Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- 1 Why Jews are more guilty than others?: An introductory essay, 1945-2016
- Part I Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- 2 ‘The Jew’ as Dubious Victim
- 3 The Meek Jew – and Beyond
- 4 Alte Kameraden: Right-wing Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial
- 5 Jewish Responses to Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- Part II Israel and ‘the Jew’
- 6 Philosemitism?: Ambivalences regarding Israel
- 7 Transnational Left-wing Protest and the ‘Powerful Zionist’
- 8 Israel: Source of Divergence
- 9 ‘The Activist Jew’ Responds to Changing Dutch Perceptions of Israel
- 10 Turkish Anti-Zionism in the Netherlands: From Leftist to Islamist Activism
- Part III The Holocaust-ed Jew in Native Dutch Domains since the 1980s
- 11 ‘The Jew’ in Football: To Kick Around or to Embrace
- 12 Pornographic Antisemitism, Shoah Fatigue and Freedom of Speech
- 13 Historikerstreit: The Stereotypical Jew in Recent Dutch Holocaust Studies
- Part IV Generations. Migrant Identities and Antisemitism in the Twenty-first Century
- 14 ‘The Jew’ vs. ‘the Young Male Moroccan’: Stereotypical Confrontations in the City
- 15 Conspiracism: Islamic Redemptive Antisemitism and the Murder of Theo van Gogh
- 16 Reading Anne Frank: Confronting Antisemitism in Turkish Communities
- 17 Holocaust Commemorations in Postcolonial Dutch Society
- 18 Epilogue: Instrumentalising and Blaming ‘the Jew’, 2011-2016
- References
- Index
3 - The Meek Jew – and Beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- 1 Why Jews are more guilty than others?: An introductory essay, 1945-2016
- Part I Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- 2 ‘The Jew’ as Dubious Victim
- 3 The Meek Jew – and Beyond
- 4 Alte Kameraden: Right-wing Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial
- 5 Jewish Responses to Post-Liberation Antisemitism
- Part II Israel and ‘the Jew’
- 6 Philosemitism?: Ambivalences regarding Israel
- 7 Transnational Left-wing Protest and the ‘Powerful Zionist’
- 8 Israel: Source of Divergence
- 9 ‘The Activist Jew’ Responds to Changing Dutch Perceptions of Israel
- 10 Turkish Anti-Zionism in the Netherlands: From Leftist to Islamist Activism
- Part III The Holocaust-ed Jew in Native Dutch Domains since the 1980s
- 11 ‘The Jew’ in Football: To Kick Around or to Embrace
- 12 Pornographic Antisemitism, Shoah Fatigue and Freedom of Speech
- 13 Historikerstreit: The Stereotypical Jew in Recent Dutch Holocaust Studies
- Part IV Generations. Migrant Identities and Antisemitism in the Twenty-first Century
- 14 ‘The Jew’ vs. ‘the Young Male Moroccan’: Stereotypical Confrontations in the City
- 15 Conspiracism: Islamic Redemptive Antisemitism and the Murder of Theo van Gogh
- 16 Reading Anne Frank: Confronting Antisemitism in Turkish Communities
- 17 Holocaust Commemorations in Postcolonial Dutch Society
- 18 Epilogue: Instrumentalising and Blaming ‘the Jew’, 2011-2016
- References
- Index
Summary
Court cases constitute a formal platform where all manner of conflicts between individual citizens and social groups are settled – within the framework of the law. This makes them the yardstick by which we can determine what was deemed legally tolerated within a specific historical context. In February 1949, the court of Amsterdam held a remarkable session. A Jewish lawyer, one of the founders of the former resistance newspaper Het Parool, had filed a complaint against a – non-Jewish – Dutch Reformed resistance fighter. During the war, the Jewish lawyer Hans Warendorf (1902-1987) had managed to escape to England in time, but several of his Parool friends and resistance comrades had been arrested and killed. Among them were a number of Jews: Maurits Kann (1894-1942), Jaap Nunes Vaz (1906-1943) and Sieg Vaz Dias (1904-1943). The accused, Klaas Norel (1899-1971), for that matter, had an excellent reputation as a resistance fighter, committed to working for the illegal National Organisation for Assistance to People in Hiding (lo) and to publishing the Reformed former resistance newspaper Trouw. He was also the author of a very popular Second World War novel for young adults: Engelandvaarders [England paddlers] (1945).
Already during the occupation, rumours circulated about Jewish people in hiding betraying their protectors. Moreover, soon after the liberation, people were saying that the Jews had not put up any resistance to the Nazis. The latter view was also disseminated by Norel in a number of passages he had written in the eighth volume of the series ‘History of the Occupation Years’: De Tyrannie verdrijven [Dispelling the Tyranny].
The Jews did not offer resistance to the pogroms. On the occasion of the closure of the Leiden University and the February 1941 strike in Amsterdam, others entered the lists for them ….
In short, the Jews had left it to others to fend for them; they themselves had not been able to. As early as July 1945, the Jewish psychiatrist Coen van Emde Boas (1904-1981) wrote that people had started to consider Jews once more as Jews, among other things, due to the necessity to help them in that capacity against the Germans. Their elimination and isolation had led to estrangement, aversion and a sense of superiority.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Holocaust, Israel and 'the Jew'Histories of Antisemitism in Postwar Dutch Society, pp. 83 - 106Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016