Bart Wallet

Sober, Strict, and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800-2000

This book examines how John Calvin – his person, character, and deeds – was remembered, commemorated, and memorialized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A sun that lost its shine: the Reformation in Dutch Protestant memory culture, 1817-1917

This essay is a first exploration of nineteenth-century Dutch Protestant memory culture. Using Reformation commemorations as our case study, we show that the appropriation of Luther and Calvin for group identity purposes underwent a twofold transition in the century between 1817 and 1917. Whereas the unity of Dutch Protestantism was a dominant theme during the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Reformation became increasingly used as an instrument for justifying subgroup identities. Simultaneously, a past-oriented discourse (the Reformation as “origin”) was gradually abandoned in favour of a future-oriented discourse (Reformation “principles” that ought to be obeyed and applied). This, we argue, distinguished Dutch Protestant memory culture both from national commemorative discourse and from Protestant memory cultures abroad.

The Battle for Jewish Sympathy: The House of Orange, the Dutch Jews, and Postwar Morality

In 1965, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands announced the engagement of Princess Beatrix to the German Claus von Amsberg. In the context of a rearticulation of Dutch public morality in terms of the Second World War, and especially the Holocaust, this engagement provoked intense public debate. Each of the groups involved—the Royal House, the government, and the opponents—connected the topic of the engagement to the Shoah and tried to get Dutch Jewry on their side. Internally, this caused fierce debate and even fear of a split in the community. Although the “Jew as legitimation” was an effective argument in public and political debate, Dutch Jews themselves generally objected to such an exploitation of their history, traditions, and existence.

'The Great Eagle, the Pride of Jacob’. Joseph Hirsch Dünner in Dutch Jewish Memory Culture

Joseph Hirsch Dunner, born in Cracow 1833, had been the dominant Jewish religious leader in the nineteenth-century Netherlands, combining halakhic Orthodoxy with modern scientific methodologies. From 1865 he led the Dutch Israelite Seminary and educated several generations of Dutch rabbis, while from 1874 onwards he guided the largest community in the country, Amsterdam, as its chief rabbi. Studying Dunner and the ways in which he was remembered is studying Dutch Jewry. Already during his life, Dunner had become one of the main characters in a developing narrative on Dutch Jewish history. After his death, Dunner’s memory became part of a larger attempt by religious and administrative elites to ensure religious and cultural continuity between Dunner’s period and present times. The focus of this article, therefore, will not be the “historic Dunner,” but Dunner as bearer of symbolic meaning. To trace this “memorialized Dunner,” I collected pamphlets, newspaper reports, articles in journals, novels, archival material and the like in which Dunner figured sometimes prominently, other times only mentioned in passing, but not with any less significance. In the memory culture around Dunner I roughly distinguish three phases: the first phase was during his life, mainly around special anniversaries, but with the “Master” still present to eventually correct distortions of his image; the second phase started with his funeral in 1911 and continued until the start of the Second World War. As I will demonstrate, the war, and a bit later, the foundation of the State of Israel significantly changed Dunner’s memory with which a third phase started. In this paper I will concentrate on the last two phases and show how Dunner’s memory changed in the course of time, while continuing to foster a Dutch Jewish collective identity.

Ritual Slaughter, Religious Plurality and the Secularization of Dutch Society (1911-2011)

Ritual slaughter thus became both a test case for how modern societies contend with what are often considered socially deviant religious practices, and a challenge for the accepted range of tolerance. As I will demonstrate in this article, the ways in which ritual slaughter was or was not tolerated were an expression of the arrangement of religion in society. Changing ideological and political views of the role of religion, and consequently of attitudes towards religious minorities, immediately influenced the status of ritual slaughter. I will concentrate on one case study: the treatment of ritual slaughter in Dutch society from the start of the twentieth century until the recent debates in 2011

‘“Bringing in Those Who Are Far”. Jewish Sociology and the Reconstruction of Jewish Life in Post-war Europe

Sociology played a major role in the reconstruction of European Jewry after 1945. It offered a putatively objective language, enabling Jews of different religious and political leanings to collaborate. With Jewish communities having been devastated by the war, policy makers now sought quantitative data regarding composition, orientation, and the needs of these populations. Through institutions, journals and conferences, American Jewish theories, and models were transferred to Europe, but were channelled for a distinct function. Demographic research and Jewish community centres were developed with the goal of locating and attracting ‘marginal Jews’ so as to reconnect them to community life. Jewish sociology in post-war Europe was part of a major effort towards reconstruction of Jewish communities; this effort was based on scientific methods and aimed at ‘saving’ all remaining Jews for the greater Jewish cause.