The Ambiguity of Virtue

In the concluding chapter of his book on Gertrude van Tijn and the fate of the Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War, Bernard Wasserstein identifies parallels between this extraordinary, but little-known, woman in wartime Holland and another extraordinary, but very well-known, woman of that period, Hannah Arendt. Each was an educated and independent-minded thinker from the highly-assimilated German Jewish bourgeoisie. For a time, both were attracted as young intellectuals to Zionism, and both worked in some capacity with Jewish refugees from Germany in the Netherlands and France respectively during the 1930s. Each was involved, in different ways, in the often contentious and bitter post-war debates surrounding the Jewish Councils and their roles during the Holocaust. Hannah Arendt and others, of course, became critics of the Jewish Councils for their alleged compliance with the Nazis in the systematic murder of the Jews. Gertrude van Tijn, because of her dealings with the Jewish Council in Amsterdam during the German occupation, became an object of some of that criticism after 1945. Opting to remain in Amsterdam to continue her work with refugee and Dutch Jews under German occupation (as Hannah Arendt chose to flee from occupied France to the United States), van Tijn’s relief work in the Jewish community required her to deal with the Jewish Council in Amsterdam, thereby establishing a link to a body with which she nevertheless had significant disagreements

Bourgeoisie · German · Judaism · Nazism · Parallels · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · The Holocaust · Zionism · German History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies