6 - Arduous Adaptation, 1814–1870

Summary

THE DEVELOPMENT of Dutch Jewry during the period between 1814 and 1870 was an integral part of the development of Dutch society as a whole. Virtually untouched and little affected by influences and models from Jewish communities in the large neighbouring states, Germany and France, Dutch Jews took their place as Citizens of a country they had regarded as their fatherland since the eighteenth Century.

Adaptation to the Dutch way of life and to Dutch culture was not, however, easy to accomplish. The process caused much conflict within the Jewish community itself, as well as considerable disquiet to individual members, the more so as the gentile environment did not always prove accommodating. Restructuring, not yet completed by 1870, led in the end not only to the gradual integration of the Jews into Dutch society, but also to the loss of part of the traditionally transmitted knowledge of the Jewish religion and culture. That was the price Jews in central and western Europe had to pay for their emancipation, and Dutch Jewry was no exception.

Dutch Jewish historians took a critical look at the nineteenth Century after the Second World War, and their assessment of both the emancipation and its effects proved strikingly negative. With the bitter experience of the persecution of Jews under the Germans still fresh in the memory, Jaap Meijer and Jozeph Michman in particular argued that it would have been better had the Jews remained unemancipated, that is, had they continued to live as tolerated aliens in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The fact that they were forced to surrender a large part of their Jewish national and religious heritage was, in the view of these writers, not offset by the advantage of Dutch citizenship. For their hard-won acceptance and participation in Dutch society did not, in the end, save them from being excluded from that society during the Second World War, nor from their subsequent extermination by the German occupiers.

Understandable though this retrospective anger may be, it does not provide a better understanding of what happened in the Netherlands before 1870, and to Dutch Jews in particular. Dutch Jews were not faced in 1814 with the choice of surrendering their recently acquired civic rights, and there is little point in speculating about what would have happened had that choice been open to them.