Recent years have seen a considerable increase in scholarly attention to the life and thought of Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), the great dogmatician of the neo- Calvinist movement that attempted to advance the historic Reformed tradition in a distinctly modern fashion in the late modern Netherlands. While this growth was initiated by the English translation of Bavinck’s magnum opus, the four- volume Reformed Dogmatics, in the early twenty- first century, scholarship on Bavinck has also expanded in scope to appreciate the complexity and variegated directions found in his works. Although his most important work is widely held to be a magisterial effort in dogmatic theology, the same figure wrote significant works in psychology, pedagogy, literary criticism, biography and political theory, and also served as the leader of a political party, a parliamentarian, newspaper editor, prolific journalist and acclaimed travel writer. In that light, this chapter concerns one important, although neglected, area of Bavinck’s thought and work that emerged from his contributions as a travel writer – his contribution as a prominent early twentieth- century European critic of racial injustice in North America – and the role played by European experience in that criticism.

While I have previously explored aspects of his criticisms of racism in America in Bavinck: A Critical Biography, this chapter expands upon that work by setting it against a hitherto unexplored aspect of his race consciousness: namely, a formative (and troubling) rebuke in young adult hood through which he became aware of racial injustice faced by Jews in Germany in the 1880s, which precipitated a shift in Bavinck’s attentiveness to the Jewish experience in the early twentieth- century Netherlands.