God’s Gifts

The Netherlands-born poet, novelist, lawyer, and journalist Jacob Israël de Haan was raised in a traditional Jewish home but abandoned religious observance as a young man for Dutch letters, education, and the Dutch social democratic movement. In 1904, while teaching at an elementary school in Amsterdam, he published Pijpelijntjes (Pipelines), an unapologetic autobiographical novel about a homosexual affair between two students, which scandalized many readers. Continuing to produce both poetry and fiction that included homosexual love and desire in unusually frank fashion, de Haan turned toward serious spiritual engagement with Judaism both in his poetry and his life, won respect and interest for his original legal theories as a law student and would-be jurist, and began a successful journalism career. During World War I, he developed an intense commitment to Zionism and settled in Jerusalem in 1919. But this was soon supplanted by an even more intense religious turn to Haredi Judaism, which, along with a deepening connection to the local Palestinian and traditional Jewish milieu of the city, turned de Haan into a vociferous and prominent anti-Zionist. He drew attention for his sharp journalistic attacks on Zionism aimed at European audiences in the name of the ultra-Orthodox community, appeals to British politicians to revoke British commitment to a Jewish national home in Palestine, and outreach to Arab leaders like the Hashemite Emir (and later first king of Jordan) Abdullah, proposing Jewish support for Arab statehood in Palestine in exchange for protections and preference to be shown to the Orthodox community. In response, activists of the fledgling Zionist Haganah militia assassinated de Haan in 1924. This act is generally deemed the first political assassination in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in pre-state Israel). German Jewish writer Arnold Zweig published a novel, De Vriendt Goes Home, in 1932, based on de Haan’s unusual life.