The Low Countries. Jaargang 3

(1995-1996)– [tijdschrift] The Low Countries– rechtenstatus

The Jerusalem of the West
Jews and Goyim in Antwerp

The first official document to mention the Jewish community in Antwerp, the 1261 will of Duke Henry iii of Brabant, was concerned with the expulsion of the Jews from his lands. When his widow, Duchess Adelheid, consulted Thomas Aquinas about this matter, the famous theologian replied that it would be wrong to convert Jewish children by force, as this infringed the divine and natural rights of their fathers, but that it was perfectly all right to increase taxes on the Jews, since most of their money derived from usury. This double-edged advice would govern the relationship between the Antwerp authorities and the Jews for some considerable time; but even this uneasy and unfair arrangement was not to last. In 1348 the Jews of Antwerp and other major cities were accused of poisoning the wells and were harshly punished for this, many of them being ‘hanged, burned at the stake, beaten to death or drowned’, while in 1370 the Jews of Brussels were accused of stealing and desecrating the sacred host and were persecuted accordingly. Their synagogue was destroyed and a chapel commemorating the ‘Miracle of the Holy Sacrament’ built on the site; and the city's cathedral still contains the stained glass windows which showed the illiterate Christian faithful how the Jews stabbed the consecrated wafer, from which the Blood of Christ then began to flow.

After all this, it was almost 150 years before there was any further sign of Jewish life in the Antwerp area. However, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497 brought a new wave of immigration. These Sephardic Jews - merchants, scientists and, above all, diamond traders - arrived in the Low Countries at exactly the wrong moment, for they became caught up in the increasingly bitter strife between the Catholic authorities, religious and secular, and their Neo-Baptist and Calvinist enemies. It was only natural that many Jews, having already experienced the ruthless intolerance of the Roman Catholic Church, should share the feelings of the ‘heretics’. Consequently, when the mainly Calvinist city of Antwerp was recaptured by the Spanish army in 1585, most of its Jews followed their fellow citizens into exile and joined the Jewish communities in Amsterdam and other northern cities. Of the few who stayed behind most were Marranos, Jews who pretended to have converted to Christianity but

The burning of Jews, as pictured in a fourteenth-century miniature from Tournai (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Brussels).

still tried to observe the Jewish feasts in the utmost secrecy.

A long battle ensued between the intransigent Spanish authorities and the Inquisition on the one hand, and on the other the moderate city fathers of Antwerp, who sought to protect the Jews as useful contributors to the city's economy. As early as the seventeenth century, Archduke Leopold William tried to obtain the King's permission for the Jews to practise their faith openly, and even to build a synagogue. As one might expect, permission was refused and the informers of the Holy Inquisition redoubled their zeal in an attempt to flush out all the remaining Jews; as in most West European countries, Antwerp's Jews had to wait for the Enlightenment and the new attitude of toleration to be officially accepted as equal citizens and gradually win their religious freedom. In the Austrian Netherlands this emancipation was initiated and supported by the Emperor Joseph ii who decreed in 1786 that the Jews should be treated in all respects as equal citizens, including the right to practise their religion and build their own places of worship. The reign of Napoleon saw the first attempt to organise and control the Jewish citizens of Belgium by means of a representative body of religious leaders in the so-called ‘Consistoire’. At last the Jews had won the right to build synagogues and to participate in politics and in civic life, even if only fifty families were registered in Antwerp.

At the end of the nineteenth century there was a third wave of immigration, which was to turn Antwerp into the ‘Jerusalem of the West’; these were East European Jews, Ashkenazim fleeing the pogroms between 1885 and 1905, who passed through the port of Antwerp in transit to the United States and Canada. A surprising number of them, however, settled in the city and developed its flourishing diamond trade and industry. A few figures: between 1880 and 1901 the Jewish community increased from 1,000 to 8,000; by 1913 this figure had already risen to 13,000 and by 1927 to 35,500; and between 1933 and 1940, largely due to the antisemitic policies of the Nazis in Germany and Austria, the Jewish population rose to 55,000.

Between 80 and 85% of them were involved in the diamond trade, the others being engaged in retailing and other service industries and in religious occupations. Not surprisingly, since its members ranged from ardent Zionists to equally staunch anti-Zionists, from atheists to the ultra-Orthodox, and from Communists to Conservatives, the Jewish community contained more rival organisations, from sports clubs to political parties, than the Flemish community around it. All the Flemish political parties (except, of course, for the Catholic party and later the small but vocal fascist groups) had active and often prominent Jewish members, among them the Conservative Louis Franck, the Flemish Nationalist Maarten Rudelsheim and the Socialist Sam Emmerik; during the Second World War this proved a significant factor for the survival of a large number of Jews. All the rival Jewish groups had their own newspapers and journals, in Yiddish, Hebrew, Dutch, French and a variety of Eastern European languages. Theirs was an overwhelmingly liberal and secular community; about 85% of the children attended non-Jewish schools and hence had many non-Jewish friends and acquaintances - a fact which would prove vitally important in the years to come. The people of Antwerp, from the Catholics to the large Flemish Nationalist organisations - and Antwerp had been a bastion of Flemish Nationalism since the end of the nineteenth century - were generally tolerant of the Jewish presence and even took part in demonstrations of solidarity with the oppressed Jewry of Nazi Germany. Genuine antisemitism was to be found, however, in certain relatively small fascist organisations which drew their inspiration from their German political friends.

On May 10, 1940, the German invasion of Belgium changed all this, although it was more than a year before ss Major Ehlers, head of the Sicherheitsdienst, dared to impose the wearing of the yellow Star of David; as he explained in several letters to an impatient Heinrich Himmler, he feared a possible hostile reaction by the non-Jewish population. We need not discuss the mechanism of the Holocaust - the division of the Jews into various categories and the installation of a Judenrat, a council of distinguished Jewish citizens whose task it was to organise what remained of Jewish education and social services and to provide a monthly list of those to be deported to the so-called work camps in the East. Two points, however, should be highlighted: first, of the more than 50,000 Jews trapped in occupied Belgium, only 42,000 were officially registered; and second, only 25,600 were deported to the death camps. Of the latter, a mere 1,244 returned. Some 25,000 Jews were either hidden or smuggled out of the country - the result of a remarkable collaboration between the elaborate network of Catholic institutions and the Communist-dominated Resistance. A

Interior of the synagogue in the Beeldhouwersstraat in Antwerp (Photo by Marleen Daniëls).

significant number of Jews, mostly political refugees from the Third Reich or Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, were actively involved in the armed struggle and eventually even formed their own military unit within the national coalition of resistance groups. Despite their heroism, however, by the end of the Second World War the flourishing Jewish community in Antwerp had been virtually destroyed.

Yet as early as 1946 the survivors were already starting to rebuild the economic and social structure of Jewish life in the city. But the make-up of Antwerp's Jewish community had been radically changed by the huge influx of Orthodox, and especially Hassidic, families from Poland and Hungary. These Hassidic Jews, themselves divided into seven distinct sects, found employment in the diamond trade and succeeded in making Antwerp once again one of the world's leading diamond centres, while at the same time they established their own religious and social ghetto, almost as if they were recreating an Eastern European shtetl (Yiddish for ‘small town’) in the heart of a twentieth-century city. But it is more complicated than that: although the great majority of their children attend Jewish schools, and apart from the Diamond Exchange they have virtually no contact with the non-Jewish population, these Hassidim contribute some 5% of Belgium's gnp and provide employment for around 20,000 of their non-Jewish fellow citizens. These facts are essential to an understanding of the relationship between the Antwerp Jews and the racists of the Far Right. Although the Hassidim represent not more than 40% of the 15-18,000 Jews in Antwerp, their religious and economic influence appears to be much greater than their numbers would suggest; more so than is the case with their fellow Hassidim (and kinsmen) in Williamsburg, Bne Brak or Mea Shearim, who are much less involved with other Jews. Those of Antwerp's Jews who do not belong to the Hassidic and Orthodox communities consider themselves traditionalists. There is not a single Reform synagogue among the twenty-three temples in the city, but there are at least fifteen Beith Midrash (houses of prayer and study, mainly strict Orthodox or Hassidic). On Fridays and Saturdays all

(Photo by Stephan Vanfleteren).

these places of worship are filled with Jewish men singing and praying loudly, while the women participate in the ceremonies from their separate galleries above and around the central area of the synagogue.

It is safe to say that, historically, the relationship between the Jewish community of Antwerp and their overwhelmingly non-Jewish, nominally ‘Christian’ (i.e. Roman Catholic) fellow citizens has largely been defined by money: to the extent that the Jews were economically useful to the city fathers and the local bourgeoisie, they were protected from the Inquisition and the Spanish authorities. After their emancipation at the end of the eighteenth century their influential position in civic society, and consequently their safety, increased with their financial and economic power, especially in the flourishing diamond industry and trade. They currently enjoy total religious freedom and maintain excellent relations with the authorities and the major political parties.

Since about 1980, however, two new factors have emerged which might in the long run threaten the almost idyllic situation in the ‘Jerusalem of the West’, as the orthodox Jews call Antwerp. The first of these is the gradual decline of the diamond business worldwide and the increasing ascendancy of the Indian dealers, against whose low production costs (read: wages) the traditional Antwerp houses cannot possibly compete. As a result, almost half the diamond trade is no longer controlled by the Jews, who have thus become more vulnerable economically. The second factor is even more alarming: because of a number of economic, political and ethnic developments, the extreme right-wing Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc) party is now the largest political force in Antwerp. An amalgam of nationalistic separatists, outright fascists and militant xenophobes, the party has profited from the combination of economic decline and large-scale immigration by non-European workers and their families, mainly from Morocco and Turkey. Realising that popular animosity can much more easily be directed at the Moroccans and Turks than at the respectable and socially influential Jews, the Vlaams Blok leaders have refrained from any openly antisemitic comments; though some of their more zealous supporters in other cities have distributed leaflets promoting a country ‘free of Arabs and Jews’ alike. Of course, anyone who reads a Belgian newspaper is aware of the regular contacts between Vlaams Blok leaders and internationally notorious antisemites and neo-Nazis, and the participation of their youth organisation in neo-fascist summer camps and similar activities.

Their combination of open aggression against non-Europeans with a display of goodwill towards the Jews has confused and divided the Antwerp Jewish community. This is quite clear from the discussion pages of the Antwerp-based Belgisch Israelitisch Weekblad (Belgian Jewish Weekly), edited by Louis Davids. Whereas Mr Davids displays an attitude of guarded vigilance towards the Vlaams Blok and carefully avoids mentioning them in his paper, other Jewish community leaders such as the actively anti-fascist Senator Fred Erdman disagree and say so in no uncertain terms. The issue is: should the Jewish community lead the battle against the resurgence of fascism (Erdman) or ignore it as far as possible and hope it will go away (Davids)? As things stand now, it is legitimate to wonder whether we are witnessing a dangerous replay of the attitude adopted by many European

Jews in the thirties. If so, the current prolonged economic stagnation and the recession in the diamond trade could easily and rapidly erode the foundations of the present tolerant attitude to the Jews of Antwerp. While the present sizeable right-wing vote (around 25% in Antwerp) indicates a popular belief that the socio-economic crisis could be solved by deporting the non-European migrant labour force, who can guarantee that once the Jews have lost some of their grip on a major section of the city's employment opportunities they will not become the next target of the ultra-nationalists? And why should a party historically and internationally linked with antisemitism, and which denies that the Holocaust ever happened, hesitate to adopt such a strategy, once the Jews are no longer the socio-economic sacred cows they once were? There is an increasingly thin line between current anti-Moroccan racism and a new outburst of old-fashioned antisemitism; and this could be further eroded by a growing impatience with the policies of Israel, which the Antwerp Jewish community almost unquestioningly defends.

Despite popular belief, history never repeats itself; so the next wave of anti-Jewish intolerance will most probably not be comparable to past experiences. At present it looks as if any such occurrence can still be avoided; but the potential for it is definitely there, much more so than ten years ago. How the Antwerp community as a whole reacts to this very real threat will be crucial for its own survival as a centre of humanism and culture in a world which seems to be sliding into ever deeper ethical, political and social confusion.

ludo abicht

The Low Countries. Jaargang 3

The Jerusalem of the West
Jews and Goyim in Antwerp

Further reading

Over dit hoofdstuk/artikel

auteurs

plaatsen

The Jerusalem of the West Jews and Goyim in Antwerp

Further reading

Over dit hoofdstuk/artikel

auteurs

plaatsen

The Jerusalem of the West
Jews and Goyim in Antwerp