JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

the novel De wandelende Jood (1906) by the Flemish author
August Vermeylen. The poet Johan Andreas dèr Mouw was the
only writer who tried to analyze his attitude toward Jews.
The first writer to react to rising Nazism and the persecution
of the Jews was the outstanding essayist Menno ter Braak,
who had a great influence on Dutch literature. The change of
attitude to Jewish themes brought about by World War II can
be gauged by a comparison of two novels by Simon Vestdijk
(1898–1971): Else Boehler, Duits dienstmeisje (“Else Boehler
the German Maid,” 1935) and De rimpels van Esther Ornstein
(“The Wrinkles of Esther Ornstein,” 1958). A writer who often
used Jewish themes was Ferdinand Bordewijk, whose novels
show a progressively antisemitic tendency. His works include
the collections of short stories Fantastische vertellingen
(“Fantastic Stories,” 3 vols. 1919–24), and the novels Noorderlicht
(“Northern Lights,” 1948) and Bloesemtak (“Blossoming
Branch,” 1955).
In the years immediately after World War II, there was
a remarkable increase in literary works dealing with Jewish
themes and fictional characters. Some writers, like August Defresne
in his play De naamloozen van 1942 (“The Nameless of
1942,” 1945), tried to prove the unequivocally sympathetic attitude
of the Dutch people toward the Jews. The theme of other
works is the absence of differences between Jews and non-
Jews, as in Volg het spoor terug (“Follow the Track Back,” 1953),
an essay by J.B. Charles (pseudonym of W.H. Nagel), and in
the novel De ondergang van de familie Boslowits (“The Ruin of
the Boslowits Family,” 1946) by Gerard Kornelis van het Reve.
Nel Noordzij deals with collective guilt feelings as a personal
experience in Variaties op een moederbinding (“Variations on
a Mother Attachment,” 1958), and with Jewish self-hate in her
novel Het kan me niet schelen (“I Don’t Care,” 1955).
The difficulties arising in mixed marriages as a result of
traumatic war experiences form the theme of several novels,
including De donkere kamer van Damocles (“The Dark Room
of Damocles,” 1958) by Willem Frederik Hermans, Het wilde
feest (“The Intruder,” 1952) by Adriaan van der Veen, Allang
geleden (“A Long Time Ago,” 1956) by W.G. van Maanen, and
Jan Wolkers’ Kort Amerikaans (“Short American,”1962). A
worthy attempt to draw an authentic Jewish portrait is that by
the Flemish writer Marnix Gijsen (pseudonym of Jan-Albert
Goris), who went to live in New York in 1939, in his short stories
“Kaddisj voor Sam Cohn” and “De school van Fontainebleau”
in the collection De Diaspora (1961).
During the 1960s and 1970s, Dutch literature shifted direction
as a result of rising tides of realism and early postmodernism.
Also, many Jewish writers came into their own,
with a staggering growth of publications on Holocaust and
post-Holocaust themes. As a result, Jewish experience and
the place of the Jew in Dutch society became almost a taboo
subject for non-Jewish writers. Jews all but vanished as characters
in fiction by non-Jewish authors, with the exception of
Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema’s Soldaat van Oranje (“Soldier of
Orange”), which was published in 1971, a picaresque autobiographical
novel about his travails during 1940–45 that included
dutch literature
a Jewish love interest. The crime fiction that Jan-Willem van de
Wetering wrote during the 1970s and 1980s features a minor
character who is a Sephardi Jew.
It took until the late 1980s for a Jew to return to Dutch
fiction. The novel Mystiek Lichaam, published in 1986 by acclaimed
author Frans Kellendonk (1951–1990), caused a major
literary scandal. Kellendonk uses the relationship between
two siblings in a Roman Catholic family as the backdrop for
an exposition of the intrinsic Otherness of homosexuality
and Jewishness in Dutch society. Some critics denounced the
novel as antisemitic. Since then, not many non-Jewish writers
have dared touch the subjects of Jewish history, Jewish
identity, and Judaism.
The Jewish community in the former Dutch colony
of *Surinam has a long history. Cynthia Macleod-Ferrier
(1936– ), a writer from Surinam, described the experiences of
a fictional Jewish family at an 18th century plantation in Hoe
duur was de suiker (1987, “How Expensive Was the Sugar”).
In children’s fiction Karlijn Stoffels’ novel about two friends
during the Holocaust, Mosje en Reizele (1996, “Moshe and
Reizele”), attracted a large audience.
The Jewish Contribution to Dutch Literature
17th AND 18th CENTURIES. The Sephardi Jews, arriving
in Amsterdam toward the end of the 16th century, were the
first Jewish writers in Holland. Although they wrote in Latin,
Spanish, and Hebrew, they made a significant contribution to
Dutch literature. Prominent among them were poets such as
Jacob Israel *Belmonte; Paulo de Pina, author of the biblical
morality play Dialogo dos Montes (1624); the satirist Abraham
(Diego) Gómez Silveyra; and the dramatist and poet Antonio
Enríquez *Gómez. A vast but inaccurate source for the history
of the Amsterdam Sephardi Jews is the poetry of Miguel
(Daniel Levi) de *Barrios. Other important cultural figures
were the scholar and statesman Manasseh Ben *Israel and the
philosophers Uriel da *Costa and Baruch *Spinoza (see also
Spanish and Portuguese *Literature).
The literary production of the Ashkenazi Jews did not
cross over into Dutch society in general. Until the 1750s Ashkenazi
Jews mainly wrote in Yiddish. In addition to translations
of religious books, they made adaptations of secular literature,
such as the *Bove-Buch, Josef Maarsen’s Sjeine artliche
Geschichten (1710) translated from *Boccaccio’s Decamerone,
and a translation of the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela (1691)
by Ḥayyim ben Jacob.
During the second half of the 18th century, the elite of
the Jewish community slowly gained entrance into Dutch
society through their growing ease with the Dutch language.
A handful of young Amsterdam Jews actively participated in
the revolutionary movements of 1787 and 1795. Some Jewish
revolutionaries contributed to magazines and pamphlets in
Dutch, marking the entrance of Dutch Jewry into Dutch letters.
The emancipation of the Jewish nation, as declared by the
French in 1796, officially opened the doors for their entrance
into Dutch society.
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