Dutch Jewish Women: Integration and Modernity

Summary

Once there was a vision: the hope and conviction that Jews would integrate into Dutch society. This hope existed especially among the progressive Jews: intelligentsia, liberals, and socialists. In recent decades, historians advocating a range of theories on the historical evolution of the Jewish role in the Western world have brought a number of historical figures to the fore. There were circles and places, movements, societies, and political parties where Jews were granted equality, and equal opportunity. In Dutch historiography, a specific and vast role has been assigned to socialism, in which, since the end of the nineteenth century, distinctions between Jews and non-Jews were minimal compared to elsewhere in the world. The transition to socialism has been considered an act of assimilation and thus a step away from Jewish tradition. Modern historical research has challenged this idea by showing precisely how socialism was part of a Jewish tradition that confronted integration and modernity. In many ways it was unclear how, in becoming members of a society dominated by Christian values, Jews would relate to Judaism, to tradition, to religion, and to culture. These questions are central to the work of scholars and in the descriptions of observers who attest to ambivalence. This is in fact the experience of most minority cultures adapting to the surrounding, hegemonic culture.

JEWS AS “CITIZENS OF THE WORLD”: A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS?

One of our eyewitnesses was a feminist who wrote in 1906: “We won some good young helpers [for the movement]. It is clear that they are always Jewish girls. With us and elsewhere. Courage and intelligence are to be found in those girls like nowhere else.” In 1928, the same person wrote: “It is certain I am going to sell my house and my belongings and then I will become the wandering Jewess, perhaps a tramp.” The author of this quote called herself a citizen of the world in her written memoirs. I quote Aletta Jacobs, whose Jewishness the collective Dutch memory seems to have forgotten, though she was surrounded by Jewish friends, and, as I might argue, typically subject to the abovementioned ambivalence. Is there a contradiction between her self-evident “we, the Jews”, and the apparently simultaneous denial of her Jewishness?