In 1924, the year in which the poet, journalist, jurist, and linguist Jacob Israël de Haan1 was assassinated in Jerusalem, his last collection of poems, Kwatrijnen, appeared in Amsterdam2.

Among the roughly one thousand quatrains it contains, here is how the one that is perhaps the most famous resounds:

Die te Amsterdam vaak zei: “Jeruzalem” En naar Jeruzalem gedreven kwam, Hij zegt met een mijmerende stem: “Amsterdam. Amsterdam.”3

He who at Amsterdam often said: “Jerusalem” And who came, drawn, to Jerusalem, He says in a voice filled with remembrance: “Amsterdam. Amsterdam.”

These four lines suffice to express the ambivalent position of the Dutch Jewish traveler in Jerusalem: between, on the one hand — notably in the programmatic poems of the First World War period — the desire for an old and new home “for his own (Jewish) people,” with its “own (new Hebrew) language” in its “own country,” forever and ever promised, and, on the other hand, the longing for the Dutch homeland in diaspora.

In what follows, all of this will be illustrated through the life of Jacob Israël de Haan who, by and despite his singularity, can reveal something of his dilemma, so rich in symbols of diaspora, homecoming, and exile, as well as of its conditions and its problematics.

On the road to Amsterdam

Jacob Israël de Haan was born on December 31, 1881, in Smilde, in the province of Drenthe. He was the son of an Orthodox Jewish merchant, a hazzan and schoolmaster in Smilde, then in other small Jewish communities. He left the family home very young — he was just fifteen — to undertake teacher training in Haarlem. At nineteen he found himself before a class in Amsterdam. At the same time he began law studies at the University of Amsterdam, which he completed successfully in 1909.

As early as Haarlem, Jacob Israël de Haan had detached himself from the Orthodox world of the family home, had turned toward socialist ideas, and had joined the SDAP (Social Democratic Workers’ Party). From late 1902, in addition to his work as a teacher and his studies, he worked as an editor on the Sunday edition of the socialist daily Het Volk (The People), where he ran in particular a column “By and for children.” It was at this time that his first prose essays appeared, their content marked by his (socialist) political worldview.

It is remarkable that all of this went hand in hand with the young poet’s admiration for the Tachtiger poetic movement (literally: those of the [eighteen-]eighties), whose most important protagonists are Albert Verwey, Willem Kloos, and Lodewijk van Deyssel, and which can be summed up by the watchword “art for art’s sake” or “the cult of beauty.” He particularly admired the psychiatrist, poet, and advocate of educational reform Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932), who was also an occasional member of this circle4.

In 1900, de Haan discovered his homosexual inclinations, which could correspond neither to the viewpoint of the Orthodox faith nor to that of his comrades in the socialist party. It seems that his emancipation on this point was due to his encounter with the physician Arnold Aletrino (1858–1916), who came from a liberal Jewish family of Amsterdam and was also known as a writer. In 1901, Aletrino had caused a sensation in a paper given at a congress of criminal anthropology, in which he upheld the thesis of an innate homosexuality while defending the idea that there could be something like a “normal homosexual” (“normal Uranian”), which was felt to be utterly unheard-of in the circle of his colleagues.

The one who was prepared to make Aletrino’s emancipatory message public, by drawing it out of the narrow circle of criminal anthropology and medicine, was Jacob de Haan, then barely twenty years old. As early as the summer of 1903, his first prose texts appeared in the Sunday edition of the socialist newspaper mentioned above. They constitute, in retrospect, the point of departure for a short novel with which de Haan, then twenty-two, provoked a veritable scandal in the summer of 1904. The novel, whose title Pijpelijntjes was drawn from the name of the Amsterdam working-class neighborhood De Pijp (where de Haan lived and worked as a teacher), openly treated relations and sexuality between men. The scandal cost the young teacher his job as well as his editorial post. Aletrino found it even more scandalous that de Haan had depicted himself, along with his friend and mentor Aletrino, under the features of “Joop” and “Sam” (their usual nicknames in their circle of friends) and, as if that were not enough, that in a burst of emancipatory enthusiasm he had dedicated the book precisely to this “A. Aletrino”56.

Two other novels appeared in the following years: Ondergangen — Ruin (1907) and Pathologieën — Pathologies (1908). The latter novel, which, like Pijpelijntjes, takes homosexuality as its theme, is filled with masochistic figures and behaviors — just as in Nerveuze vertellingen (Nervous Tales): love and sexuality between men are deeply decadent and pathological things78, whereas, following Aletrino’s position, they had been represented as completely natural in Pijpelijntjes. This can be interpreted as a reaction to the abrupt end of Aletrino’s friendship, as a taking-into-account of the homosexuality-hostile conduct of his socialist comrades, but also as an anticipation of the scruples regarding the love of men and boys that would from then on accompany his life. As for literary recognition through Van Eeden, Verwey, and the literary scene, a positive evolution was then in preparation. It was also with his poems that de Haan now gained access to Verwey’s ambitious literary review, De Beweging (The Movement).

In the meantime de Haan had also “arrived” at another point of view: in 1907 he married Johanna (called ‘Hans’) van Maarseveen, a non-Jewish woman physician, a little older than he, whom he had known for some years. He would separate from her neither on account of his homoerotic inclinations nor on account of the problem that being married to a non-Jewish woman posed for his Zionist friends.

In 1909, he successfully completed his law studies in Amsterdam and, since he earned his living as a legal tutor, he was so well-off that he could, from time to time, help his friend Frederik van Eeden out financially. He conceived the plan of a doctoral work in legal terminology bearing on the domain of freedom of the will9; to this end, at Van Eeden’s instigation, he immersed himself in the philosophy-of-language works of the Englishwoman Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912)10.

In February 1916, Jacob Israël de Haan defended his doctoral thesis in Amsterdam, Rechtskundige Significa en hare toepassingen op de begrippen: ‘aansprakelijk’, ‘verantwoordelijk’, ‘toerekeningsvatbaar’ (Legal Significs and its application to the concepts of criminal majority, responsibility, and accountability for one’s acts)11. In the very year of his doctorate, de Haan became a privatdocent at the University of Amsterdam. On October 31, 1916, he gave his inaugural lecture on “The nature and tasks of the legal science of Significs”12. In Amsterdam, the son of the modest hazzan of Smilde was also received into the academic community.

On the road to Jerusalem

Despite the various and varied efforts of his allies in the significs movement, de Haan was unable to succeed his thesis director, the penal-law scholar Van Hamel. Such were, according to his biographer Jaap Meijer, the circumstances and the fundamental reason why de Haan exchanged the Netherlands for Palestine, Amsterdam for Jerusalem, at the beginning of 1919. But his departure for Jerusalem has deeper roots.

Since 1910 de Haan had been publishing poems that took as their theme his return to his Jewish origin, in the important review De Beweging but also in the no less renowned De Gids (The Guide) and, after 1913, in the Zionist review De Joodse Wachter (The Jewish Sentinel). They genuinely place the emphasis on a return to the Jewish year in which he left his parents’ home, which is expressly a reaffiliation. It is not entirely by chance that in 1910 a poem of thirteen stanzas published in De Gids, Grote Verzoendag (Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement), describes the entry into the synagogue with the father and the son’s return at his side “naar ons licht huis” (into our bright house)13. The poem Loofhuttenfeest I (Sukkot I) of the same year explicitly dreams of the journey to Jerusalem:

En ik, een Dichter, droomde nimmer schooner Dan in den nachten na zoo bonten dag: Ons volk was vrij en vorstlijk en ich zag Van Jeruzalem mij een blij bewoner.

Aanbiddend hoorde ik een kalme stem, Zag een zonnige stad, een tempel heilig, Dus weet ik verheugd, dat wij eens weer veilig Vorstelijk wonen te Jerusalem.

And I, a poet, never dreamed more beautifully Than in the nights following so colorful a day: Our people was free and sovereign and I saw Myself a happy inhabitant of Jerusalem.

Worshipping, I heard a calm voice, Saw a sunlit city, a holy temple, Joyful, then, I know that we will once more, secure, Sovereign, dwell in Jerusalem.

But the poet who here dreams of Jerusalem is a rather special poet. “Het Joodse Lied” (The Jewish Song) is the programmatic name of the 1913 sonnet that would, in 1915, open the first volume of the same name14. The Jewish faith had become the theme of his poems, in a manner so insistent that, both in his own consciousness and in that of his contemporaries and allies, he was henceforth “de dichter van Het Joodse Lied” (the poet of the Jewish Song) — an identity that he had, moreover, attributed to himself, which would have considerable consequences for his own self-image. Three important aspects announce themselves in Het Joodse Lied: the consoling return to the “Hebrew song” (which he had, moreover, heard and read, but never composed himself), the reaffiliation with the Jewish people (“I am one of your people,” “my people,” “my oppressed people”), and the decision “to be the poet of [his] oppressed people” (“dichter van mijn verdreven Volk te zijn”), a decision that stands opposed to the possession of an earthly treasure but also to the complex “Vriendschap” (friendship).

One must of course note the pertinence of this last opposition, the alternative friend/friendship versus Judaism and piety, whose theme keeps recurring all the way to the Kwatrijnen, if one considers that “the love that is called friendship” — since the cycle of poems so named by Verwey — means more than a mere friendship, namely, very precisely, erotic relations between men15.

Yet before the actual beginning of the journey to Jerusalem, a detour takes place by way of Russia. During a visit to London in 1912, Van Eeden and de Haan called on Count Kropotkin, whose descriptions of the prison regime in tsarist Russia, in particular the fate of political prisoners after the revolutionary events of 1905/1906, launched the young law student, upon his return, into a political activity in a manner very characteristic of him. In the summer of 1912, de Haan made a first journey to Russia, in fact with his wife. He would make two others in the following months. He traveled through Russia as a jurist, managed to meet a series of penal-law scholars of all kinds in Riga, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg, with the declared aim of informing the West about the situation. De Haan’s reports appeared in a specialized legal review and in the review De Beweging. What he was able to see in Russia profoundly shook and angered him. The way political prisoners were treated, and among them the Jews in particular, did not leave him in peace. The result was political activity but also — and this is significant of the way poetry and the realities of life are closely linked in him — poetry, the two intertwining in a poem addressed to “His Excellency General Zhukovsky,” in which de Haan takes up the posture of formulating demands on behalf of the young prisoner Georges Dmitrenko, to whom he addressed, moreover, a series of other poems16.

One may deduce from all this that his desire to turn toward Judaism and Zionism emerged strengthened from his encounters in the Russian prisons. In the years that followed there came to be added the experience of the First World War, in which Jews of different nations fought against other Jews, which made more pressing the necessity of a Jewish country of one’s own and that of a Jewish people. In August 1914, de Haan wrote three more long poems that appeared in important reviews (De Gids, De Beweging) and that form part of Het Joodse Lied (1915), under the title In den Oorlog (In the War):

Wij strijden broeders tegen eigen broeders, En breken machteloos onze eigen macht, Wij berooven van zonen onze moeders, En ons volk van zijn onmisbare kracht17.

We fight, brothers against brothers (our own brothers), And powerlessly break our own strength, We rob our mothers of their sons, And our people of its indispensable vigor.

The original title Aan mijn volk (To My People) had caused difficulties for the editorial board: in that period, de Haan wrote to Albert Verwey on August 29, 1914, it was deemed unseemly for a Dutch poet that “my people” should mean a people other than the Dutch people18.

In 1912 — the year of the publication of Het Joodse Lied — de Haan joined the Dutch Zionist Union. By 1914 at the latest, he began to learn modern Hebrew and was forever taking positions in the contentious questions that broke out concerning this old and new language, its rebirth, the necessity of its development, its expansion, and the rules to be observed in the matter19. The extent to which de Haan integrated his arguments and his interest in “significs” into his new preoccupations would become apparent later, when in Jerusalem he would also pay attention, from the standpoint of the philosophy of language, to the questions posed by the development of modern Hebrew20.

One may also say that, to this extent, his movement toward Judaism unfolds over time in complete parallel with his legal, political, and philosophical commitments. At the same time, and this must not be overlooked, his homoerotic emotional world remains virulent and productive21: it colors his experiences in the Russian prisons — like the poems we have mentioned, in particular those addressed to Georges Dmitrenko — and it also accompanies his movement toward religion22. De Haan problematizes it and is problematized by it. Parallel to Het Joodse Lied, cycles of poems appear in which the fascination with the openly homoerotic and homosexual texts of the French-language Belgian writer Georges Eekhoud (1854–1927) mingles with the undisguised expression of his own feelings. These poems appear from 1911 in scattered form, then are gathered in the volume Antwerpsche Libertijnen — Antwerp Libertines (1914). The cycle Een nieuw Carthago (A New Carthage), published at the author’s own expense in 1919, is also indebted to Eekhoud (his Nouvelle Carthage in particular).

If one takes into consideration the fact that de Haan published this volume of poetry at the same time as he was leaving for Palestine, a remarkable parallel appears between Antwerp, become the new Carthage as a place of an old and new freedom, and Jerusalem, center of the “alt-neu” (old-new) Palestine, whose name cannot have been given entirely at random23. The poetic claim, which states, with respect to the rich merchant city, that poets are worth more and are more important for the community than men of action and their exploits (“meer dan Daders zijn der daden Dichters”), shows without any doubt the status that the poet de Haan had planned for himself in the new national home.

At the beginning of 1919, de Haan was the first Dutch Zionist to leave for Jerusalem. He took his leave at a special celebration organized for him at the Amsterdam diamond exchange. He departed as a poet, as the author of Het Joodse Lied, as he emphasized in his farewell speech24. From Jerusalem he wrote reports on Palestine under the recent British Mandate as correspondent for the Algemeen Handelsblad (General Commercial Gazette)25. He made the acquaintance of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922), the founder of modern Hebrew, wrote about him several times in the Algemeen Handelsblad, and supported his project of a general dictionary of Hebrew. From 1920, de Haan taught as a jurist at the Government Law College. And above all, when his Zionist-critical attitude later sharpened, he never gave up his dream of the settlement of “ons volk” (our people), as is shown by the description of a journey from one end of Palestine to the other, during which he speaks again and again of the open spaces still capable of accommodating tens upon tens of thousands of people26.

Amsterdam, Amsterdam

And yet: faced with what de Haan felt to be the consequence of the settlement of Jewish immigrants in a Palestine inhabited by Palestinians, also because of the difficult relations between the settlers and the British authorities, with in addition the differences of political opinion among the members of the Jewish group, the “return to Jerusalem” leads to a growing estrangement from political Zionism and to a rapprochement with the groups that were opposed to the founding of a State of Israel. Just as he had given an account of the situation in the Russian prisons in 1912/1913, he now published his observations on Palestine in the Netherlands. For Agudat Israel, and the group gathered in particular around the Orthodox rabbi Chaim Sonnenfeld, which he had joined, de Haan drafted a memorandum to be addressed to the British government and to the League of Nations. This group, constituted for a good part of pious pre-Zionist immigrants, held a position ranging from critical to hostile toward political Zionism, denying it in any case the right to speak and act on behalf of the Jewish people as a whole. The memorandum that de Haan sent to the League of Nations first thanked it “for its support of the British Mandate over Palestine on the basis of that magnificent declaration which promises to give the suffering and wandering Jewish people the possibility of returning and rebuilding a home faithful to the country it has desired for a thousand years, which it venerates despite its forced separation from it for nearly twenty centuries.” But it had at the same time deferred the autonomy of the “pioneers of the present colonies with their institutions” who, in order to preserve their religious freedom, “had to organize their community independently, convinced that it is only in this way that the future preservation of the Jewish religion could be assured in the country, and that it is only through independence that disputes and quarrels could be avoided”27.

The Zionists particularly resented de Haan for having made himself the spokesman of an Orthodox delegation which, at the beginning of 1922, set out before the press magnate Lord Northcliffe, then visiting Jerusalem, the doubts of the independent Orthodox community regarding the Zionists who claimed exclusive representation. In their eyes, he was now a traitor28. And of course de Haan aroused opposition in Zionist circles on account of his friendly relations with Arabs (not solely tinged, moreover, with homoeroticism)29. This resulted in problems in his teaching at the Government Law College: his classes were boycotted and in 1923 he had to give up his post.

On June 30, 1924, just before a departure for London, where he was to go as legal adviser to a delegation of the Agudah, practically at the door of the synagogue of the Sha’arei Tsedek Hospital in Jerusalem, Jacob Israël de Haan received a knife wound to which he would not survive. His funeral gave rise to an impressive demonstration by the Orthodox group. Representatives of the official Arab authorities were also present. With a few exceptions, the Zionists were absent30.

Subsequently, de Haan’s political Zionist adversaries tried to pin the presumption of guilt on non-Jewish suspects. This went hand in hand with suggestive insinuations regarding de Haan’s homosexual tendencies, which steered suspicions toward a murderer drawn rather from Arab milieus31. That Jacob Israël de Haan was killed by a member of the Haganah, the Zionist defense organization, was not officially established until 1985, following the discoveries of the journalist Shlomo Nakdimon32. It is notably thanks to what Arnold Zweig knew that the political background of de Haan’s murder has always been known — Zweig who, during a journey to Palestine in 1932, wrote to Sigmund Freud that de Haan had not at all been killed by an Arab but by a Jew, a political adversary, a radical Zionist, whom many knew in the country and who still lives there33. This affair is the subject of a novel, the last that Arnold Zweig published in Germany34.

Posterity

Jacob Israël de Haan is barely known in the German-speaking world, and one scarcely notices that he is the protagonist of the Arnold Zweig novel that will be discussed in a moment. He is, however, still entirely alive in the Netherlands. His biography was established in an official edition by the Jewish historian Jaap Meijer; his commitment to socialism and Zionism, his reports on the situation in the Russian prisons just before the First World War, his participation in the birth of modern Hebrew, and his reportage in Palestine — all of this has given rise to research and accounts from various quarters. His prose texts have been republished in various reprints, sometimes for bibliophiles. His complete poems were republished as early as 1952. His archives, not very large (he kept practically none of the letters addressed to him), are preserved in the Judaica department of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana of the Amsterdam University Library and have been inventoried.

At the same time, de Haan has become a kind of icon for the Dutch homosexual movement, which honors his first novels as the first homosexual narratives in the Dutch language. De Haan’s poems too enjoy an extraordinary renown and favor. In 1979, the line “Naar vriendschap zulk een mateloos verlangen” (such an immoderate longing for friendship), drawn from the sonnet Aan een jongen visser (To a Young Fisherman)35, served as the title of an anthology of Dutch homosexual poetry, since become a classic36. And one can read this same line at the foot of the Westerkerk in Amsterdam, on the Keizersgracht, on the enormous marble plaque of the Homomonument inaugurated in the mid-1980s. And finally there are the Kwatrijnen of Jacob Israël de Haan, that poetic diary of the journey toward Jerusalem and of the year he spent in Jerusalem, containing numerous and magnificent poetic descriptions of Arab boys, but also the inner struggle aroused in the poet by his sensibility to the beauty of these boys (a struggle the boys win most of the time).

At the Gay Games held in Amsterdam in 1998, an opera about de Haan was included in the accompanying cultural program, specially composed and staged on the basis of the text of the Kwatrijnen37. That on this occasion the Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad (“The New Israelite Weekly”) devoted a special issue to the homosexual Jew Jacob Israël de Haan may be taken here as an example of the way in which Jewish and homosexual emancipation are today able to bridge the gulf between Hellas and Jerusalem which, all his life, broke the heart and head of the poet (while becoming the driving cause of his poetry!)38.

The dilemma is often evoked indirectly in the Kwatrijnen, even cum grano salis in the four lines already cited that open the collection, where “Amsterdam” would have taken on something of the coded meaning “Hellas”39. Whatever his scruples, the poet nevertheless always manages to integrate them in a remarkable way — in Jerusalem, it is true:

Vraag niet naar veilig of onveilig, Want in Gods wil is alles één. Langs lusten heilig en onheilig Voert Zijne Liefde mij naar Jeruzalem.

Do not ask after safety or peril, For in God’s will all is one. Along desires holy and unholy His Love leads me toward Jerusalem.

And there is indeed, as we have mentioned, that curious piece of de Haan’s reception in the German language: Arnold Zweig’s novel De Vriendt kehrt heim. It is the last novel Zweig composed in Germany; he wrote it after his visit to Palestine in the spring of 1932. His account of the commitments and the death of “Dr. de Vriendt” is an all-too-transparent portrait of Jacob Israël de Haan. In the novel the murder is committed in 1929, the year of violent Arab riots. In Arnold Zweig’s novel, the love for Arab boys, as well as the Kwatrijnen that speak of these boys, play an astonishingly central role: it is “the nature of the friendship between de Vriendt and the young Saoud”40 that sets the events in motion from the very first chapter.

The English security officer Irmin is told the news that death threats against de Vriendt are being heard ever more loudly from the side of the boy’s Arab family. Irmin’s attempt to warn de Vriendt through a physician friend makes visible the taboo character of the theme (“I can’t insult de Vriendt by letting him know I know”). After Irmin has cautiously put him on guard, de Vriendt reacts with panic: “This Englishman knew.” In the novel, de Vriendt’s panic is connected to the fact that he has generally kept hidden his religious skepticism and his homosexuality in general, and this more particularly from the Orthodox Jewish group he had joined. Only the fear that these two aspects might be discovered provokes his flight into anti-Zionist political activities, which will lead to his assassination by a Zionist militant.

This entanglement of motivations of course corresponds in no way to the historical model. Even if one takes as a point of departure that de Haan had not really spoken of his homosexuality with his Orthodox friends, it seems that his marriage to a non-Jewish woman was a more serious problem than his attraction to young boys, whether they were Arab, Hasidic, or Yemenite, as appears in the Kwatrijnen. In general, Arnold Zweig scarcely knew the poet Jacob Israël de Haan, whom he describes in 1932 as “unhappy” in the Jüdische Rundschau. As Zweig himself composed them, the quatrains whose role is so important in the novel are elaborated very superficially from the Kwatrijnen, as Zweig himself admits, and they thematize only the scruple and not the superior way in which de Haan managed to go beyond it. Faced with the explicitly homoerotic content of the Kwatrijnen, Zweig dodges by means of a classic literary trick: during the crisis meeting in which the poems of “Dr. de Vriendt” are at issue, they are not read, out of discretion. Thus they are no longer dangerous. “Who reads Dutch?” the security officer Irmin asks calmly41. Indeed. In any case, not Arnold Zweig.

Like de Vriendt’s Orthodox friend in the novel, the Orthodox rabbi Chaim Sonnenfeld, to whom a series of Kwatrijnen is addressed42, is said to have known nothing of de Haan’s homosexuality. This is entirely possible. However, some time later the Zionist side took the necessary steps to bring this aspect of de Haan’s life, indeed his inner world, to everyone’s knowledge43. This was not enough to diminish the Orthodox sympathy for de Haan. In sovereign fashion, they interpret the Kwatrijnen, which give rise to so much emotion and agitation in Arnold Zweig’s novel, as a “creative confession,” as obedience to the pious commandment “to note one’s sins of thought and one’s actions on paper and to inspect the list regularly in order to repent of the past and resist in the future”; “in moving quatrains, he refined his conscience by illustrating the war of the drives and the struggle between faith and unbelief, in fact the struggle for his own soul”44. No doubt, one can also read de Haan’s Kwatrijnen in this way. One can go so far as to ask oneself whether Chaim Sonnenfeld himself ever, as a young man, gave way (“nimmer bezweken”) and whether, as an adult, he always resisted (“altijd weerstaan”)45. It is thus that, for a certain number of Orthodox groups, de Haan is still today a kind of saintly figure, his tomb a place of pilgrimage, the day of his death a day of remembrance46.

There is another question: why, in 1932, does Arnold Zweig describe de Haan in the Jüdische Rundschau as a “baleful politician”? If one compares Zweig’s estrangement from Zionism with de Haan’s, one obtains some interesting differences that allow de Haan’s position to be made explicit. One of these differences consists in the fact that de Haan conceived of himself resolutely as a poet. This was in his eyes a position bound up with the function of prophet. One can read the central place that language, the word, and the book held for him in one of his little sketches written in Jerusalem, in which he depicts, with a tender irony, a debate among scholars:

“As the three visitors leave, I observe, once again, that we are the People of the Book. And we must remain so, even if we again become the People of the Land. Nissim Nahum, although he is not a rabbi, goes out first because he is carrying two large sacred books. Rabbi Epstein is older, to be sure, but it is Rabbi Bernstein who carries authority. To which of the two should precedence fall? These are matters of importance here. Schisms have been seen to occur because one rabbi went ahead of another. In the end, priority must go to Rabbi Epstein. But Rabbi Bernstein had come with a book. Very well: Rabbi Epstein will therefore carry it until he is outside. After that it would no longer be proper. This makes you smile, this fussy formalism regarding protocol? Me too. But it is a smile full of indulgence and tenderness toward these peccadilloes.”

The debate had, moreover, concerned ancient legends and prophecies about a spring hidden in the rocky subsoil of Jerusalem. De Haan reflects at the same time on the significance for Palestine of living water — that is, water gushing from a spring — and on the significance of the legends and traditions accompanying them, endangered by Zionist ideology:

“We love water here, truly, and we truly need it here. For us, a spring is the living, the good. A Being. To each spring its legend. But all that will soon belong to the past. We are going to modernize Palestine, modernize it terribly. The fellahin will be electrified and dusted off with vacuum cleaners. What a prospect! And that will be the end of all the beautiful legends that speak of springs, flowers, and rivers.”47

Arnold Zweig’s unease toward the Zionist enterprise was, on the contrary, far more of the order of a culture shock (which de Haan of course also experienced at the beginning, but which he worked through in an entirely different way), which made him call for help upon the achievements of civilization and whose introduction generally seemed imaginable to him before his own settlement48. And there is of course another, essential difference: de Haan does not leave for Palestine in exile — as Arnold Zweig does — but leaves the diaspora for his “own country.” That he felt there the nostalgia for Holland and for the Dutch language (which was and remained the language of his poetry) is only one aspect of the matter. He also becomes aware — and this can also be heard in the poem cited at the beginning and in other similar poems — that it would do no good to “return” to Amsterdam, because there, the nostalgia for Jerusalem would erupt anew. Just as there is no way out of the dilemma “God or the Moroccan boy”49, there is none either to the question Amsterdam or Jerusalem — or Amsterdam after all? Or Jerusalem after all? Jerusalem remains “met lusten heilig en onheilig” (with desires blessed and accursed). And Jerusalem would in any case have remained, even if the anger of the Zionists had not literally struck Jacob Israël de Haan and silenced him there — he who had given to more than one of his Kwatrijnen (including the one cited at the beginning) the title “Onrust” (unrest).

There is, however, a last letter, very touching, written by “Hans” (that is, Johanna de Haan van Maarseveen) to her husband on June 13, 1924, which he no longer received (and that is the sole reason it has been preserved; he destroyed all the letters he received). She explains to him once more that in any case she did not want / could not convert to Judaism, but she asks: “Should I come fetch you this summer?”50. The implication: to return to Amsterdam.

Translated from the German by Martine Leibovici and from the Dutch by Vivane Siman.

Notes

  1. This text was originally published in an Austrian collection (Armin Eidherr, Gerhard Langer, Karl Müller, eds.: Diaspora-Exil als Krisenerfahrung: Jüdische Bilanzen und Perspektiven. Vienna: Drava, 2006, pp. 281–305). We translate it because the figure of Jacob Israël de Haan is, in our eyes, exemplary of a life that, while remaining faithful to Judaism, never ceased to make tremble the various religious, sexual, political, or identity-related borders that delimit Jewish existence in modernity (Translator’s note).↩︎

  2. Jacob Israël de Haan: Kwatrijnen (Quatrains). Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen en Zoon, 1924.↩︎

  3. This quotation and those that follow are drawn from Jacob Israël de Haan: Verzamelde Gedichten (Collected Poems). 2 vols. Amsterdam: van Oorschot, 1952; here II, p. 358.↩︎

  4. Cf. Jaap Meijer: De zoon van een Gazzen. Het leven van Jacob Israël de Haan 1881–1924 (Son of a hazzan. The life of J.I. de Haan). Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1967; Jan Fontijn: Trots verbrijzeld. Het leven van Frederik van Eeden vanaf 1901 (Pride shattered. The life of Frederik van Eeden from 1901). Amsterdam: Querido, 1996.↩︎

  5. Cf. Maurice van Lieshout: “Pendelen tussen wetenschap en moraal. Arnold Aletrino (1858–1916)” (Shuttling between science and morality. Arnold Aletrino), in: Hans Hafkamp, Maurice van Lieshout (eds.): Pijlen der naamloze liefde. Pioniers van de homo-emancipatie (Arrows of nameless love. Pioneers of homosexual emancipation). Amsterdam: SUA, 1988, pp. 83–88.↩︎

  6. Jacob [Israël] de Haan: Pijpelijntjes. Amsterdam: Jacq. van Cleef, 1904; cf. the afterword “Pijpelijntjes. De geschiedenis van een ‘onzedelijk’ boek” (Pijpelijntjes. The history of an “immoral” book) by Wim J. Simons, written on the occasion of the reprint of the first edition (’s-Gravenhage: Kruseman, 1974). The title means “Tales of De Pijp” while also letting an untranslatable hidden sexual meaning slip in.↩︎

  7. Cf. the afterword by Simons in the 1974 edition (op. cit.), p. 227.↩︎

  8. Cf. Jacob Israël de Haan: Nerveuze vertellingen. Ed. and introduction by Rob Delvigne and Leo Ross. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1983 — In our context, the most interesting of these stories is the one that was reprinted after its appearance in the review Levensrecht (The Right to Live) in 1907, under the title “Over de ervaringen van Hélènus Marie Golesco” (On the experiences of Hélènus Marie Golesco). Jesus is represented there as “de verleider” (the seducer), thereby binding together, in a remarkable way, religious and erotic motifs.↩︎

  9. The theme of accountability for one’s acts played a considerable role in the discussion of the time concerning the condemnable character of homosexual behaviors. This too certainly motivated de Haan to choose this theme.↩︎

  10. It was Van Eeden and de Haan who introduced into the Netherlands Lady Welby’s communication-oriented theory of the sign, called “Significs” (which became “signifique” in French), and who were at the origin of the development of a critical linguistic orientation, the “significs movement.” Cf. H. Walter Schmitz: Verständigungshandlungen – eine wissenschaftshistorische Rekonstruktion der Anfänge der signifischen Bewegung in den Niederlanden (1892–1926) (Acts of mutual understanding — a historical reconstruction of the beginnings of the significs movement in the Netherlands). Habilitation thesis, Phil. Fak. der Univ. Bonn, 1985.↩︎

  11. Published in Amsterdam: Versluys, 1916.↩︎

  12. Jacob Israël de Haan: Wezen en taak der rechtskundige significa (Essence and task of legal significs), Amsterdam: P.N. van Kampen & Zoon, 1916. — His lectures of the following years are gathered and published in 1919 in a volume entitled Rechtskundige significa — Legal Significs (Amsterdam: Joh. Müller, 1919).↩︎

  13. Verzamelde Gedichten I, op. cit., p. 93 f.↩︎

  14. Amsterdam: W. Versluys 5676 (1915); a second volume appeared in 1921.↩︎

  15. Cf. Marita Keilson-Lauritz: Von der Liebe die Freundschaft heißt. Zur Homoerotik im Werk Stefan Georges (Of the love that is called friendship. On homoeroticism in the work of Stefan George), Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1987; on Verwey’s poetic cycle, see in particular p. 61.↩︎

  16. Cf. Jacob Israël de Haan: In Russische gevangenissen (In Russian Prisons), with a preface by Wim J. Simons. 3rd edition, Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1986, in particular pp. 129–140; Verzamelde Gedichten I, the section “Aan Russische vrienden” (To Russian Friends), pp. 259–285.↩︎

  17. Verzamelde Gedichten I, p. 212.↩︎

  18. Cited by Jaap Meijer: Onze taal als een bare schat. Jacob Israël de Haan en het Hebreeuws (Our language, a manifest treasure. Jacob Israël de Haan and Hebrew). Amsterdam: De Engelbewaarder, 1981, p. 28.↩︎

  19. Cf. Meijer, Onze taal (op. cit.), in particular, but not only, the chapter on the two articles in Hebrew that de Haan published in collaboration with Lev Strachun for the review Hamizrach — The East (pp. 72–120).↩︎

  20. Cf. Meijer, Onze taal (op. cit.), in particular pp. 130–152: “Hebreeuwsche significa” — Hebrew significs.↩︎

  21. Even if Jaap Meijer’s biography undoubtedly tends to exaggerate the psychological dimension, one must often grant him the point as to the importance of de Haan’s homosexual tendencies in many of his decisions and actions (cf. Meijer, De zoon van een chazzen, op. cit., p. 145).↩︎

  22. Cf. the cycle dedicated to the dead young man Leo V[leeshouwer], “Het Jaartijdlicht” (The light of remembrance), and in particular, within this cycle, the poem “Gebed dat bindt” — The prayer that binds (Verzamelde Gedichten II, p. 72).↩︎

  23. In this context one might also recall that Zionism and the homosexual movement can be historically considered as absolutely parallel phenomena. Cf. Marita Keilson-Lauritz: Die Geschichte der eigenen Geschichte. Literatur und Literaturkritik in den Anfängen der Schwulenbewegung am Beispiel des Jahrbuchs für sexuelle Zwischenstufen und der Zeitschrift Der Eigene (The history of one’s own history. Literature and literary criticism in the beginnings of the gay movement, taking as example the Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Stages and the review Der Eigene). Berlin: rosa Winkel, 1997, chapter: “Auftakt: Das Jahr 1896” (Overture: the year 1896), pp. 23–29.↩︎

  24. Meijer, De zoon van een chazzen (op. cit.), p. 211.↩︎

  25. A minute selection of these articles is found in Giebels, Jacob Israël de Haan correspondent in Palestina 1919–1924 (Jacob Israël de Haan, correspondent in Palestine 1919–1924). Amsterdam: De Engelbewaarder, 1981.↩︎

  26. Cf. Jacob Israël de Haan: Palestina. Amsterdam: Querido, 1925. It seems that in French a single book of de Haan’s has been translated: Palestine 1921; presentation, translation from the Dutch, and annotations by Nathan Weinstock, Paris; Montreal (Quebec): Éd. l’Harmattan, 1997 (Translator’s note).↩︎

  27. In English in the text. Cf. Meijer, De zoon van een gazzen (op. cit.), p. 395 f.; on pp. 397–401, another passage of the memorandum is reproduced concerning the contentious question of the tax on the manufacture of matzot; both documents are in the de Haan archives at the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, Amsterdam.↩︎

  28. Here and for what follows, see also Emil Marmorstein: A Martyr’s Message. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Professor de Haan. Published in London in 1975; it can be found on the website of the True Torah Jews <www.jewsagainstzionism.com>; as a precaution, it must be noted that Marmorstein’s text is cited on websites with openly antisemitic tendencies. Cf. also Mohammed de Zeeuw: De moord op Jacob Israël de Haan (1881–1924) (The murder of Jacob Israël de Haan (1881–1924)). In Acta Academica, 2002; it can be read via <www.actaacademica.nl>, July 2005. The fact that De Zeeuw’s quotations regarding de Haan’s Arab friendships are found more in Jaap Meijer’s biography than in Ludy Giebels’s balanced anthology shows the extent to which de Haan’s argumentations and judgments are woven together.↩︎

  29. See his description of a journey with the elder brother of his young friend Adil Aweidah: Jacob Israël de Haan: Palestina (op. cit.).↩︎

  30. To my knowledge, from this perspective, the most accurate account concerning the last period of de Haan’s life is Ludy Giebels’s introduction to the inventory of the archives of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana of the Amsterdam University Library.↩︎

  31. On this point, see Marmorstein (op. cit.). In this direction, regarding an exemplary denunciatory text Ha’kadosj’ De Haan (De Haan, the “Saint”) from the pen of a pseudonym, A.Z. Ben Jisjai, one of the poet’s mortal Zionist adversaries according to Jaap Meijer, see Meijer, Onze taal (op. cit.), pp. 124–127.↩︎

  32. J. Meijer, in his biography, nevertheless already cites the unpublished memoirs of the assassin Avraham Tehomi, whom he calls Awrahm X (op. cit., pp. 329–332).↩︎

  33. Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig. Edited by Ernst L. Freud. Translated by Elaine and William Robson-Scott. New York: New York University Press, 1970, p. 42.↩︎

  34. Arnold Zweig: De Vriendt kehrt heim. Novel. Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1932; see the documents in the appendix of the volume corresponding to the Berlin edition, Berlin: Aufbau, 1996. In French: Un meurtre à Jérusalem, L’affaire De Vriendt, translated by R. Hartmann, Paris, Desjonquères, 1999.↩︎

  35. Verzamelde Gedichten I, p. 290.↩︎

  36. Hans Hafkamp (ed.): Naar vriendschap zulk een mateloos verlangen. Bloemlezing uit de Nederlandse homo-erotische poëzie 1880-nu (Such an immoderate longing for friendship. Selected pieces of homoerotic poetry in the Netherlands from 1880 to today), Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1979; de Haan’s poetry is found on pp. 29–38.↩︎

  37. De tweede reis. Een nieuw Nederlandse opera van Joost Kleppe op teksten van Jacob Israël de Haan (The Second Journey. A new contemporary Dutch opera by Joost Kleppe on texts by Jacob Israël de Haan). First performance on August 6, 1998, at Felix Meritis, Amsterdam.↩︎

  38. See also my reflections on this point in “Hellas und Jerusalem. Ein Versuch über Männerliebe und Judentum” (Hellas and Jerusalem. An essay on love between men and Judaism) in Gert Mattenklott, Michael Philipp, Julius H. Schoeps (eds.): ‘Verkannte Brüder?’ Stefan George und das deutsch-jüdische Bürgertum zwischen Jahrhundertwende und Emigration (“Misunderstood Brothers?” Stefan George and the German-Jewish bourgeoisie between the turn of the century and emigration) (Hildesheim et al.: Georg Olms, 2001, pp. 69–82).↩︎

  39. De Haan appeals directly to classical Greece in the poetic cycles Sophocles en de jonge slaaf (Sophocles and the young slave) and Pindarus’ dood — The death of Pindar (Verzamelde Gedichten I, pp. 51 f. and 69 f.).↩︎

  40. Un meurtre à Jérusalem, op. cit., p. 21.↩︎

  41. Ibid., p. 127.↩︎

  42. Verzamelde Gedichten II, pp. 231, 319, 343.↩︎

  43. Cf. Ha’kadosj’ De Haan by A.Z. Ben Jisjai (op. cit.), one of the student organizers of the boycott of de Haan’s classes (cf. Meijer, Onze taal, op. cit., p. 124 f.).↩︎

  44. In English, Marmorstein, op. cit.↩︎

  45. “R. Chaïm Sonnenfeld,” Verzamelde Gedichten II, p. 319.↩︎

  46. Cf. Marmorstein, op. cit.↩︎

  47. Jacob Israël de Haan: Jerusalem. Amsterdam: Querido, 1921; these two excerpts are cited from the version available on the internet in the form of an e-book belonging to Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.net.↩︎

  48. Cf. David R. Midgley: Arnold Zweig. Zu Werk und Wandlung. 1927–1948. Königstein/Taunus: Athenäum, 1980, Chapter V: “Arnold Zweig in Palestine,” p. 123 f.↩︎

  49. Cf. the question posed in the self-analytical Kwatrijn “Twijfel” (doubt). “Wat wacht ik in dit avonduur, / De Stad beslopen door de slaap, / Gezeten bij den Tempelmuur: / God of den Marokkaanschen Knaap? (Verzamelde Gedichten II, p. 259) — What do I await at this late hour, / While sleep has crept stealthily over the City, / Seated before the wall of the Temple / God or the Moorish boy?↩︎

  50. Reproduced in Meijer, De zoon van een chazzen, op. cit., p. 338.↩︎

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