Jacob Israël de Haan

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For other uses of the name De Haan, see De Haan (disambiguation).

Jacob Israël de Haan (31 December 1881-30 June 1924) was a Dutch Jewish lawyer, legal scholar, diplomat, journalist and poet. He was assassinated by the Haganah on July 1, 1924, allegedly for his political stance, although there may have been additional factors stemming from strong feuds with others.

Portrait of Jacob Israël de Haan (1881-1924) (with permission of [1])
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Portrait of Jacob Israël de Haan (1881-1924) (with permission of [1])

Contents

[edit] Early life

De Haan was born in Kloosterveen, a village in the province of Drenthe, and grew up in Zaandam. He was one of eighteen children and received a traditional Jewish education. His father, Yitzchak HaLevi de Haan, was a hazzan (synagogal cantor) and Shochet (ritual slaughterer).

His sister was also a writer, who wrote mainly under the pseudonym Carry van Bruggen.

De Haan worked as a teacher after obtaining a degree, and studied law between 1903 and 1909. He wrote in socialist publications during these years, and corresponded with Frederik van Eeden, a celebrated author of the period.

He initially lived in Amsterdam, where he composed the controversial novel Pijpelijntjes (1904, named after the then-new neighbourhood De Pijp), which featured what can be interpreted as homo-eroticism. The book stirred up a controversy and led to his dismissal from the social-democratic circles. He married Dr. Johanna van Maarseveen in 1907, but this marriage is likely to have been platonic; they separated in 1919, although they never officially divorced.

[edit] Interest in Judaism and his departure for Jerusalem

Around 1910, De Haan developed an interest in Judaism, the Land of Israel and Zionism. This seems to have begun as a result of the mass-imprisonment of Jews in Tsarist Russia, suspected of Bolshevism and his work to free them. According to historical records, de Haan went to Russia armed with a letter of recommendation from the Queen of Holland and was able to negotiate leniency for his Jewish clients. His work for Russian Jews lasted two years and made him keenly aware of the evils of anti-Semitism.

Prior to his departure for Palestine de Haan is described as being:

...In 1919, two years after the Balfour Declaration, this Poet of the Jewish Song took the next logical step and emigrated to Palestine "anxious to work at rebuilding Land, People and Language" as De Haan put it to Chaim Weitzman in his application for a passport. The same letter assumed his stance with aplomb. False modesty was never one of his faults. With a mixture of the martyred doubts many Zionist emigrants had, and the pride of a well-established position, De Haan wrote: "I am not leaving Holland to improve my condition. Neither materially, nor intellectually will life in Palestine be equal to my life here. I am one of the best poets of my Generation, and the only important Jewish national poet Holland has ever had. It is difficult to give up all this."...
The Palestine De Haan entered on a bitter stormy winter day in January 1919 was above all an intricate country. Arguably it had the most confusing political conditions of that politically complicated moment when the Versailles Peace Conference was about to begin. One might call it a natural habitat for this cranky man. It was the "twice promised country," to the Arabs in the Arab Revolt T.E. Lawrence existentialized in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and to the Jews (or rather in practice the Zionists) by the Balfour Declaration calling for creation of a Jewish Homeland. De Haan arrived there as an ardent, even fanatical, Zionist. Indeed, the first secret Zionist report about him refers to his ranting anti-Arab remarks made at a party... [2]

[edit] Interest in Zionism and Judaism

He rapidly became more religiously committed. He wrote extensively on the subject of Israel and Zionism even before he moved there in 1919, when he settled in Jerusalem, teaching at a new law school and sending articles to the Algemeen Handelsblad ("General Trade Journal") and the De Groene Amsterdammer ("The Green Amsterdamian") in The Netherlands.

He was initially involved with the Religious Zionist Mizrachi movement and then, after meeting with Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld (1849-1933) the leader of the Haredi Jews, he began to side with the Haredi groups in Jerusalem, for whom he became a political spokesman, remaining especially close with the leader of the Haredim Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld who allowed him to conduct negotiations with groups outside of the strictly Orthodox camp. De Haan was elected political secretary of the Orthodox community council (Vaad Ha'ir). He was adept at high level diplomacy that would have enabled the Haredim of the old Yishuv to establish their own direct link with leading officials. He sought a negotiated end to the struggle between Jews and Arabs and not one based on war and conflict, a view that was not seen with favor by all secular Zionist leaders at the time. (Sonnenfeld & Danziger)

During this time, he continued to have relationships with men, mostly Arab youngsters from east Jerusalem. He wrote about his experiences in his poetry book, called "Squars" (four line poems), that was published in the Netherlands on 1924. In these poems he explicitly exposed his tendencies such as:

For whom should I wait late at night
When the city is sound a sleep
While I'm sitting at the temple's wall?
For god, or for the Moroccan lad?

[edit] Targeted for assassination

His assassination by the Haganah on July 1, 1924, allegedly for his political stance has been well researched and reported in the book De Haan: The first political assassination in Palestine written by Shlomo Nakdimon and Shaul Mayzlish (Hebrew edition. Modan Press, Tel Aviv, 1985). Nakdimon and Mayzlish conducted an in-depth investigation and their findings caused an upsurge of interest in the mysterious death of de Haan in Israel following their book's publication in 1985. They were able to trace the assassin, then living in Hong Kong as a business man, Avraham Tehomi. Tehomi was interviewed for Israeli TV by Nakdimon and openly stated: "I have done what the Haganah decided had to be done. And nothing was done without the order of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (who later became the second president of Israel 1952-1963)...I have no regrets because he (de Haan) wanted to destroy our whole idea of Zionism." (Nakdimon)

The secular Zionist establishment would not allow the established Haredi community in Israel to be represented in the powerful Jewish Agency in the 1920's. In response, the Haredim founded an Agudat Israel branch in Jerusalem to represent their interests during the British Mandate of Palestine. The leader of the Haredi Jews in Palestine at the time, Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld chose de Haan to organize and represent the Haredi position on a diplomatic level equal to that of the secular Zionists. When Lord Northcliffe, a leading British publisher, was about to visit the Middle East, de Haan went to Alexandria in Egypt to present the case of Palestine's Orthodox Jews to him, before he reached Palestine:

He spoke about the tyranny of the official Zionist movement. The journalists of the Northcliffe party gleefully reported all that back home. As a result of this contact, De Haan was appointed correspondent for the Daily Express, a one-penny paper that made much of everyday scandals. Already in Dutch circles he was the reputed volksverrader, traitor of his own people, and now his views spread throughout Great Britain and its Global Empire. Although his messages were short and few compared to his articles in the Handelsblad (the news from the Middle East in the Daily Express was more concerned with the mysteries of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt than with the intricate Palestine politics) the Zionist authorities both in Palestine and London became very worried. There was a great potential danger from these critical reports from a Jew who actually lived and worked right on this hot spot. [3]

De Haan also opened negotiations with the Hashemite leader Hussein bin Ali for the recognition of a Jewish state and the establishment of an official Palestinian state in Jordan within a federation. These bold moves threatened and alarmed the secular Zionist leadership and were factors contributing to the decision to eliminate him from the scene.

[edit] Aftermath

De Haan's murder was the first political murder in the Jewish community in Palestine, and stirred a controversy. Although most of the Zionist community sympathized the act (as De Haan was undermining the struggle for establishing a Jewish state), there were critical newspaper articles condeming the murder. Labor movement publicist Moshe Beilinson wrote:

The flag of our movement must not be tarnished. Neither by the blood of the innocent, nor by the blood of the guilty. Otherwise - our movement will be bad, because blood draws other bloods. Blood always takes revenge and if you walk down this path once, you do not know where it would lead you.

Author Arnold Zweig published a book in 1932 based on De Haan's life called "De Vriendt kehrt heim" (English title "De Vriendt Goes Home"). Israeli author Haim Beer's book "Notzot" (feathers) also has a character based on De Haan.

In Haredi circles De Haan is considered to be a martyr, killed by secular Jews, while protecting the Jewish religion. However, in the global circles of Agudat Yisrael, where they were not pleased with his too radical approach, there were some reservations from him especially after the publication of his homosexual writing. For years his name was not commemorated in places nor activities. During the 1980s, the Haredi community in Jerusalem tried to change the name of the Zupnik Garden to commemorate De Haan.

In recent years, De Haan's memory was adopted by the gay community, that praises him as a poet and humanist that was murdered. They do not deny that the murder was performed mostly because of his political activities, but stress that his sexual orientation assisted the acceptance of the murder in the Zionist community. Tehomi denied such allegations: "I neither heard nor knew about this... why is it someones business what he does at his home?". A line from De-Haan's poem "a poem for a young fisherman": "Such a limitless longing for friendship", is inscribed on one of the three sides of the Homomonument at Amsterdam.

[edit] See also

[edit] Sources

  • Nakdimon, Shlomo & Mayzlish, Shaul: De Haan: The first political assassination in Palestine (Hebrew edition. Modan Press, Tel Aviv, 1985).
  • Sonnenfeld, Shlomo Zalman (adapted by Hillel Danziger): Guardian of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld (Mesorah Publications, Brooklyn, 1983) ISBN 0-89906-459-0

[edit] External links

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