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Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2020

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Summary

This book is about antisemitism and the stereotypical Jew in postwar Dutch society. When we embarked on this project we envisioned a series of interconnected chapters that follow the transfer of antisemitic tropes over time as manifested in everyday interactions, public debates, mass media, protests and commemorations. By investigating how old stories and vocabularies concerning ‘the Jew’ get recycled and adapted for new use, we sought to bridge early postwar antisemitism with current manifestations. While it is clear that Sartre's incisive view on ‘the Jew’ as a construct of the antisemite is still topical, we were not convinced that reflection on ‘the [stereotypical] Jew’ is a privilege of ‘the [stereotypical] Antisemite’. We therefore expressed a common ambition to cast our net wider and make an effort in exploring how ‘real people’, including Jews, have dealt with their stereotypical counterparts. By following a wide range of participants in the Dutch public debate – including Jewish and non-Jewish publicists, various solidarity movements and migrant interest groups – The Holocaust, Israel and ‘the Jew’. Histories of Antisemitism in Postwar Dutch Society thus aims to demonstrate how in the Netherlands the Holocaust and the founding of Israel have come to act both as points of fixation for antisemitic expressions as well as building blocks for postwar Jewish identity.

The Netherlands may seem like an unlikely candidate for such an exploration of antisemitic stereotyping over time. The general feeling always has been that antisemitism in the Netherlands only exists in isolated incidents or in ‘mild form’. When in the early 1880s the neologism Antisemitismus was coined, Dutch newspapers exclusively applied the term to incidents abroad. In several newspapers commentators wrote disapprovingly of the rise of the ‘antisemitic movement’ in Germany and the Habsburg Empire, but more than once they did so by simultaneously sneering about the assumed obtrusive presence of Jews. This was also the rhetorical strategy when finally a newspaper reported on a local incident. ‘Anti-semitisme in Nederland’, was the headline of De Tijd in 1890. The Catholic newspaper reported on the distribution of a periodical, De Talmudjood, in which Jews were literally portrayed as bloodsucking vampires.

Type
Chapter
Information
Holocaust, Israel and 'the Jew'
Histories of Antisemitism in Postwar Dutch Society
, pp. 11 - 16
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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