Jacob Israël de Haan

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Jacob Israël de Haan

Jacob Israël de Haan ( Hebrew יעקב ישראל דיהאן or. יעקב ישראל דה האןborn on December 31, 1881 in Smilde ; died June 30, 1924 in Jerusalem ) was a Dutch lawyer , jurist, journalist and poet . He was murdered on June 30, 1924 by the underground Zionist organization Hagana because of his political stance .

Early years

De Haan was born in Smilde, a village in the northern Dutch province of Drenthe . He grew up in Zaandam . De Haan was one of eight children and received a traditional Jewish upbringing. His father Yitzchak HaLevi de Haan was a Chasan . One of the sisters, Carry de Haan (born January 1, 1881 - † November 16, 1932) was an important Dutch author who wrote under the name Carry van Bruggen .

De Haan worked after his education as a teacher and studied 1903-1909 jurisprudence . He wrote in socialist publications during these years. De Haan was a friend of Frederik van Eeden and Arnold Aletrino , both Dutch authors and doctors.

De Haan lived in Amsterdam, in the De Pijp district , where he wrote the novella Pijpelijntjes in 1904 , which was received controversially by the public. In this homoerotic tale he describes his own promiscuous life with homosexual affairs in a barely claused manner . In the course of the controversy, the book led to de Haan's dismissal as a teacher and his exclusion from social democratic circles.

In 1907 de Haan married the doctor Johanna van Maarseveen. In 1919 the couple separated. An official divorce, however, never took place in her life. In 1908 de Haan published a second controversial novel Pathologieën , in which the worries and happiness of a sadomasochistic relationship are described. However, the novel received less public attention than its prose and skits, which appeared in the following years from 1914 to 1921.

Commitment to Zionism and departure to Jerusalem: Living in the Mandate Palestine

Poem by De Haan in Amsterdam

From 1910 onwards de Haan developed an increased interest in Judaism, Eretz Israel and Zionism . De Haan's interest was, among other things, a result of the mass arrest of Jews in Tsarist Russia, his interest in Bolshevism and his commitment to the liberation of the imprisoned Russian Jews. De Haan traveled to Russia as a diplomat with a letter from Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands . In the following two years he campaigned for the release of Russian Jewish prisoners in Russia and learned about the consequences of anti-Semitism during this time .

Ludy Giebels writes about de Haan in the Internet "Journal The Exquisite Corpse-A Journal of Letters and Life":

In 1919, two years after the Balfour Declaration , this poet of the Jewish song took the next logical step and emigrated to Palestine, "eager to work on the reconstruction of the country, the people and the language," as de Haan put it in his entry application to Chaim Weitzman . The same letter suggests an inner serenity. False modesty was never one of his weaknesses. With a mixture of the doubts of a martyr such as many Zionist emigrants had and the pride of being in a well-established position, de Haan wrote: “I am not leaving Holland to improve my situation. Neither materially nor intellectually, my life in Palestine will match my life here. I am one of the best poets of my generation, and I am the only great Jewish poet that Holland has ever had. It is difficult to give up all of this. ”The Palestine, which de Haan entered on an ugly stormy winter day in January 1919, was anything but an uncomplicated country. Political conditions were arguably confusing when the Versailles armistice negotiations were just beginning. You could call this a natural setting for such a quirky person. It was a "double promised land", it was promised to the Arabs during the Arab uprising by TE Lawrence , as he describes it in the " Seven Pillars of Wisdom ", and it was promised to the Jews (or rather the Zionists) by the Balfour Declaration, which promised the establishment of a Jewish home. De Haan came across as a fervent, even fanatical, Zionist. In fact, the first secret Zionist report made of him is of the zealous anti-Arab remarks he made at a party.

De Haan became increasingly active in the religious field and was involved in this. He wrote articles on Israel and Zionism before moving to Palestine in 1919, where he settled in Jerusalem . He taught at the new law faculty in Jerusalem and sent articles to the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad , one of the most important Dutch daily newspapers, and to the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer . De Haan initially participated in the religious-Zionist Misrachi in Palestine. But when he met Rabbi Joseph Chaim Sonnenfeld , the leader of the non-Zionist Haredi Jews, he became a member of a Haredi group in Jerusalem, of which he became the political spokesman. De Haan became an important member of the Orthodox Jewish camp. He believed that the struggle between Jews and Arabs must end and not be resolved through war and conflict. With this view, De Haan was controversial within the secular Zionist leaders of the time.

In his poetry book Kwatrijnen ("Vierzeil") De Haan wrote about his sexual contacts with bisexual and homosexual men. The book was published after his death in Amsterdam in 1924. In one of these published poems, de Haan wrote:

"Wat wacht ik in dit avonduur,
De Stad beslopen door de slaap,
Zezeten bij de Tempelmuur;
God of de Moroccanse Knaap? "
(German translation:
“What am I waiting for this evening hour
- The city of sleep crept -
Sitting on the temple wall:
God, or the Moroccan boy ")

Assassination and Posthumous Reviews

De Haan's grave on the Mount of Olives
Avraham Tehomi, the contract killer of Jacob Israël de Haan

On June 30, 1924, de Haan was murdered by the Hagana . Jacob Israël de Haan was buried on the Har Hasetim .

This incident was documented 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). For their book in 1985, the authors Nakdimon and Mayzlish interviewed the hit man Avraham Tehomi (1903–1990), who meanwhile lived as a businessman in Hong Kong . Tehomi stated in a television report written by Nakdimon:

“I did what the Hagana decided. Nothing was done without the order of Jizchak Ben Zwis (who later became the second president of Israel) ... I have no regrets because he (de Haan) wanted to destroy the whole idea of ​​Zionism. "

Because of his demand for a peaceful solution to the achievement of a separate state of Israel, he was a political obstacle to the group within the Zionist movement that wanted to achieve this goal through conflict and war. The leader of the Orthodox Jews, Rabbi Joseph Chaim Sonnenfeld , had elected de Haan as diplomatic representative to represent the position of the Orthodox at the diplomatic level. About de Haan's meeting with Lord Northcliffe , a leading English publicist, in Alexandria, Egypt, the authors write:

“He spoke about the tyranny of the official Zionist movement. Northcliffe party journalists gleefully reported all of this at home. As a result of this contact, De Haan was hired as a correspondent for the Daily Express , a 'one penny paper' that dealt with the daily scandals. In Dutch circles he was already seen as a traitor to the people, a traitor to his own people, and now he is spreading his views on Britain and her world empire. Although his articles were brief compared to his articles in the Handelsblatt (the Middle East news in the Daily Express was more concerned with the secrets of Tut-Ench-Amun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt than with the complex politics in Palestine) the Zionists in both London and Palestine very nervous. From these critical reports there was a great potential danger for a Jew who lived and worked on such a hot pavement. "

De Haan's assassination was the first political murder in the Jewish community in Palestine and sparked controversy. The author and publicist Moshe Beilinson wrote about this:

“The flag of our movement must not be sullied. Neither by the blood of the innocent nor by the blood of the guilty. Otherwise our movement will become bad, for bloodshed will result in further bloodshed. Bloodshed always brings vengeance, and once you have embarked on this path you do not know where it will lead you. "

In 1932, the author Arnold Zweig processed the character and the murder of de Haans in his novel De Vriendt returns home . Furthermore, the Israeli author Chaim Be'er wrote the book Notzot , in which a fictional character is based on De Haan .

In ultra-Orthodox circles, de Haan is considered a martyr who was murdered by secular Jews. During the 1980s, the ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem attempted to change the name from Zupnik Garden to De Haan . However, this project failed. Various Zionists have cited de Haan's homosexuality as the reason and justification for the murder. The murderer Tehomi, however, denies such motives and said:

"I neither knew about it nor heard of it ... what is it anyone's business that someone does at home?"

A line ( Naar vriendschap zuk een mateloos demand “Such an immoderate desire for friendship”) from de Haan's poem Aan eenen jongen visscher (“To a young fisherman”) is inscribed in the Dutch Homomonument in Amsterdam.

De Haan's works

poetry

Between 1900 and 1908 De Haan published poetry in numerous magazines:

  • 1914 - Libertijn songs
  • 1915 - Het Joodsche Lied. First boek
  • 1917 - Liederen
  • 1919 - Een nieuw Carthago
  • 1921 - Het Joodsche Lied. Tweede book
  • 1924 - Kwatrijnen
  • 1952 - poetry Verzamelde
  • 1982 - Ik ben een jongen te Zaandam geweest

prose

  • 1904 - Pijpelijntjes
  • 1904 - Kanalje
  • 1907 - Ondergangen
  • 1907–1910 - Besliste volzinnen
  • 1908 - Pathologists. De ondergang van Johan van Vere de With
  • 1983 - Nerveuze vertellingen

Legal writings

  • 1916 - Wezen en taak the legal significa.
  • 1916 - Legally knowledgeable significa en hare toepassing op de gerippen (dissertation)
  • 1919 - Significant legal knowledge

Journalistic publications

  • 1913 - Detained in Russian
  • 1922 - Jeruzalem

Individual evidence

  1. a b corpse.org : On De Haan by Ludy Giebels
  2. ^ Sonnenfeld, Shlomo Zalman (adapted from Hillel Danziger): Guardian of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld (Mesorah Publications, Brooklyn, 1983), ISBN 0-89906-459-0
  3. Shlomo Nakdimon; Shaul Mayzlish: Deh Han: ha-retsah ha-politi ha-rishon be-Erets Yisraʼel / De Haan: The first political assassination in Palestine, 1st edition (in Hebrew), Tel Aviv: Modan Press, 1985. (OCLC 21528172)

Web links

Commons : Jacob Israël de Haan  - Collection of images, videos and audio files