions. Chief among these was the Koranic jizia or poll tax, but there were also various signs of discrimination, which I will not discuss here.2 ccccccc 1.

For descriptions of the complex cultural profile of Moroccan Jewry before the colonial period, see Mohammed Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans au Maroc 1859-1948: Contribution à l’histoire des relations inter-communautaires en terre d’Islam (Rabat: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de l’Université Mohammed V, 1994), 14-30; Joseph Chetrit, “The Jewish Traditional Marriage: Sociocultural Essay” [Hebrew], in The Jewish Traditional Marriage: Interpretive Documentary Chapters, ed. Joseph Chetrit et al., Miqqedem Umiyyam 8 (2003): 24-27.

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Nonetheless, by the end of the Muslim period, new models of collective identity penetrated the Jewish communities. These were introduced by Jewish movements and organizations from abroad: the Hebrew Haskalah or Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), on the other, neither of which lowered the religious barrier. Both declared outright that the Moroccan situation was no longer normative in Europe or in progressive Muslim lands, such as the Ottoman Empire, where the official ideal was Jewish equality. Moreover, in the 1880s, the Hebrew Haskalah started to carry a Jewish-national message, which only reinforced the boundaries of the old religious community with the added element of nationalism.3 Alliance, for its part, cast its education net in the Balkans and the lands of Islam, providing Jewish youth with French education and spreading French patriotism. Since these endeavors involved secularization, there was a blurring of the original religious divides, paving the way for potential Jewish integration into non-Jewish society. The targeted milieu was however non-local and at this stage rather virtual – the French communities of the worldwide French Empire. Alliance did not prepare the youth for integration into the Muslim neighborhood.4 Thus, in terms of the religious barrier, the European-Jewish influence brought no visible change. But in terms of the economic boundaries, there was great change. Alliance schools trained top students for employment in European firms, while Muslims had no such modern training apparatus. If in the past there had been no economic divide between Muslims and Jews, now more and more Jews had access to markets that were practically closed to Muslims. And, at this stage of imperialism, they were ccccccc 2.

3.

4.

Foreign and Jewish observers tend to underline the dhimma status of the Jews and its particular manifestations, while Moroccan recent historiography tends to blur it and to emphasize JewishMuslim similarities. For a general and rather balanced description of the Jews’ status in precolonial Morocco, based on the local rabbinical literature, see Shlomo Deshen, The Mellah Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 13-29; see also the recent study by Emily Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red City (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007). For the nationalist turn of Hebrew Haskalah, see for instance Yosef Salmon, “David Gordon and ‘Ha-Maggid’: Changing Attitudes toward Jewish Nationalism, 1860-1882”, in Modern Judaism 17, no. 2 (1997): 109-24. For the modern map of Jewish identities in Morocco, see Yaron Tsur, A Torn Community: The Jews of Morocco and Nationalism 1943-1954 [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001), 4850, 53-55. On Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU)’s project in the Meditterranean, see André Chouraqui, L’Alliance Israélite Universelle et la renaissance juive contemporaine, 1860-1960: Cent ans d’histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965); Aron Rodrigue, Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Transition: The Teachers of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, 1860-1939 (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993); idem, French Jews, Turkish Jews. The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990); Eli Bar-Chen, Weder Asiaten noch Orientalen. Internationale jüdische Organisationen und die Europäisierung “rückständiger” Juden, Ex Oriente Lux, vol. 7 (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2005). On AIU in Morocco, see Michael M. Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morocco: 1862-1962 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983).

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the strongest and most rewarding markets. Alliance’s striking success in educating increasing numbers of Jewish youth stemmed precisely from this advantage.

The Effects of Colonial “Sectorization” The French conquest in 1912 sharpened the above starting positions. The French arrival was followed by the installation of a colonial regime, officially dividing society into two categories of differing status: Europeans and natives (indigènes). The tiny European population grew and developed, augmented by the immigration of French officials and colonists. A special structure formed, which I call “sectoral”, sustaining culture-dependent, economically-disparate social networks. The architect of the Moroccan protectorate, General Lyautey, tried to enclose the Jews in the majority native sector. As regards legal and political status, he succeeded, though less so in the cultural sphere. He tried to do away with Alliance in Morocco – but it continued to function. Though Alliance did not provide French elementary schooling for all Jewish children, it certainly ensured access to this resource to many more Jews than did the French regime to Muslims.5 In the new, official, dual-dichotomous regime, Alliance graduates contributed to creating a third, westernized unofficial sector: locals with potential mobility in both economies, able to mediate between the traditional-native and the European markets.6 The colonial regime encouraged the sectoral divide, and the by-product was that new social boundaries were instituted within the old populations. The tiny westernized sector grew larger year by year, and hereafter Morocco’s original inhabitants, Muslims and Jews, subdivided into a large majority, belonging to the local, native sector and resting on Morocco’s original culture, and a new minority, made up mostly of Jews but also of a growing number of Muslims, belonging to the westernized sector and resting on French. In both these sectors, the social boundaries between Muslims and Jews were reformulated. Let us turn to developments in the larger native sector. The French regime had little interest in modernizing it – but modernization did take place, at least among the elites, despite the French. We mentioned the Hebrew Haskalah. It echoed in Morocco from afar, primarily through the Hebrew press, penetrating the traditional elites of the Jewish community and influencing the drift towards nationalism and Zionism; in other words, the Hebrew press revalidated the old collective boundaries.7 Something similar happened among Muslims. The modernization centers of Arabic culture were in the East, in Syria and mainly in Egypt. And they too ccccccc 5. 6.

Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle, 303-12. Tsur, A Torn Community, 33-36, 178-84; on the “sectorial” colonial divide see also: idem, “The Brief Career of Prosper Cohen: A Sectorial Analysis of the North African Jewish Leadership in the Early Years of Israeli Statehood”, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 22 (2007): 67-72.

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echoed in the Maghreb. Nor were they neutral in terms of religion and nationalism; they spread Islamist and pan-Arabic influences. The Islamist influences of course left intact the old religious boundaries between faithful and infidels. But the influence of Arab nationalism in the East was followed by the emergence of the Moroccan National Movement, which carried a modern message for Jews. In the East, in such countries as Egypt or Iraq, Arab nationalism adopted the model of classic Western emancipation, offering Jews full and equal rights, including a share, generally symbolic, in high government posts – a particularly sensitive issue, given the old religious hierarchy.8 The problem was, first, that Morocco had a rather conservative character by comparison with the Arab East, and second, that the birth of the Moroccan National Movement took place rather late, in the 1930s. Both factors diminished the movement’s chances of success among Jews. To begin with, neither of the native modern elites – neither that of the Muslim majority nor that of the Jewish minority – was secularized in the encounter with modernization or transferred its basic religious values to second place. Upon its establishment, the Moroccan National Movement proclaimed Jews to be Moroccan nationals, but it did not clarify the extent to which it was prepared to retreat from Islam’s familiar demands. Moreover, it was not born as a straightforward territorial national movement, as, for instance, in Egypt, but as part of pan-Arabism which, in the 1930s, was already steeped in sharp conflict with the Zionist movement. One important item on its binding political agenda was thus a rejection of the Zionist orientation – which elite members of the Jewish native sector, many Maskilim and some rabbis, already espoused. Consequently, the modernization of the original culture did not lead towards a mutual embrace, but towards a nationalist revalidation of the old religious divide. A mutual embrace and the lowering of Muslim–Jewish barriers might have happened more readily in the tiny westernized sector, locals who adopted French as their high culture. Secularization processes in this sector left both sides freer of the religion-based conceptual world. They were more attuned to the classic Western emancipation model, and they included Jews who openly opposed Zionism. The problem was that, nearly always, most of the anti-Zionists were not motivated by the classic Western model or devotion to the Moroccan national idea; they were driven by faith in a mutation of the Western model – the mutation that Alliance disseminated, placing Asian and African Jews on the road to acculturation to, and integration in, the social structures of imperialist France. Between the two ccccccc 7. 8.

Tsur, A Torn Community, 53-56; Joseph Chetrit, “Hebrew Nationalist Modernity versus French Modernity” [Hebrew], Miqqedem Umiyyam 3 (1990): 11-66. Gudrun Kraemer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989); Maurice M. Sawdayee, The Baghdad Connection (n.p., n.d.); Nissim Kazzaz, The Jews in Iraq in the Twentieth Century [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991).

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world wars, this was without a doubt the dominant current among westernized Jews – and they were the local group that increasingly took over the community leadership. The overriding tendency, as said, was to link up with the French and aspire to French citizenship, as the Jews of Algeria had been granted in 1870. But other identity options were also open. Some westernized Jews adopted Zionism, while a very small number did consider Moroccan nationalism.9

The Effects of the “Diasporic” Situation In retrospect, Morocco’s decolonization seems to have begun in the Second World War. The bottom line is that France failed in the war. Its dominance was shaken, and the empire started to disintegrate. The French orientation, which till then had appeared to be the winning identity option, was not dropped from the repertoire, but the new westernized elite of Moroccan Jewry was now much more tolerant of other options, such as Zionism and Moroccan nationalism. Both of these national movements gained in strength.10 In Morocco, the Independence Party (el-Istiqlal) was formed and the Sultan joined and headed the liberation movement. The anti-French campaign was launched and, from 1952, included terror. In Palestine, a Jewish state was created and the small Jewish Yishuv realized the dream of mass immigration. The two national movements, the Moroccan and the Zionist, began to seriously compete for Moroccan Jewry at the height of the Second World War, in 1943-44. To put it in our terms, each sought to reshape the Jews’ modern collective identity and derivative social boundaries. The starting point of the Moroccan movement, as we have seen, was not promising. The new collective boundaries, until then, had not tended to lower the traditional religious barrier. The dominant modern orientation, the French one, had scored success because of its promising opportunities for a population entering the colonial era. The opportunities did not, however, encompass the entire population. This was already obvious at the climax of the French period, in the 1930s. The native sector was hard hit by industrialization and the collapse of both agriculture and traditional trades. Under the French, internal migration was accelerated along with the expansion of urban slums, particularly in Casablanca. The plight of Muslims and Jews outside of the orbit of modern education and colonial benefits had a good deal in common.11 It was a social powder keg, and novel solutions were needed. The Moroccan National Movement was able to channel the frustration of the Muslim masses towards opposition to the French and the vision of independence.

ccccccc 9. 10. 11.

Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, 495-594; Tsur, A Torn Community, 63-72. Tsur, A Torn Community, 81-82, 186-90, 193-97; Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, 639-68. Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, 508-10; Tsur, A Torn Community, 27-43, 182-84.

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Labeling the Christian French as hateful “others” of course posed no problem. On the same basis, it was also possible to unite the various Muslim cultural types created by the colonial era: those who were practically untouched by modernism of any kind, the masses, and the elites – those who embraced Arabic modernism and those who adopted French high culture. But the Jews had a different history regarding their identification of “others”. And the Muslim was among the “others”, although in a different way than the French. The Moroccan movement thus needed to make special efforts to surmount the old boundaries that had merely been revalidated in the colonial period. In the early thrust of Moroccan nationalism, el-Istiqlal and Sultan Muhammad V invested all their energy against the French. It is hard to say that they made special, intensive efforts towards the Jews.12 In contrast to the national camp’s relative neglect of the local Jewish minority, world Jewry now afforded the local community a new status. This was primarily due to the extermination of European Jewry in WWII: international Jewish movements and organizations had lost their main target public in what had been the Jews’ demographic center before the Holocaust. Moroccan Jewry, making up the largest Jewish community in the lands of Islam, now enjoyed new, unprecedented importance. Zionists, the Orthodox community, and philanthropic organizations began to take intensive interest in the large Moroccan community. Alliance launched a strong drive to build schools, the international Jewish organization for professional education and training ORT began to take care of youth vocational training, and the Jewish World Health Organization (OSE) opened community clinics. Habad and the Lithuanian yeshivas inaugurated heders and recruited students for yeshivas. All these depended on the support of the central organization of American-Jewish philanthropy, the American Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC, or simply the “Joint”). In addition, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) tried to win over the Moroccan Jewish community leadership to its pan-Jewish organization. The boundaries of religious identity, which had remained almost intact till then anyway, now received reinforcement and new global validity.13 Whereas in the preceding period the hegemonic current shaping modern collective boundaries had been, in Jewish terms, antinationalist, now the dominant current was Zionist. Following the Holocaust, even Alliance partially underwent a certain nationalist transformation, not to mention the American Joint or the WJC. And, whereas the previous hegemonic orientation had walked hand in hand with imperialist France, the pro-Zionist orientation was attentive to the needs of the Jewish state. The social powder keg, spawned by industrialization under the French and expressed

ccccccc 12. 13.

Tsur, A Torn Community, 93-96. Ibid., 22-24, 128-32, 151-55, 205-13; Michael M. Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), 158-85.

Moroccan Jewry and Decolonization

199

predominantly in internal migration from the inland regions to Casablanca, could be channeled to external emigration – to Israel. And that is precisely what happened. All the abovementioned organizations, from Alliance to the Joint, joined the effort of preparing the nonwesternized masses for emigration to Israel. To be sure, there were local forces, mainly unemployment and poverty, pushing the Jewish masses, like the Muslim masses, to migrate. But unlike the Muslims, the Jewish masses could attribute a positive meaning to external migration, that radical change, and there were forces attracting them to a specific country abroad. For some, especially the youngsters, that was the force of modern nationalism. For the many, the initial attractiveness was a function of their religious culture. It included the vision of redemption, whereby Jews were to leave their domiciles in Exile one day and return to their ancestral land.14 The Zionist movement was now able to activate this lever, while Jewish organizations promised training and funding for a sole destination – the Holy Land. Morocco’s Jewish minority thus became the pioneer of Moroccan emigration abroad. The move from the one society to the other was gradual, conducted in waves from 1947 to 1964.15 The Arab-speaking native sector and the French-speaking westernized sector were not represented to equal extents in the move to Israel. The westernized had a choice of destination – Israel, France, or Canada – or they could choose to remain in Morocco. The Moroccan National Movement did not give up on the Jews easily. Right after independence in 1956, it encouraged elite members, coming mainly from the westernized sector, to found a movement denoting Jews as Moroccan nationals and shaping social boundaries in the reverse direction from French or Zionist orientations.16 At the same time, Muhammad V closed Morocco’s gates to Jewish emigration. But it was too late – more than a third of Morocco’s Jews, about a hundred thousand, had already settled in Israel. The Jews saw the king’s measure as oppression. It was inconsistent with the ideas of freedom and liberty preached by nationalism. Meanwhile, Moroccan immigrants did not have an easy time in Israel either. They were subjected to the internal orientalism characteristic of the modern encounter between European and non-European Jews and were at the forefront of Israel’s ethnic problem – the problem of Ashkenazi-Mizrahi relations.17 Nevertheless, Morocco’s economic crisis and growing closeness with the Arab League in the early years of independence reinforced the pull of Jewish solidarity and Israel. Ultimately, Hassan II, Muhammad V’s son, gave up on the Jews. ccccccc 14. 15. 16.

17.

Tsur, A Torn Community, 403-5. In 1948-51, the number of immigrants was about 30,000, in 1954-56 70,000, and in 1961-64 100,000. On this movement, Al-Wifaq, see Joseph B. Schechtman, On Wings of Eagles: The Plight, Exodus, and Homecoming of Oriental Jewry (New York: Tomas Yoseloff, 1961), 286-88; Laskier, North African Jewry, 158-85; Robert Assaraf, Une certaine histoire des juifs du Maroc ([Paris]: Jean-Claude Gawsewitch Éditeur, ca. 2005), 660-61. Yaron Tsur, “Carnival Fears: Moroccan Immigrants and the Ethnic Problem in the Young State of Israel”, The Journal of Israeli History 18, no. 1 (1997): 73-103.

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And then, within four years, 1961-64, more than a hundred thousand Jews left Morocco for Israel, again under the management and funding of Jewish organizations.18 Later, in 1967-71 there was another big wave of about 30,000 immigrants to Israel, and in sum, about 263,000 Jews left Morocco to the Jewish state between 1948 (when there were no more than 300,000 Jews in Morocco) and 1971.19 The rest, some 80,000 to 100,000 souls, left during these years and later, mainly to France and (to a lesser extent) Canada.20 There were only a few thousand Jews in Morocco at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Moroccan case is instructive about the molding of Jewish collective identity in the modern age and the Jews’ evolving social boundaries with respect to their surroundings. In this case, the cardinal influence, in my view, was the diasporic one: the fact that Moroccan Jewry was part of a dispersion of minorities scattered over different regions of the world. The demographic and political centers of the Jewish diaspora in the modern era were European, and from early on, they took part in global movements and currents such as imperialism and nationalism. They took a growing interest in Jewish communities outside of Europe and affected their history. As a result, in various processes in Morocco, Jews were ahead of the Muslim majority. Because of Alliance, Jews were the spearheads of Western modernization. Because of Alliance and the Hebrew Enlightenment (Haskalah), the spirit of nationalism reached them earlier. And because of the actions of Israel’s leadership and international Jewish organizations, they were the vanguard of Moroccan emigration en masse. But in the Moroccan case, Jewish diasporic intervention not only led to avantgardism, it also perpetuated the traditional, collective barrier. At a time that nationalism swept up the Muslim majority in Moroccan identity and the pan-Arab camp, the French orientation of Alliance and the Zionist influence pulled the Jewish minority towards allegiance – first to imperialist France, and then to the Zionist Yishuv and the State of Israel, which were in conflict with pan-Arabism. Then, whereas the force of the West’s attraction led young Muslims to emigrate to the countries of Christian Europe, the forces of religion and nationalism led the majority of the Moroccan Jews to emigrate to Israel, in the Middle East, while only the minority, although considerable in numbers, went to the West.

ccccccc 18. 19. 20.

On the last wave of emigration, see Michael M. Laskier, Israel and Jewish Immigration from North Africa 1948-1970 (Sede Boqer: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2007), 490-509. The State of Israel, Immigration to Israel 1948-1972 (Jerusalem: Central Bureau of Statistics, 1975), Table 1. On the Moroccan Jewish immigration to France, see Doris Bensimon-Donath, L’intégration des Juifs nord-africains en France (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1971).

Contributors

Chaya Brasz is a historian living in Jerusalem. She is the former director of the Center for Research on Dutch Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she worked for sixteen years. Born in the Netherlands (1952), she studied history at the University of Utrecht and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was honored with the Hartog Beem prize in 1982, after which she continued to publish books and articles on Dutch Jewry. She was a Marcus fellow at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and is presently working on a book about (religious) Judaism in the Netherlands. Joël Cahen is director of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. He is former chief curator and associate director of Beth Hatefutsoth, the Nahum Goldman Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, in Tel Aviv. Ido de Haan is professor of modern political history at Utrecht University and head of the department of History and Art History. In 2006-2007, De Haan was visiting professor at UCLA. He is specialized in European political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of the Netherlands, the history and memory of the Holocaust, and Jewish history. In 1997 he published a study on the commemoration of the Holocaust in the Netherlands. David de Vries is professor of history at the department of Labor Studies, Tel Aviv University. He studied history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Warwick University, and Tel Aviv University. His primary research interests are modern labor and business history of Palestine and Israel. Among his publications are Idealism and Bureaucracy in 1920s Palestine: The Origins of “Red Haifa” (1999, in Hebrew), Dock Workers: International Explorations in Labour History, 1790-1970 (coeditor, 2000), the reprint of Henya Pekelman’s The Life of a Woman-Worker in Her Homeland (coeditor, 2007, in Hebrew), and Diamonds and War: State, Capital, and Labor in British-Ruled Palestine (2010). Manuela Franco is diplomat in residence and Abade Correia da Serra fellow at the Portuguese Institute for International Relations, Lisbon University (IPRI-UNL) since October 2005, and guest professor in the MA program on Political Science and International Relations, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (since 2008). She is former Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, XV Constitutional Government, 2004; associate researcher, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Lisbon University (1999 to present); senior partner and manager of the Companhia do Triângulo, S.I, Lisbon Consultants (1991-1999); editor of the quarterly Politica Internacional, Lisbon (1990-1991); chef de cabinet of the Secretary of State for Culture (1988-1990) and of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation (1985-1987); diplomatic officer at the

202

Contributors

Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Lisbon, and from 1981, human rights desk officer at the Permanent Mission of Portugal to the United Nations, New York (1979-1985). She holds a degree in law from the University of Lisbon Law School (1973-1979). Judith Frishman occupies the chair of Jewish studies at the Institute for Religious Studies of Leiden University. She was previously professor of the history and culture of Rabbinic Judaism at the Catholic Theological Faculty, University of Tilburg as well as professor of the history of Jewish-Christian relations in the modern period at Leiden University. Professor Frishman’s research deals with the effects of Enlightenment and modernity on Jewish identity, both collective and individual, with a focus on Jewish religious reform and acculturation in Western Europe. She has recently initiated comparative research on the emancipation of Jews in Western Europe in the 18th through the 20th centuries with that of Muslims today. Karin Hofmeester is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and professor of Jewish culture at Antwerp University. She is a specialist in modern Jewish (social) history. Her publications include Jewish Workers and the Labour Movement. A Comparative Study of Amsterdam, London and Paris (1870-1914) (Ashgate 2004), and she is preparing a comparative history of Jewish Emancipation in France and the Netherlands, 1780-1914. Paula Hyman, who received her PhD from Columbia University in 1975, occupies the Lucy G. Moser Chair of Modern Jewish History at Yale University. Among Professor Hyman’s works are From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906-1939 (1979), The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace (1991), Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (1995), and The Jews of Modern France (1998). She is the editor of My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland, by Puah Rakovsky (2001) and coeditor of both Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1997) and Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia (2007). Krzysztof A. Makowski is an associate professor in the department of History of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznán (Poland), visiting professor at University of Western Ontario (Canada) and University of Reading (England), president of the Commission of Slavonic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Commission Internationale des Études Historiques Slaves and that of the Polish Society of Jewish Studies. His research interests include the history of Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially history of the family and women, social mobility, migrations and mentality; history of the national relations in the 19th and 20th centuries, mainly history of the Jewish and German population and German-Jewish-Polish relations; and history of modern historiography. Dan Michman is professor of modern Jewish history and chair of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, and serves also as chief historian at the Yad Vashem International Institute of Holocaust Research. Among the books he authored are The Jewish Refugees from Germany in the Netherlands, 1933-1940 (dissertation, 1978); Het Liberale Jodendom in Nederland, 1929-1943 (1988); Pinkas: Geschiedenis van de joodse gemeenschap in Nederland (coauthor, 2nd edition: 1999); Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective. Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues (2003); The Jewish Ghettos in the Holocaust: Why and How Did They Emerge? (2008).

Contributors

203

Ronald Schechter is associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary. He has degrees from the University of Michigan (BA), the University of Chicago (MA), and Harvard University (PhD). He is the author of Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 17151815 (2003), translator and editor of Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing with Related Documents (2004), and editor of The French Revolution: The Essential Readings (2001). His articles have appeared in Past and Present, Representations, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Historical Reflections. Stefanie Siegmund, an early modern historian, holds the Women’s League Chair in Jewish Gender and Women’s Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Previously she held tenure in the department of History at the University of Michigan. Her book, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence: The Construction of an Early Modern Jewish Community (2006), was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in European History by the American Historical Association. Dr. Siegmund has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and at the Institute for the Humanities. Her current project concerns the conversion of Jews and gender in post-Tridentine Italy. Yaron Tsur took part in creating the Open University of Israel in 1975 and gave courses in modern Jewish history, specializing in Muslim lands and on the ethnic problem in Israel. Since 1990 he is a professor at Tel Aviv University, where he is founder and director of The Jews of Islamic Countries – Archiving Project (http://jic.tau.ac.il) (1999) and of the Historical Jewish Press website (http:// jpress.org.il) (2004). He was chair of the department of Jewish History (2007) and head of the School of Jewish Studies (2008-2010). His publications include the award-winning A Torn Community: The Jews of Morocco and Nationalism 1943-1954 (2001, in Hebrew) and Jews among Muslims, 1750-1880, 3 vols. (2003, in Hebrew). Veerle Vanden Daelen works as a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the University of Antwerp, where she teaches migration history, Jewish history, and other subjects. She has a BA and MA in history from Ghent University and completed a PhD at the University of Antwerp in 2006. She has held fellowships at the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania and has published, in addition to several articles, two monographs: Vrouwbeelden in het Vlaams Blok (2002) and Laten we hun lied verder zingen. De heropbouw van de joodse gemeenschap in Antwerpen na de Tweede Wereldoorlog (19441960) (2008). Bart Wallet is a researcher at the department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Amsterdam and lectures in Jewish history at the History department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is specialized in Dutch and Belgian Jewish history and author of Nieuwe Nederlanders: De integratie van de joden in Nederland, 1814-1851 (2007). David Wertheim is director of the Menasseh ben Israel Institute for Jewish social and cultural studies. The article in this volume was written in the context of his work as post-doctoral fellow at the University of Utrecht researching the intermedial reception of The Diary of Anne Frank. His book Salvation through Spinoza: A Study of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany is due to be published by Brill in 2011. He is currently working on a book about the Dutch neoKantian philosopher Alfred Coppel Elsbach.

Index of Names and Places

Abas, Jacob 178 Africa 9, 42, 98, 144-146, 200 Agathe 83 Algeria 197 Alsace 15, 169, 180, 183-192 Alsace-Lorraine 183, 185-187 Altoviti 27 Alves, António Júnior 117, 120, 122 Aly, Götz 39, 42 America 9, 28, 52, 53, 114, 117, 129, 145 Amerongen, Jaap van 145, 152, 153 Amsterdam 7, 10, 11, 35-37, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48, 65-69, 71, 72, 75, 77, 97, 100, 102, 105, 106, 125-127, 129, 130, 131, 133-142, 145-148, 150, 152, 168, 169, 171-173, 178-180 Anderson, Benedict 10 Andorn, Hans 138 Angola 115, 116 Antonescu, Ion 44 Antwerp 11, 12, 14, 45-56, 58-61, 145-148, 150152, 168-170, 172-175, 179 Arafat, Yasser 100, 101 Archer, José 120 Arezzo 30, 31 Aronsfeld, Caesar C. 160, 162 Athens 117, 118 Austria 114 Baeck, Leo 128, 132, 140, 163, 185, 187 Barcelona 117 Baron, Salo 7, 93, 170 Beaune-la-Rolande 119 Beers, de 14, 144, 146-148 Belgium 14, 45, 47, 48, 58, 146-153, 167, 168, 171, 173, 175-178, 180 Bellini, Norma 83

Ben Ami, Oved 148, 150, 151 Benjamin Schaap, Leib 180 Bentschen 164 Bergen-Belsen 99, 139, 150 Bergh, Samuel van den 67, 80 Bergh, Zadok van den 67, 78, 80 Berlin 35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 83, 89, 92, 102, 107, 113, 119, 120, 128, 131, 133, 135-137, 139, 158, 188 Berlioz 89, 91, 92 Bessarabia 44 Bettelheim, Bruno 106 Bischoffsheim, Jonathan-Raphael 174 Blair, Tony 99 Bloemendal, Salomon 180 Bloemgarten 65, 68, 77, 130 Böhmcker, Hans 35 Bordeaux 92 Bosnia 98 Bossy, John 24 Boyarin, Jonathan 8, 16, 17 Brachfeld, Sylvain 45, 55, 56 Breslau 127 Bromet, Hermanus Leonard 65 Browning, Christopher 38, 42 Brussels 49, 58, 83, 91, 168, 169, 170, 172-176, 179 Bucovina 44 Budapest 83 Buruma, Ian 103 Bush, George W. 102 Caeiro da Matta, José 120, 121 California 8, 12, 23, 92, 98, 99 Canada 199, 200 Carmoly, Eliakim 174, 176, 178, 179 Caron, Vicki 185, 186-188, 190, 191

Index of Names and Places Casablanca 197, 199 Clinton, Bill 99 Cohen, Isaac Jojada 130, 151, 171, 195 Compiègne 119 Confucius 107 Crakow 127 Crémieux, Adolphe 93 Curaçao 139, 141 Deby, Marcus 177 Delft, van 172 Drancy 43, 119 Dreyfus, Albert 15, 186, 188, 189, 191 Dünner, J.H. 127 Duponchel, Henri 84, 93 Duprez, Gilbert-Louis 85 East Berlin 102, 107 Edegem 53, 55 Egypt 146, 195, 196 Ehrenfeld, Albert 147, 151-153 Eichmann, Adolf 36 Elias, Connie 117, 131 Empoli 30 Europe 9, 11, 14, 18, 21, 22, 24, 31, 37-40, 42, 43, 45-48, 50, 53, 56, 58, 60, 65, 75, 76, 79, 84, 106, 111-113, 115-117, 120, 127, 129, 151, 167, 183, 194, 200 Exin 160, 162 Falcon, Cornélie 81, 91, 92 Félix, Rachel 93, 94 Florence 21-33, 39, 84 France 12-15, 23, 47, 75, 81-83, 90-92, 112, 113, 116-124, 126, 128, 139, 173, 177, 183-192, 194, 196-200 Franco 13-15, 111, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120-122, 124, 183-185, 190 Frank, Anne 13, 95-107, 128, 139, 141 Frank, Hans 41 Frank, Otto 97-100, 102, 128, 139, 140 Frankfurt 38, 39, 41, 42, 83, 139, 162, 169 Frankfurt am Main 38, 39, 41, 42, 139, 169 Friedman, Philip 38, 42 Gautier, Théophile 13, 81, 83, 88-91, 94 Gelder, Elise Julian van 92 Genoa 117 Gent 168, 169, 172-175, 179 German Democratic Republic 101, 102

205 Germany 8, 9, 11, 15, 39, 40, 43, 98, 101, 102, 114, 117, 119, 125-130, 132-135, 137, 139, 140, 141, 145, 146, 157, 165, 168, 169, 173, 179, 184-192 Ghetto Nuovo 39 Gnesen 164 Gniezno 164 Godefroi, Michel Henri 12, 65-80 Goebbels, Joseph 41 Goodrich, Frances 99, 100 Gotzmann, Andreas 8, 17 Goudeket, Maurits 128, 138, 139, 141 Graetz 161, 163 Greece 114 Grodzisk 161, 163 Groen van Prinsterer, Guillaume 72 Groningen 66, 135, 171 Grünewald, Siegfried 135 Gulpen 180 Gutmacher, Elijahu 161 Haarlem 68, 69, 127, 140 Hackett, Alfred 99, 100 Haffmans, Johannes 74, 75 Halévy, Fromenthal 13, 89-93 Hamburg 83 Hannivoort, E. 131 Harster, Wilhelm 42 Hartog Lémon, Hartog de 65 Hartog, Abraham Frans Karel 67 Hartog, Arnold 131 Hartogh, A.F.K. 12, 67, 76, 78, 80 Hassan II 199 Heemstra, S. 70 Heinefetter, Catinka 13, 81-94 Heinefetter, Clara 84, 88 Hermanus Leonard, Bromet 65 Herzberg, Abel 133 Herzl, Theodor 149 Heydenryck, Christianus 74 Hilberg, Raul 36, 38, 41 Himmler, Heinrich 41 Hirsch, Kalischer Zvi 161 Hirsch, Samson Raphael 126 Hitler, Adolf 37, 39, 44, 99, 102, 134 Hungary 38, 48 Iffla, Auguste 92

206 Israel 8, 9, 17, 36, 97, 107, 128, 140, 141, 147, 149, 152, 153, 178, 199, 200 Istanbul 117, 146 Jacobi, Louis 139, 141 Jacobsthal, Walther 136 Jamaica 174 Jerusalem 36, 38, 44, 45, 126, 134, 140, 143, 144, 148, 153, 171, 196, 200 Jong, Lou de 35-37, 66 Jordan 92, 97 Kastan, Isidor 159, 162 Kaunas 43 Kcynia 160, 162 Kempen 159, 162 Kepno 159, 162 Kerdijk, Arnoldus Polak 67, 68, 76, 80 Keuchenius 77 King William I 170, 179, 180 Kleerekoper, A.B. 68, 80 Knapowski, Stanisław 162 Koetsveld, Cornelis Eliza van 72 Kohut, Rebecca 129 Kolmar 187 Kosansky, Oren 9 Kovno 43 Kreyn, Mozes 174 Krieg, Hans 139 Kuyper, Abraham 75, 76 Laeken 177 Lasker, Meir (Max) 131, 133 Latin America 117, 145 Lausanne 117 Leffmann, Ernst 135 Lehmans, Jacob 180 Lemans, Mozes 171, 177, 178 Leopold 176 Leszno 161 Levi Glogauer, Bezalel 169 Levin, Meyer 99, 100 Levisson, Levie 128, 132, 136, 137 Levisson, Robert A. (Bob) 138-141 Levisson-Simons, Amalia (“Milly”) 132 Levy, Isaac Abraham 67, 76, 77, 80, 118 Levyssohn Norman, H.D. 67, 80 Liege 168, 169, 180 Lier, Alexandre van 169, 172

Index of Names and Places Limburg, J. 80, 168, 169, 179, 180 Lindberg, Paula 139 Lindwer, Willy 106 Lipman, Samuel Philippus 171 Lissa 161 Lodz 38, 42 Loeb, Thea 132, 133 Loeb-Levenbach, Betty 132, 133 London 9, 10, 16-18, 25, 26, 37, 39, 44, 49, 50, 77, 92, 98, 100, 124, 128, 130-132, 134, 137, 138, 140, 141, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 160, 164, 177, 180, 194, 196, 198 Long Beach 98 Low Countries 14, 144-146, 148-151 Löwenberg, Alfred 135 Lower East Side 52 Luxemburg 169, 170, 180 Lyautey 195 Lynden, W. van 70 Lyon 93, 117 Maarssen 169 Maastricht 130, 168, 169, 179, 180 Macedonia 112 Magno, Agenore 116, 117 Mandela, Nelson 99 Marseille 117 Mathias, Marcello 118 Mattuck, Israel 128 Mayer-Wolff 133 Mechelen 43 Medici, Cosimo I de’ 21-23, 26-28, 30-33 Mehler, Ludwig Jacob 135-138, 140 Mendels, Maurits 68, 80 Mesquita, Alfredo de 115, 118 Metz 128, 183, 184, 187, 189 Meyerbeer, Giacomo 83, 85, 92 Milan 116 Missir, Jacques 115 Modiano, Samuel 114, 115 Mons 168, 169 Montagu, Lily 129, 131-133 Montefiore, Claude 129, 137 Montessori, Maria 132 Morocco 9, 15, 114, 119, 121, 194-197, 199, 200 Morris, Eugene 9 Mortara, Edgardo 12, 70

Index of Names and Places Muhammad V 198, 199 Muhlhaüsen 187 Mulisch, Harry 105 Münsterberger, Werner 136 Napoleon 168 Nathan-Treillet 91, 92, 93 Netanya 146, 148, 150, 152 Netherlands 10, 14, 15, 18, 35-37, 42, 43, 47, 48, 65-67, 69-75, 77, 79, 98, 100, 107, 119, 125-135, 137-142, 144, 147, 149, 153, 167, 168, 174, 177, 178, 180, 181 Netter, Nathan 189 Netze District 158, 159 New York 8, 16, 17, 26, 28, 36, 38, 42, 43, 45, 49, 52, 58, 83, 89-91, 95, 99, 103, 114, 117, 126, 128, 133, 139, 143-145, 147, 153, 162, 164, 177, 194, 198, 199 Nice 117, 177, 178 Nierop, A.S. van 12, 66, 67, 69, 80 Nijmegen 66, 74, 131, 179, 180 Noël, Léon 82 North Korea 102, 107 Numan-Leffmann, Eva 135 Ollendorf, Paula 131 Oppenheim, Adolphe 168, 170, 174-176 Oppenheim, Joseph 172 Ottoman Empire 14, 111-114, 116, 194 Overveen 140 Palestine 9, 10, 14, 137, 143-153, 197 Pappé, Illan 9 Paris 48, 51, 53, 77, 81, 83-85, 88, 90-94, 112,114, 116-120, 124, 128, 133, 147, 175, 184, 186, 189, 194, 199, 200 Pau 117, 124 Peach, Ceri 51, 53, 55 Pellenberg 172 Pels, Auguste van (=mrs. van Daan) 105 Pétain 121 Peter-Heinz, Seraphim 39 Philippsthal, E. 140 Pillet, Léon 84-88, 90, 91, 93, 94 Pinto, Samuel de 75 Pithiviers 119 Polak, Henri 67-69, 78, 80, 178 Poland 15, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 48, 157, 158, 160, 163, 164

207 Portugal 14, 111, 113-115, 118-121, 123 Posen 15, 157-163, 165, 166 Poznania 15, 157-163, 165, 166 Presser, Jacques 37, 119 Prussia 84, 157-159 Pulido, Angel 114 Raalte, Eduard Ellis van 77, 80 Rachel 13, 81, 83-85, 91-94 Ragusa (Dubrovnik) 39 Raphael, Freddy 126, 174, 184, 191 Raschkow 161 Raszków 161 Rauter, Hanns Albin 36 Reinhard, Heydrich 38 Rodrigue, Aron 9, 194 Roest, Friso 35-37 Rogan, Eugene 9 Rome 22, 25, 39, 69, 70 Rosenthal, Herbert 139 Rosman, Moshe 16, 17 Roth, Cecil 7, 41 Rothbart, Tirtsah 136 Rothschild, Solomon de 90, 93 Rotterdam 130, 131, 174 Rülf, Shlomo 140 Rumania 38, 44, 48, 70, 113 Sachs, Elinor 129 Sahlins, Peter S. 23 Salazar, António de Oliveira 119, 120, 122-124 Salomon, Albert 139 Salomon, Charlotte 139 Salonika 14, 38, 43, 111-119, 121-123 Salvador, Mozes 68, 69, 130 Sam, Elias 117 Sarlouis, Lodewijk 137 Scheren, Jos 35-37 Schroeter, Daniel 9 Scott, Walter 90, 183 Scribe, Eugène 90 Seelandt, Madame 84 Seligmann, Caesar 128 Serbia 114 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur 35, 36, 42 Shakespeare, William 90 Shlaim, Avi 9 Siena 32

208 Sierra Leone 147 Sijes, Ben A. 35, 37 Silesia 180 Silva, Carvalho 120 Simon, Philip 40, 127, 159 Smart, Mary Ann 91, 92 Socrates 107 Soetendorp, Jacob 139-141 Soeterwoude, Pieter Jacob Elout van 72 Somerhausen, Hartog 168, 173-176, 178, 179 Somerhausen, Hartog or Hirsch 173 South Africa 98, 145, 146 Spain 23, 114, 158 Speijk, Jan van 171 Spontini, Gaspare 84 Stablewski, Florian 164 Stahl, Heinrich 137 Sternberg 11, 54 Sternberger, Estella 130 Stillman, Norman 9 Stillman, Yedida 9 Stoltz, Rosine 13, 87, 88, 92 Strassburg 186-189 Straßmann, Arnold 161 Syria 146, 195 Taylor 149 Tel Aviv 9, 149, 150, 152, 159, 194 The Hague 35, 37, 68, 70-72, 74, 77, 131-138, 140-142, 169, 172, 173, 175, 179, 200 Theresienstadt 38, 43 Thompson, Emma 50, 96 Toller, Ernst 164

Index of Names and Places Toulouse 117, 121 Transylvania 180 Trent 10, 23-27 Trieste 117 Turkey 112, 114-117, 194 Tuscany 21-24, 27, 29, 31, 32 United Kingdom 15, 145, 167-170, 172, 175, 176, 180 United States/USA 40, 98, 99, 102, 127, 130, 140, 141, 146, 160, 184 Utrecht 67, 107, 129, 169 Valentine 83, 85 Vaughan, Laura 49, 52, 61 Venice 10, 22, 26, 38, 90 Vichy 14, 111, 112, 119, 120, 121, 124 Vienna 83, 89, 117, 118, 159, 167 Vollenhoven, Jan Messchert van 74 Warsaw 38, 42, 43, 157, 159, 161, 162 Weber, Carl Maria von 83 Wertheimber, Palmyre 92 Westerbork 43 Wielek, Heinz 37 Wiener, Alfred 160, 164 Wijsenbeek-Franken, Caroline 131 Willems, Jan Frans 175 Willemstad 141 William I 170, 179, 180 Wilrijk 53, 55 Winterhalter, Franz 82 Zbąszyń 164 Zwanenberg, Arnoldus van 131 Zwanenberg, Salomon van 131