A Brill Calendar: June 12

Few stories in European history after from the 4th century onwards are as complex as what happened to the Jews.

The Hellenistic word ‘diaspora’ is almost exclusively associated with Jews; whether religiously or culturally. What is perhaps characteristic of Europe’s “essence”, (seen as a notion beyond geographical boundaries), is the stunning diversity in which local, regional and finally national communities, steeped in Christendom, interacted with the ‘Old People’: usually reluctantly, often bloodily; rarely easily.

The Low Countries had developed since 1492, when both Catholic Kings on the Iberian Peninsula ousted Jews from their Realm, to a relatively ‘safe haven’ for these Sephardic Jews. This was very much like the Kingdom of Poland had provided an earlier one, for ‘Ashkenazim’ (‘Germans’), after their diaspora in Northern France and the Rhineland - driven out by the religious fervour of the Crusading Era.

Equality before the Law for Jews is a crowning glory of the French Revolution; and the Dutch Batavian Republic copied it with little hesitancy. Within the tradition of Leyden University, this is reflected too: Mozes Salomon Asser (1724 – 1826, both in Amsterdam), one of the founders of a patriotic club, ‘Felix Libertate’ (1795), advocating emancipation of the Jewish part of the nation, became an Abraham of a long line of eminent Leyden Professors in legal scholarship and fundamental study. It is seldom that a historical process covering millennia may be summarized by commemorating the birthday of one individual, as dear to The Netherlands as to all nations, forasmuch as they are willing to unite: Anne Frank, June 12, 1929; in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.