Janiv Stamberger

Dutch Jews had a profound impact on the development of Belgium's Jewish community in the nineteenth century. More than a third of the Jews living on Belgian territory during this period were of Dutch descent. The mass arrival of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, transformed Belgian Jewish society. Dutch Jews now became a minority in Antwerp's Jewish population. This essay explores how in the first four decades of the twentieth century Dutch Jews preserved and negotiated spaces within Antwerp's Jewish society in which they could express their distinct Dutch Jewish identities. Their ties with Eastern European Jews will be explored and the place of Dutch Jews in Jewish society in general will be discussed. The intense contacts with the Eastern European Jewish world forced Dutch Jews in Antwerp to ask questions as to their own 'Jewish' identities.

This paper published in the magazine of the Jewish museum of Belgium gives a first overview of the development of Yiddish culture in Belgium in the 1930s. It focuses on the establishment of a Yiddish literary journal in Belgium in the second half of the 1930s.