The battle against ritual slaughter that has been raging recently in the Netherlands has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Despite a number of isolated incidents, the vast majority of Dutch people are not anti-Semitic.
In relation to the Holocaust, it is necessary to correct the much distorted facts about the Dutch and the Holocaust. The Dutch police were instrumental in the rounding up of Jews on behalf of the Nazis during the Second World War, and any attempt to whitewash this by focusing on the small number of cases in which Dutch people took it upon themselves to hide Jews is serving a grave injustice to a Jewish community that was decimated in the Holocaust, with only 10% surviving.
The Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam is run by the government at the expense of sites such as Westerbork, where the Jews were assembled by Dutch police before deportation to Auschwitz.
It is positive however that lessons have been learnt from the past, as testified by the recent public apology of the Chief of Police of the Netherlands to the Jewish community for the role of the police during the Nazi occupation.
A reason for the terrible losses suffered by the Dutch Jewish community was a false sense of immunity. Dutch Jewry before the war was one of the most integrated communities in Europe, in contrast to the more assimilated and isolationist communities in Germany and Poland respectively. In Holland, observant Jews lived in towns and villages across the land, in peace and harmony with the local population.
This degree of integration led Dutch Jews to believe that what was happening to the Jews in Germany and Poland would never happen in Holland, even after the Germans had invaded. This sense of immunity and security within Dutch Jewry led to reluctance to abandon their communities after the Nazi invasion, leading to almost their total destruction after their betrayal by their neighbours and the Dutch police.
Dutch society, however, is not anti-Semitic, and this can be seen by the popular support towards Jews encountered across the country, despite sporadic and highly publicised attacks by individuals. Although Geert Wilders’ PVV party has received much criticism for its anti-Islamic stance, there are no anti-Semitic parties in Dutch politics, unlike in other European countries, and that the groups opposing shechita – kosher slaughter of animals – are doing so purely on animal rights grounds.
Dutch Jewry however faces decline with only about 20,000 Jews remaining as a result of the Holocaust, subsequent mass immigration to Israel, and a high rate of intermarriage relative to other countries in Europe. High rate of assimilation is partly due to the fact that many of the 10% of Dutch Jews who survived the Holocaust were brought up by Dutch non-Jewish families after the war. One may criticize the courts after the war for having ruled in favour of children staying with their non-Jewish foster parents rather than being returned to Jewish cousins, uncles and aunts.
While Jews in Europe should never become complacent, and should always be committed to preventing a repetition of history, the future looks very positive for European Jewry. Indeed, he argued, European multiculturalism sits very comfortably with the Jewish outlook, whereby each community has its own role within society, and can live side-by-side, appreciating each other’s contributions rather than attempting to cast everyone into the same mould.