The Jewish community of Amsterdam was the oldest, largest and most culturally distinctive in the Netherlands. At the time of the German invasion in May 1940 it numbered around 80,000, roughly 10 per cent of the city’s population and more than half of all Dutch Jews. By May 1945 fewer than 5,000 remained alive in the city. The Jewish community of Amsterdam, which had taken three centuries to build, was destroyed in three years.
Sephardim and Ashkenazim
Amsterdam’s Jewish community had been founded by Sephardic Jews fleeing the Iberian Inquisition in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Portuguese Synagogue, the Esnoga, completed in 1675, remains one of the great surviving Sephardic buildings in Europe, its candle-lit interior unchanged since the seventeenth century. The Sephardim brought with them international trading networks, capital, and the languages and culture of the Iberian peninsula. They were merchants, bankers, diamond cutters and printers; their printing presses produced Hebrew books that were sold across the Jewish world.
From the late seventeenth century Ashkenazi Jews from German lands and from Poland began to arrive in larger numbers, fleeing the Chmielnicki massacres in Ukraine and the wars of central Europe. They came as a poorer population than the Sephardim, settled in their own quarter around the Nieuwmarkt, and by the eighteenth century outnumbered the Sephardim several times over. The two communities maintained separate institutions, separate synagogues, separate cemeteries and separate religious authorities for most of their history. They were unified administratively only after the Napoleonic emancipation of 1796.
By 1940 the Ashkenazi community numbered around 70,000 in Amsterdam and the Sephardic community around 4,000. Both communities were concentrated in the Jodenbuurt, the Jewish quarter east of the Amstel river, although Jews lived in every part of the city by then. The diamond industry, in which Jews had held a near-monopoly since the seventeenth century, employed around 10,000 Amsterdam Jews in the 1930s; the city’s diamond exchange on the Weesperstraat was the centre of the world diamond trade.
Cultural and political life
Amsterdam Jewish life in the 1930s was politically diverse and intellectually substantial. The community had its own daily newspaper, the Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad, founded in 1865 and still publishing today. It supported a network of Jewish schools, hospitals, orphanages and welfare organisations. Zionist and Bundist political organisations were active. The chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Lodewijk Hartog Sarlouis, was a respected scholar; the chief rabbi of the Sephardic community, Jacob Hirsch Dünner, had been a major figure in nineteenth-century Dutch Jewry.
The community produced figures whose work crossed the boundary into Dutch national life. The diamond magnate and philanthropist Abraham Asscher led the General Diamond Workers Union in the early twentieth century. The painter Jozef Israëls and his son Isaac were major figures in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Dutch art. The composer Sem Dresden directed the Amsterdam Conservatory until 1937. The lawyer and politician Henri Polak founded the Diamond Workers Union in 1894 and was one of the founders of the Dutch Social Democratic Workers Party.
1940 to 1945: occupation, deportation, destruction
The German invasion of the Netherlands began on 10 May 1940. The Dutch government surrendered after five days. The occupation administration under Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart imposed antisemitic legislation in stages. By the autumn of 1940 Jewish public servants had been dismissed; by early 1941 Jewish businesses had been registered for Aryanisation; by April 1941 a Joodse Raad, a Jewish Council, had been established under the chairmanship of Asscher and David Cohen, on the model of the Judenräte in occupied Poland.
The first deportation from Amsterdam took place on 22 and 23 February 1941, when 425 Jewish men were arrested in the Jewish quarter and sent to Mauthausen. The arrests provoked the February Strike, organised by the Amsterdam dockers and tram workers and led by the Communist Party of the Netherlands; the strike was the only sustained public protest by non-Jewish Europeans against an early Nazi deportation. It was suppressed within two days. The men sent to Mauthausen were almost all dead within months.
Systematic deportations to the east began in July 1942. The transports left from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a former theatre on the Plantage Middenlaan that had been requisitioned as the assembly point, to the Westerbork transit camp in the north-east of the country, and from there to Auschwitz, Sobibor and Theresienstadt. The Amsterdam deportations were carried out with a thoroughness unmatched elsewhere in western Europe. The Joodse Raad, forced to compile the lists and to deliver the summonses, became the instrument of the deportation. Around 60,000 Amsterdam Jews were deported between July 1942 and September 1943; almost none survived.
Of the roughly 80,000 Jews who had been living in Amsterdam in May 1940, around 5,200 survived in hiding (the most famous of these was Anne Frank, whose hiding place at Prinsengracht 263 is now the Anne Frank House); around 1,000 survived elsewhere in the Netherlands; around 1,500 returned from the camps. The deportation rate of around 75 per cent of the Jewish population was the highest in western Europe and exceeded by only a small margin in Poland and the Baltic.
What survives
The Portuguese Synagogue on Mr Visserplein still stands and is in use, one of the few European Jewish buildings to have survived the war intact. The Jewish Historical Museum in the four former Ashkenazi synagogues at the Jonas Daniël Meijerplein houses the largest collection of Dutch Jewish material culture. The Anne Frank House at Prinsengracht 263 is one of the most-visited museums in Amsterdam. The Hollandsche Schouwburg is preserved as the Hollandsche Schouwburg memorial; its courtyard contains the names of all 104,000 Dutch Jews who were murdered. The diamond industry survived the destruction of its workers and continues, its centre still in Amsterdam, but the community that built it does not.
See also
- The Netherlands
- The Sephardic Communities
- Anne Frank
- Anne Frank House Amsterdam
- Sigmund Freud Albert Einstein and Jewish Intellectuals in Exile
Sources
- Jacques Presser, Ondergang: De vervolging en verdelging van het Nederlandse Jodendom 1940-1945, Staatsuitgeverij, 1965 (English translation: Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry, Souvenir Press, 1968)
- Loe de Jong, Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, 1969-1991
- Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands 1940-1945, Arnold, 1997
- Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, Jodenvervolging in Nederland, Frankrijk en België 1940-1945, Boom, 2011
- Jaap Meijer, Hoge hoeden, lage standaarden: De Nederlandse Joden tussen 1933 en 1940, Bohn, 1969
- Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe, Brill, 2000
- NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, https://www.niod.nl
- Joods Cultureel Kwartier, https://jck.nl
- Hollandsche Schouwburg, https://jck.nl/nl/locatie/hollandsche-schouwburg