The Passing of Dutch Jewry:An Elegy
Siegfried E. Van
When the Nazi flood receded from the Netherlands, it was seen that the centuries-old Jewish life of that country was all but destroyed. This moving elegy on the fate of
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Commentary Magazine
When the Nazi flood receded from the Netherlands, it was seen that the centuries-old Jewish life of that country was all but destroyed. This moving elegy on the fate of his people is from the pen of the noted Dutch man of letters Siegfried Emmanuel Van Praag. This article is translated from the French by Irving Kristol.

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After a great war, some men return to their country to find its cities and towns in ruins—but the people are still there. Others return to find a terrible void—their generation has been decimated; but the life they have always known flows once again through habitual, venerable channels. Their generation is decimated—but the people are still there. And we—what have we found? The country is still there, but the people—our people—are not. History has entombed them. The human beings who peopled our infancy, our youth, the familiar talk that hummed through our ears like a well-known song, have ceased to exist. Until the end of our days we shall know the futile wish to see these people walk, act, think and react in their own peculiar manner; but they will not return.

There are still Jews in Holland. I have met them. They now constitute a community like the Jewish communities of the Scandinavian countries: no longer an integrated unit—only a collection of individuals. They still have a special psychological make-up and characteristic thoughts, but they no longer have a way of life of their own.

There were some 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, of whom 80,000 lived in Amsterdam. Because of this great number (the whole population of Amsterdam was less than 800,000) the Jews gave an imprint of their own to certain quarters of the city, and even to Amsterdam as a whole. A character in one of my novels, walking arm in arm with a Jewish girl along the Amstel, sighs: “Amsterdam—the Jewish.” And I too in my youth, walking in the center of the city, or along the deep-green canals of the Jewish quarter, and looking into the dark eyes of a daughter of the ghetto, oblivious to her harsh and too familiar accent—I, too, would sigh: “Amsterdam—the Jewish.” All that is gone now.

My father was an Amsterdam Jew, but my mother came from the provinces, from Harderwijk, a small town on the Zuyder Zee where her family had lived for many generations. For there was in Holland a vigorous provincial Judaism of small congregations sprinkled throughout the country; the provincial Jews were often more energetic than those of Amsterdam, who were somewhat softened by city life, good food, and the sensual atmosphere of this highly sensual city. They also spoke a purer Dutch, in which was often preserved an earthy accent—as in the writing of my friend Jacob Hiegentlich, who in all his work preserved the tone of his native Limbourg. (He is dead now; he killed himself when the Germans came.) In my mother’s time, the provincial Jews were much more assimilated than those of Amsterdam, but on the other hand their religious and community life had not lost its vitality. The orthodox among them set the tone of the community. And a visit by the grand rabbi of the province was an event of the first importance, marked by copious feasts, with quantities of boterkoek and bolus—fat-sweet specialties of the Dutch-Jewish cuisine.

Some provincial congregations died out, others grew according to the economic and industrial development of the country. Provincial Jewry as a whole remained strong.

But one day I had a kind of anticipatory revelation of what Holland’s Jews were to become: a colony of survivors. My mother and I decided to revisit her native village. Even in the days of my adolescence, the Jewish congregation of Harderwijk, once flourishing and prosperous, had become almost extinct. There remained only a single and vaguely related cousin of my mother’s. We went to see him. He was a small Jew, rather distinguished looking—though he was no more than a traveling peddler who toured the surrounding farms—with a pointed, gray beard and eyes that sparkled with a Talmudic irony. We stayed at his house for an hour, and then left. The boat that was to take us back to Amsterdam was already at the dock. A crowd of people was gathered there: fishermen, placid Dutchmen, noisy, blond youngsters—no Jews, except for our cousin—a little man all alone—who had insisted on accompanying us. The boat got quickly under way, and the workers on the dock waved their hands and turned back to the town. Only our vaguely related cousin remained, smaller and more delicate than the others. He stood there a long time, watching us recede into the distance, waving his handkerchief with his graceful fingers. The last survivor of the congregation. I could almost have whispered: “Baruch hayosheve—blessed is he who remains.” But is it true—is it possible—can he be truly blessed who remains on the dock all alone and watches the others disappear?

I shall write only a few words about the history of our Jews and about their way of living. A few words only; nothing I can write will bring them back.

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The Sephardim arrived in the Low Countries towards the end of the 16th century, and flourished in the course of the next hundred years. But in the days of my boyhood, this community had greatly decreased in numbers; no more than eight thousand Sephardim remained in Amsterdam. However, that did not prevent the Portuguese Jews from placing their imprint on the entire Jewish community of Amsterdam, just as the Jews in general added certain nuances to the life of the city as a whole. There were some among the Sephardim who continued to speak Spanish and Portuguese until the middle of the 19th century, and for a very long time they maintained a feeling of superiority over the Ashkenazim, scorning to sully their purity by “misalliances” with the “tedescos.” The consequent inbreeding destroyed the fine hereditary stock of the Sephardim, and it was not unusual for the children of these aristocrats to be of inferior intelligence and worse—along with some who possessed exceptional talents. Of these latter may be noted the writers Israel and Emmanuel Querido, the painters Jessurun de Mesquita, de Leo Laguna, Texeira de Mattos, and the very great sculptor Joseph Mendes-Dacosta.

Fortunately, the Sephardim did not stay forever in the isolation that was one of the legacies of the Spanish Inquisition. In my days they mixed freely with the Ashkenazim, and there were couples who dared to have printed on their visiting cards: Mr. and Mrs. Coloco-Osorio-Soep. (Soep means “soup” in Dutch, and was a good name among the Ashkenazim.)

The Germans, desiring to corrupt their Jewish victims by setting one against the other, began by sparing the Jews of Spanish-Portuguese origin, thereby flattering their particularism. Many were taken in. But later on, they too were beaten, packed on to wagons, and dispatched to the gas chambers. The Sephardic community disappeared. Today a young Ashkenazi, a historian of talent, has been appointed librarian of the old and celebrated Sephardic library of the Montezinos, and the few remaining faithful who, at the hour of prayer, stand in the noble Sephardic synagogue like isolated yew trees on a desolate heath, are almost all Ashkenazim. How fond I was of our Sephardimthe fine hidalgo manners of their aristocrats, their hispanic Semitism, their marvelous melodies. Especially the melodies. Slowly they would creep round the old leather and gold tapestries of the synagogue and climb twisting round the branches of the candelabra with its bright candle lights.

The Ashkenazim of Holland began to arrive toward the middle of the 17th century. Most of them spoke Yiddish down to the middle of the 19th century. But it was not Russian-Polish Yiddish with its strong admixture of Slavic words; instead, the language was full of words probably of Alsatian origin. They would say “oren” for “pray,” from the Latin “orare,” instead of “davnen.” A worthless fellow was called a “falterappe,” probably a corruption of the French “valet de drap.” From the Dutch Sephardim they adopted the curious pronunciation of the letter “ayin” like the “ng” of the English “thing.”

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Few as they were, the Dutch Jews berlonged to many different classes. The strangest—unique in Western Europe where the Jews generally adhered to the bourgeoisie—was the proletariat: peddlers, traveling hawkers in the provincial markets, workers in the diamond industry, tailors, sawyers. The diamond workers would earn fabulous wages for a while, only to fall into long stretches of poverty. Then they would sell their wives’ fur coats purchased during the delirium of abundance, and change their trade, augmenting the number of traveling hawkers and street vendors; or, if they were gifted with eloquence and with what they believed to be elegant manners, they transformed themselves into commercial travelers. The most enterprising and daring clung to the balloon of commerce, which carried them high into the spheres of negotiation and manipulation in the diamond trade; with their stomachs thrust prosperously out in front, they would tell of the pleasures of Paris and their adventures in London.

Among the ordinary workers in the diamond industry, there were many who, upon their initiation to socialism, fell to the adoration of profane knowledge as their fathers had adored the Torah. They stood in humility and longing before the wide-open doors of Western culture. Their ideal was embodied in the great leader of the diamond workers, the bold and powerful and encyclopaedically self-taught Henri Polak.

There are still some Jewish intellectuals left in Holland, but almost no workers. The cry of the peddlers pushing their carts along the streets and docks is no longer to be heard. Some of them used to have a mixed trade, selling flowers in the summertime and fish during the winter. From house to house they sold their wares—fruits, nuts, herrings, and above all, what they used to call “zuur,” “sour goods.” It was a little Amsterdam-Jewish specialty, this sale of gherkins, onions, and vinagered limes by the thimbleful to loungers and in quantity to housewives. The man who carried on this trade was called “Zuurman.”

Of the lively ghetto, with its playful children, its placid elders, its young women banal in their individuality and sublime in their race—the ghetto with its inhabitants indolent in sensuality, pity, and fatigue, or else vibrant with energy, feverish in eyes and jaws—the picturesque ghetto of Rembrandt and Max Lieberman with its shop windows overflowing with pastry or with big, black cigars that the storekeepers had made with their own hands (the manufacture of cigars was also a Jewish trade)—of this ghetto there remain only empty houses, separated by empty stretches of ground, by walls, bristling with broken glass. The inhabitants of the ghetto were sent first to the camp of Westerbork in the province of Drente, and from there to Poland. Thus died the posterity of those who had escaped from the butchers of the Inquisition and from the pogroms of Maria Theresa and of Russia; the noxious gas generated by the poisoned soul of humanity enveloped them at last.

I always had a weakness for the Orthodox milieu. I am not of that generation which had to struggle against the tyranny of a blind and stubborn Orthodoxy as did the dramatist Herman Heyermans. I was present at the regeneration of Orthodoxy, especially through the Mizrachi movement. The newly Orthodox of Amsterdam lived their religion; it became one with the pavement of the streets on which they lived. On the Sabbath they strolled, calm and smiling, the father in his high hat, the children in their holiday clothes. Some streets, on a Saturday, were animated by those who were going to synagogue, velvet tallis bags under their arms. These modern Orthodox Jews understood the text as they said their prayers. The older ones, who were not quite up with the times, mumbled the prayers, gliding comfortably along the Hebrew litanies like children sliding down a banister. One young enthusiast reproached his father for praying without understanding, and the old man replied: “So long as God understands.” And it went on that way, in the small synagogue on the ground floor of a middle-class house, right through the Havdalah. The old—the “non-moderns”—forgot that they were chanting a warrior’s psalm, and from their mouths poured forth a lullaby for old men: “l’david baruch adoshem tsouri, hamelamed yaday la-kerov.” They floated on their backs in celestial waters, these old men of Amsterdam of the generation of my father—those who came before the waking of the Zionist and Mizrachist consciousness.

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In Holland, in the course of the 19th century, the people of the book had allowed themselves to forget the book. For a long time the Jews of Holland remained ignorant of all things Jewish. Zionism woke them up—Zionism and socialism, and the general atmosphere of Holland. The Dutch have a cult of education, and perhaps nowhere else is so great an importance attached to the instruction of children and adults. The culture of the Jews of Holland was autochthonous—that is to say it grew naturally as both Jewish and Dutch, without tension. And it was therefore a solidly based culture, with none of the ostentation and display that appeared so often in Germany, and without that hollow ring which could be detected among the Jews of the Slavic countries who sought to encompass all of European culture in one great gulp.

The self-taught who came up from the proletariat were the most interesting of our intellectuals. They adored the knowledge that had cost them so much effort to acquire, and, in the fever of possession, they used it as if it were a weapon. One thinks at once of the writers Israel and Emmanuel Querido, the latter the founder of one of our best publishing houses. (He was killed by the Germans.) And there was Carry van Bruggen, daughter of a hazan and teacher in an elementary school who became a brilliant novelist; in love with revolt for its own sake—it was an act of revolt that had freed her from paternal orthodoxy and feminine servitude—she glorified it in a historical-philosophical work consecrated to Prometheus. Her brother, Jakob Israel de Haan, also rebelled, and became a prominent philosopher of law—but later his Jewish consciousness re-awakened and he went to Palestine, where he wrote poems that are like fragments of bleeding flesh: in them, one sees him tossed between rediscovered God and the mocking devil, between his yearning for bourgeois life and his homosexual desires, between Holland and Palestine. Of the self-taught rebels who rose from the Jewish proletariat, the novelist Samuel Goudsmit has survived the massacre.

Most of the ordinary intellectuals, who came from the university, had joined the Zionist movement. They were ardent Zionists but more disciplined and less grandiloquent than is usual among Jews. (They were, after all, Dutch.) At first, the meetings would begin perhaps a half-hour late; but the Polish Jews among them soon stretched this difference between the official time and the actuality into a matter of hours. There was a great deal of discussion, but somewhat less for the pleasure of hearing one’s self talk than is customary in Israel. There was Nehemia de Lieme, weighing his words, marrying the profound to the ironic, always master of himself and always solemn. And there was Bernstein, his disciple, now one of Palestine’s leading citizens, attacking all failures of discipline, all faults of organization, every error of easy-going bookkeeping. Organization above all!

The Jewish lower classes of Amsterdam did not always understand Zionism. I remember myself, as a boy, going off with a pretty young girl to sell oranges from house to house for the benefit of Keren Kayemeth Leyisrael. The oranges were attractively laid out in a pretty basket, and decorated with the blue and white cockade. A Jewish peddler came upon us, set down his cart full of fruit, and shouted: “Why are you taking away my business? Why must you compete with a poor schlemiel like me?” Then he continued on his way, crying through the quarters of the city—rich and poor—the excellence of his fruits, corrupting their names into incomprehensible gibberish.

As I said, there are still some Jewish intellectuals in Holland. The two great Jewish libraries, the Rosenthaliana and the Montezinos, were saved. The great synagogue of the Sephardim—the “snoge”—has been made an official monument of art. But the special atmosphere of Jewish life is gone. The survivors are getting along all right—yet their bitterness often shines through. The first anecdote I heard when I came back to Holland recently was an old joke that has taken on a new sharpness: An old Jew, a survivor of the ghetto, was taking in the fresh air on a bench in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam, when a little bird perched on the branch of an overhanging tree, dropped his excrement on the Jew’s head. The old man looked up and said: “To a poor Yid you do that—and for the others you sing.”

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For several centuries, one small part of Israel knew repose and liberty. Holland has deserved well of her Jews. She permitted them to be good citizens without insisting they make themselves more Dutch than the Dutch, as was the case in Germany. Except for a little anti-Semitism among the petty bourgeoisie, the Dutch, and above all the Dutch intellectuals, were quite content that their Jews remain Jews. But the fate of Israel came to search them out. Israel is eternal, they say—but not the individual Israelites.

There remain some names. As there is a Calle de la Judería at Toledo or Granada, so there is the Jodenbreestrant, the great street of the Jews in Amsterdam.

We, the survivors—we stop before the houses where our people lived, on the pavements where they used to drag their wooden shoes, beside the walls that no longer throw back their voices. We bend our heads. For we are human, and if the thought that Israel is eternal consoles us a little, still what we loved so much was the temporal aspect under which we knew Israel. And that was in Amsterdam, in the gaiety of the Jewish quarter, where one small part of the Jewish people lived for once confident of the present and of the future—how wrong, oh how wrong!

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