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. 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.

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.