The murder was ordered by Yitzhak ben Zvi, who
became Israel’s second President – Zionism has always feared Jewish
anti-Zionists because we are the living proof of
their lies
When the Board of Deputies issued their 10
Commandments to candidates in the Labour leadership elections they were careful
to ensure that the candidates pledged that they would not meet with dissident Jewish
groups that the Zionist Board didn’t approve.
Anti-Zionist Jews have always been one of the principal targets of the Zionists
because we are living proof that their claim to represent Jewish interests is a
lie.
I am indebted to Richard Silverstein, whose
article I copy below, for writing this article about someone who has been long and
undeservedly forgotten. Jacob de Haan was openly gay before it was fashionable
to come out.
 |
| Board of Deputies' Commandment No. 8 - do not mix with 'fringe' Jewish groups and individuals |
But whereas the Zionist leaders in 1924 had
Jacob de Haan assassinated by the Haganah terrorist group, today their chosen
weapon is ‘anti-Semitism’. When I happen to meet up with Zionists you can see
the hatred burning in their eyes as they call us ‘traitors’ ‘self-haters’ and
so on. If you are not loyal to your ‘nation’ and its bastard offspring, Israel,
then you are worse even than an Arab.
So it was that Jacob de Haan, the
representative of the ultra-Orthodox haredi in Palestine was felled by an
assassin’s bullet. De Haan wasn’t the only victim of a Zionist assassination. Count Folk Bernadotte, the UN mediator, was
also assassinated
in November 1948 in Jerusalem. Bernadotte,
who was personally responsible for the rescue of thousands of Jews from the concentration
camps, wanted the UN to take responsibility for Jerusalem as an international
city. However this is for another day.
 |
| Poem by Haan in Amsterdam |
Jacob de Haan was open about being gay and
today he is remembered by a poem etched on a memorial in central Amsterdam. Ido Liven describes
how one stone pillar standing in central Amsterdam is anything but a tourist
attraction, certainly nothing like the Rembrandt House Museum just across the
street. Rather, it is a memorial dedicated to Jacob Israël de Haan,
who was murdered 90 years ago today.
The modest
monument dedicated to him, located at what used to be Amsterdam’s Jewish
quarter, bears a quote from one of his poems that was published the same year
he was assassinated:
Who in Amsterdam often said ‘Jerusalem’
And finds himself driven to Jerusalem
Whispers in a wistful voice
‘Amsterdam, Amsterdam’
And finds himself driven to Jerusalem
Whispers in a wistful voice
‘Amsterdam, Amsterdam’
And yet, in 2001 it was The Netherlands that became the
world’s first nation to legalize same-sex marriage. In fact, in January 2012,
Amsterdam’s Jewish community suspended
its chief rabbi after he had written that homosexuality is an incurable disease.
Also, mixed couples – married or not – are also a non-issue in The
Netherlands.
In Israel none of
that is possible. Sadly, in a society that sees itself as open and liberal,
both same-sex and inter-religious (or simply civil) marriage are considered a
red rag. In fact, had he lived today, De Haan would probably have been as much
of an outcast today as he was before being assassinated in 1924.
Ha’aretz’s David Green described
how, in 1922, the same year that Jacob de Haan defended Agudath
Israel, the Haredi political movement, in a trial over its refusal to pay a new
excise tax levied by Zionist authorities on matzot before Passover, he also met
with Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail newspaper in London, when the
latter visited the region. He shared his anti-Zionist views with Northcliffe
and those views were reported back in the United Kingdom. Soon, de Haan was
offered work as a correspondent for the Daily Express. De Haan also met
with Hashemite leader Hussein bin Ali, the King of Hejaz, to discuss the
establishment of a Palestinian state.
These were
the days when the Tory press, The Daily Express and Mail, were vehemently opposed
to the Palestine Mandate which they saw as a waste of imperial treasure and
serving no useful purpose except antagonising the Arabs. Probably not a stance that they want
reminding of today.
De
Haan became persona non grata among Zionists, including his law students. One
anecdote has him walking with a Dutch visitor, who observed that as people
passed them into the street, they were spitting on the sidewalk. The visitor
thought this was a sign of disrespect, to which de Haan responded, according to
Dutch historian Ludy Giebels: “"Oh
no, they spit on the street out of respect for you, your presence. Otherwise
they would have spit in my face."
It
was only in the 1980s that his assassin, Avraham Tehomi, told two Israeli journalists,
Shlomo Nakdimon and Shaul Mayzlish, that he had been acting on orders of the
Haganah, specifically Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, an officer in the militia and a
political activist:
“I have done what the
Haganah decided had to be done. And nothing was done without the order of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi ... I
have no regrets because he [de Haan] wanted to destroy our whole idea of
Zionism.”
He
has been described as a Jewish Lawrence of Arabia
 |
| Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, spiritual leader of Israel’s Haredi Jews |
May 13, 2020 by Richard Silverstein
There are a number of figures who played major roles in the pre-State
era who have unjustly faded into oblivion. Jacob De Haan
is one of these. He packed more life into his short 43 years than others
could pack in several lifetimes. He was a teacher, poet, journalist,
lawyer and a close confidant of one of Israel’s leading religious figures of
the first decades of the 20th century, Rabbi Chaim
Sonnenfeld. At various times in his life he was a socialist, an atheist who
married a non-Jew, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, a Zionist, and an anti-Zionist. He
was also gay and publicly identified himself as such.
De Haan was born in a small northern Dutch village, one of
sixteen children, born to a father who was a cantor, melamed (religious
teacher) and ritual shochet (slaughterer). He himself earned
his teaching certification and became a teacher, later moving to
Amsterdam. There he taught in the city schools and became a
socialist. He lost his religious faith and married a non-Jewish doctor
ten years his senior, who later supported him in his legal studies.
He became editor of the children’s page of the socialist party’s
newspaper. At the same time, he began frequenting the city’s gay
underworld and wrote an explicitly homoerotic novel, Pijpelijntjes (“Pipelines”).
The novel recounts his relationship with a prominent married medical doctor who
pioneered the field of criminal anthropologist, Arnold Aletrino. The book
is dedicated to him. As it became popular, Aletrino became scandalized by
the notoriety and he, together with De Haan’s then-fiance, traveled
throughout the city to buy up every copy they could find. A second
edition removed the dedication to Aletrino and changed the main characters’
names in order to distance them from their real-life originals.
The book’s focus on the gay demi-monde and the characters’ flirtations
with young boys and portrayal of sadomasochistic behavior ended his career as a
children’s journalist and his teaching career as well. But De Haan was
undeterred and continued to write homosexual novels and poetry.
His contemporaries noted
he was what Ludi Geibels calls (p. 110) “a figure of striking
personality.” The death of his mother, who played an outsize role in
life, brought on a severe mental breakdown. In his poetry, he gives voice
to flights of ecstatic spiritual rapture alternating with a celebration of
carnal lust. His novels portray his obsession with sadomasochism sex
play. The existence of such dichotomies in the same soul seems one of the most
striking characteristics of his personality.
This tortured attempt to integrate one’s sexuality in the context of
society and its expectation is a trait commonly seen in the lives of many gay
individuals, though attempting to bridge homosexuality and the life of an
ultra-Orthodox Jew seems one of the most extreme examples of such integration.
The British governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, who De Haan
admired, portrayed him as “facially an intellectual version of Vincent Van
Gogh, whose dreadful glare of an unknown terror sometimes blazed in his eyes.”
Today, undoubtedly he might have received a diagnosis of manic-depressive
disorder. Given his massive struggle with his sexual identity, it’s
astonishing how productive and ambitious were his political achievements in the
few years he lived in Palestine before his murder.
De Haan’s older sister, Carry van Bruggen,
was also a distinguished writer known for her literary innovation and
rebelliousness. She suffered from depression her entire life and
committed suicide at the age of 51.
Back in the Netherlands, De Haan had already enrolled in the law
school and earned his law degree, where he made his mark as a legal
theoretician. He pioneered
the field of semiotics in the law, which “demonstrated that legal writing
often contained (and obscured) hidden agendas, and altered power relations in
ways not explicitly expressed.” He specialized in criminal law and became
interested in the plight of the Jews of eastern Europe and Russia who faced
pogroms and massive waves of anti-Semitism. Common at the time was the
notion that Jews were identified with criminality, a notion prevalent in
European criminal law, which De Haan disputed.
After his socialist comrades abandoned him, De Haan turned to an
altogether different political movement, Zionism. The suffering of the
Jews in Russia moved him and he came to see Zionism as a means of providing
safe haven for such communities.
He combined his scholarly and Zionist interests with a two-year-long
trip to Russia where he conducted research on the Czarist prisons. In
particular, he focussed on the Jewish inmates often accused of sympathy for the
Bolsheviks. He described his trip as “two full years of unremitting
work in Russia on behalf of his suffering Jews.”
Trip to
Czarist Russia and Turn to Orthodox Judaism
Sometime during his Russia travels he returned to the faith of his
ancestors and resumed Orthodox Jewish practices. On his return, he joined
the Orthodox Zionist party, the Mizrahi. At this point he began to
consider making aliyah to Palestine, a calling heard in the recitations from
the daily prayer book. If he could not make his mark in Holland, he would
set out on a new adventure as the first Dutch Jew to emigrate to the Holy Land.
At the suggestion of a leading Zionist, Israel Zangwill, De Haan wrote
to Chaim Weizmann, offering himself as a leading Dutch Jewish poet of his
generation eager to do his part on behalf of his people.
Weizmann was not impressed. The Zionist movement in 1919, when he
arrived, did not need poets. It needed clerks, teachers, mechanics,
farmers, guards and ideologues. He didn’t receive the rapturous welcome
he expected when he arrived in Jerusalem. But he did take up a teaching
position in the British Mandate’s new College of Law. He joined Vladimir
Jabotinsky as a co-founder of the law program.
When the latter was arrested by the British for organized an armed
militia to defend Jews during the Palestinian riots, De Haan joined his
legal defense, where he provided flamboyant and effective counsel.
Increasingly, De Haan found himself at odds with the Yishuv Zionist
leadership in its approach toward both the Orthodox and Palestinian
communities. Dishonest land deals negotiated by Zionist financiers, which
deprived Palestinian peasants of land and livelihood distressed him in
particular. He gravitated toward the ultra-Orthodox movement which,
through the Agudat Yisrael organization, represented a significant percentage
of the Jewish population of Palestine, especially in communities like Hebron,
Tiberias, Jerusalem, and Safed.
Unlike the secular or Orthodox Zionists, the Agudah championed both
Ashkenazi and Sefardi Jews in Palestine, marking a major break from the
Yishuv’s focus largely on the Eastern European Ashkenazi (a bias that continued
for decades even after the establishment of the State).
Disciple of
Rabbi Sonnenfeld
In this period, De Haan met and became a disciple of the leader
of the Haredi community, Rabbi Sonnenfeld. Originally from
Austro-Hungary, Sonnenfeld was not a typical holy man. He was learned in
both secular and religious fields and open to the world outside Judaism in ways
that many of his disciples were not. He was also quite astute politically
and understood that De Haan’s legal training and sharp political mind
was something lacking amidst the Agudah’s fold. Michael Berkowitz quotes
Sonnenfeld:
He knew that he required “a loyal and well-versed lawyer to plead in the
courts, advise delegates to conferences, draft petitions and memoranda, study
proposals and precendents and explain the general situation in answer to
sympathetic inquiries.”
This suited De Haan to a ‘T,’ and they took an immediate liking
to each other with the Dutchman becoming one of the rabbi’s most trusted
advisors. He became something akin to a foreign minister for the Haredim:
its representative to the outside non-Jewish world. He spoke up to the
British Mandatory authorities not only on behalf of the interests of the Haredim,
but also in opposition to the prevailing Zionist movement. De Haan
also became a powerful journalist-advocate who wrote columns for Dutch and
English newspapers which advanced ideas in direct contradiction of those of the
Zionist movement. He was handsomely remunerated for his journalistic reportage,
which afforded him financial independence from Palestinian society.
De Haan’s homosexuality was well-known and Sonnenfeld understood
that his protege’s skills in advancing the Haredi cause were more important
than the sin represented by his sexual identity. It is a remarkably
progressive (or perhaps cynical) view, considering the absolute taboo against
homosexuality inscribed in Jewish religious law.
Ultra-Orthodoxy, Anti-Zionism and Political Threat
The Haredim opposed national sovereignty and creation of a State for
religious reasons (awaiting the Messiah who would restore the Davidic
monarchy). They preferred to remain under British colonial control,
believing that the Empire would afford Jews security in their homeland.
But they did not ignore the Palestinians living in their midst. They
understood that they shared the land with them and sought ways to co-exist
peacefully. This was one of the reasons Haredim opposed shoddy land deals
negotiated between Ottoman absentee landlords and Zionist purchasers. De Haan
also roiled the Zionists when he pursued independent diplomacy, meeting with
Arab monarchs who exercised authority (or sought to do so) in Palestine.
At the same time, De Haan, the cultivated and learned European
Jew, enjoyed a prominent role in Jewish society frequenting soirees at the home
of a prominent Jewish socialite which brought together literary, cultural and
civic figures including British officials. He used such an entree to
impress the British with his sophistication and erudition, becoming a favored
interlocutor among both the Jewish and British elite class.
This too rankled the Zionists, who sprang from the Eastern Europe
working class and prided themselves on forming a socialist laboring class that
would create the new state they envisioned. They had very little in
common with the British Christian ruling elite, which hailed from aristocratic
families.
Despite De Haan’s radical ideas in the Yishuv context, he was an
avowed Orientalist. He viewed Arabs as the Exotic Other, the tantalizing
and desired. In his poetry, he waxed rhapsodic about these people of the
mysterious east. It was a poetic version of Gaugin’s paintings of
voluptuous Tahitian maidens, and a common European motif. It was also
reminiscent of the medieval Spanish Hebrew poetry of Yehuda HaLevi: “My heart
is in the east, but I am at the far reaches of the west.”
But unlike the typical Orientalist of the period, De Haan did not
so much seek to foist western values on the east. Rather, he sought to
elevate the east to an equal, and integrate it with the civilization of the
west. His vision was not unlike that of Lawrence of Arabia in seeking to
create a united Arab nation out of the disparate tribes of the region. But in
at least one sense, DeHaan’s vision was even more radical: he sought to
unite two separate religious and ethnic groups into one united political entity
that would advance the interests of both.
De Haan, unlike the Zionists, he did not wish to conquer or expel
the Palestinians. He sought to unite with them, or at least respectfully
co-exist with them.
One of the major goals of the Agudah was to roll back the Balfour
Declaration which, in 1917, had declared the goal of the British Empire to
establish a “national home” for the Jewish people. De Haan’s vision was
altogether different: he saw the Jews of Palestine living together with their
Palestinian neighbors in relative harmony. Even if the British eventually
ended the Mandate, the Haredi leader believed that he could negotiate a
similarly stable, productive relationship with King Abdullah of Transjordan.
 |
| Yitzhak Ben Tzvi, architect of De Haan’s murder, at Tel Hai shrine (1934) |
Given that the Yishuv leadership’s ultimate goal was to drive the
British out of the region and establish a nation-state for the Jewish people,
De Haan was a powerful, effective and dangerous opponent. The
conflict came to a head when he announced that he planned a voyage to Britain,
where he expected to conduct high-level diplomacy with leading officials
responsible for Mandatory affairs. The possibility that he could unravel
years of progress made by the Zionist movement toward its goal of national
sovereignty was too serious to ignore.
Who Gave the
Order?
A recent Haaretz article recounts
the discovery of the previously-unknown journal of the then-chief of the
Zionist militia, the Haganah, Yosef Hecht. It was he who gave the order
to murder De Haan. Though Hecht does not clarify whether he
received explicit approval from the leader of the Yishuv, Yitzhak Ben Tzvi
(later to become the country’s second president), the assassin whom Hecht
charged with the mission, did claim in a 1985 interview that Ben Tzvi directly
approved it: :
“I have done what the Haganah decided had to be done. And nothing was
done without the order of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. I have no regrets because he [de
Haan] wanted to destroy our whole idea of Zionism.”
 |
| Avraham Tehomi, assassin of De Haan, later first commander of Jewish terror organization, Etzel |
The murderers did try beforehand to warn De Haan that he was a
marked man. They urged him to leave the country. But he was not one
to be deterred. In fact, he saw himself as a visionary, a pioneer, and
possibly even a martyr. He was almost philosophical about his own
death. He certainly would not let his enemies change his course.
Thus, on the evening of June 30, 1924, the day before he was to set sail
for England, De Haan left the synagogue of Shaarey Tzedek Hospital after
evening prayers. He was accosted by Avraham Tehomi, who drew out a pistol
and shot him three times. He died soon after.
Though there was outrage both in the Haredi community and the world
outside Palestine at his murder, no one was ever arrested. The Yishuv, in
order to deflect blame from itself, spread the calumnious rumor that one of De Haan’s
Arab lovers had murdered him in a fit of jealous rage. As a deflection, it had
a bit of genius to it, as it served to reinforce the Arabophobia of the Jewish
population: this is what happens when a Jew betrays his tribe and consorts with
Arabs. This is his reward for his sympathy for them.
Tom Segev, whose majesterial biography of Ben Gurion, A State at Any
Cost, was published last year, wrote this
account of the assassination for Haaretz in 2010:
…Zman Yerushalayim, came out with a five-page article, centering around
an interview with a 74-year-old man named Yosef Meshi, who proudly claims: “My
father was the murderer.”
The father, Ze’ev Meshi, was a member of a fanatic Zionist underground
group called Hamifal. According to Yosef, his father told him that de Haan’s
activity was a threat to the Zionist enterprise, and therefore the group
decided to murder him. They sat in the granary on Moshav Nahalal and drew
straws to decide who would carry out the act. The responsibility fell to Ze’ev
Meshi and a man named Avraham Tehomi.
…According to Meshi: His father stood guard in the alley and made sure
nobody approached, and Tehomi fired.
…Based also on testimony found in the Haganah archive…de Haan was
murdered by order of that organization [the Haganah], and the decision to kill
him was taken according to a formal, organized process. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi,
who would later become Israel’s second president, was among the planners of
the murder, as may have been the country’s first prime minister, David
Ben-Gurion.
In the Ben Gurion biography, he adds
more details about the Zionist leader’s views on the murder:
The Zionist establishment condemned him as an anti-Semitic rogue; nearly
everyone agreed he was insane. Ben Gurion accused him of “betrayal and deception,
talebearing and slander.”
…Ben Gurion went to watch the funeral. He estimated there were…about 200
people in attendance. “I did not see among the mourners any profound anger.
Apparently, most of the Jews accepted it without getting much exercised about it.”
The question of whather Ben Gurion had been involved in the murder would
soon arise; in other words, the question Ben Zvi would have taken upon himself
to approve such a deed without informing Ben Gurion. Perhaps he would
have…There is no reason to belive that Ben Gurion saw any need to liquidate De Haan.
De Haan’s death left Ben Gurion unmoved, but he likely saw the
assassination as just one more in the series of subversive acts carried out [by
the Haganah] without the authority of the Histadrut [Ben Gurion’s fiefdom], and
that was intolerable.
Tehomi, the assassin, was later expelled from the Haganah and became the
first commander of the Jewish terror organization, Etzel. Hecht, who
authorized the assassination, was eventually deposed as Haganah chief and
disappeared into the back pages of Zionist history. Ben Gurion found the
murder of fellow Jews distasteful. It’s not clear whether he held this
view for purely pragmatic reasons because it made the Zionist movement look
bad; or because the murder of fellow Jews made the Zionist movement look like
it lacked discipline and self-control. He clearly had no moral
compunctions about the murder. At any rate, after Hecht later conducted a
drumhead
court-martial in 1930 Ben Gurion sacked him:
The trial was held…before a panel of three commanders, none of whom had
a legal background, and in the absence of the accused himself…He was charged
with providing information about the Haganah to a senior officer in the
Mandatory police…and was ordered to kill himself.
After the trial, two of the judges broke into the condemned man’s
home…bombarded him with accusations, forced him to sign a confession of treason
and, on their way out, left him with a loaded pistol with which he carried out
the sentence.
Hecht’s role in the formation of the precursor of the national army
receded and he was largely forgotten until his notebooks were discovered and
reported in Haaretz.
Assassination
as a Tool of Political Domination
Sonnenfeld and the Haredi religious movement never mounted a similar
challenge to the Zionists after De Haan’s murder. They were cowed and
accepted dominance of the secular Zionists in political affairs. Henceforth,
ultra-Orthodoxy retreated from the political area (at least as a potential
rival to Zionism) and largely reverted to a purely religious movement. In
this sense, the assassination succeeded in suppressing a movement that
threatened Zionist hegemony.
Assassinations serve many purposes for those who commit them: some are
acts of desperation and protest like the murders of Nazi diplomat, Ernst Von
Rath by Herschel Grynszpan (which led to Kristallnacht); or the assassination
of Rudolf Heydrich by the Czech resistance. Others like the assassination of
Lord LeMoyne by Lehi seek to lay down a marker warning the colonial enemy that
terror will lead to their eventual defeat. But the assassination of De Haan
was an expression of dominance by the Zionist leadership–that it would brook no
competition or threat to its power and control of the Yishuv’s political
future.
De Haan as Victim of Zionist Homophobia
There was a second, less obvious element in the murder plot. Though De Haan
was viewed primarily as a political enemy of the Yishuv, he was also despised
as a sexual deviant by Zionist Jews. He was known to groom young Palestinian
boys and had such a male servant with whom he was suspected of conducting a
homosexual relationship.
Though today, Brand Israel uses pink-washing to paint Israel as a
paradise for the global LGBT community, De Haan’s murder has explicit
homophobic elements. The official historian of the Haganah, Prof. Yehuda
Slutsky, wrote this of the murder victim:
…He of the dangerous pathological background, tainted with homosexuality
and with the lust of his perverse acts of love with the Arab shabab [youth].”
It is no accident that the first Zionist political assassination of a
fellow Jew incorporated raging homophobia as well. It’s important to note
that such hate continues to simmer in Israeli society to this day with the Bar
Noar (unsolved) and Jerusalem
Pride murder.
Zionism and its adherents can readily understand hatred against the
Palestinian Arab enemy. Such violence is almost inbred in the struggle between
these two peoples. But it much more troubling to accept that inherent in
Zionism is a murderous urge to eliminate Jewish dissidents as well.
That’s certainly why this particular tragedy has receded to the periphery of
Zionist consciousness.
But it is important to understand that Zionism was not a visionary,
altruistic enterprise solely seeking the good and happiness of the Jewish
people. It was a ruthless movement which viewed itself as part of an
existential struggle to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people in the face
of centuries of Jew-hatred.
Nor were such assassinations a one-off phenomenon. Seventy years
later, in 1995, another murderer fueled by Judean settler rage and blessed by
their rabbis assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. His “crime” was
to sign the Oslo Accords and threaten the demise of the Greater Land of Israel,
and the messianic vision of Gush Emunim to resettle the entire Biblical Land of
Israel and thus hasten the coming of the Messiah.
As was true of De Haan, the settlers who plotted the murder knew
they could not defeat Rabin at the ballot box. Their only recourse was
through a gun barrel. Yigal Amir’s murder did precisely that. Though Rabin’s
successor, Simon Peres, promised to continue the martyr’s legacy, he squandered
whatever political capital the killing offered. The Labor Party lost power and
Bibi Netanyahu assumed the leadership during his first term as prime
minister. Oslo was dead and interred in its grave. The Labor Party went
into a gradual decline that has continued, to the point where today it stands
on the brink of oblivion.
So the Rabin assassination, similar to that of Jacob De Haan
ensured the dominance of Likudist ultra-nationalism and rejectionism as the
path for the Israeli state for decades to come.
See also
Assassinated for his opposition
to Zionism, de Haan’s life was a succession of scandals, from sex with young
Arabs to radical diplomacy
October 01,
2014
It was late afternoon on Friday, June 30, 1924, and the shopkeepers
along Jaffa Road were rolling down the thin screens of corrugated metal and
shutting down for Shabbat, shouting greetings at each other and slamming doors.
The din didn’t seem to bother Jacob de Haan: Walking out of the makeshift
synagogue in the back yard of the Sha’are Tzedek hospital, he stopped in front
of the building’s imposing façade, lost in thought.
He had much on mind: The new book he had just published was scandalous,
its 900 short poems much more candid than de Haan had ever been in print about
his love for young Arab boys. And there was the upcoming trip to London, to
convince the government there that not all of the Jews in Palestine were
hell-bent on independence; the Zionists, incensed, had threatened de Haan more
than once, but he didn’t care. His convictions, like his poems, were deeply
felt. He started marching down the street.
A tall man, all dressed in white, approached him and asked him for the
time. De Haan reached into his pocket and tugged on a thin gold chain, removing
an ornate watch and straining to read its hands. The tall man reached for his
own pocket and pulled out a long revolver. Just as de Haan looked back up at
the tall man’s translucent blue eyes and his shock of black hair, three shots
rang out, clearly audible even amid the noise. The tall man ran into a nearby
backyard, his loose white shirt flapping in the breeze like a ghost. De Haan
fell on the sidewalk, grasping his chest, bleeding. A few minutes later, he was
dead.
Growing up, I often heard the story of de Haan’s assassination: He was
the confidante and the right-hand man of my grandmother’s grandfather, the
great Rabbi Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, the leader of the anti-Zionist haredi
community in pre-state Jerusalem. I’ve been to the spot where he was struck—the
building now houses the state-run broadcasting authority—and tried to imagine
him lying there, his magnificent and unending forehead against the cool
pavement, looking up at the trees and the limestone walls, his vitality
flickering, his breast wet and warm with blood.
But while I knew much about how Jacob de Haan died, I knew very little
about how he had lived. When I finally bothered asking—reading old newspaper
accounts and transcripts of interviews, sifting through my ancestor’s
multi-volume biography, and perusing the surprising number of online tributes
to a largely forgotten man now dead for ninety years—I understood why: a former
communist, a contrarian, an Orthodox Jew, a secular intellectual, a terrific
writer, a one-time ardent Zionist, a homosexual, a fan of the local Arab
community—whatever fault lines divided Israel in the early years of its
struggle to be born, de Haan seemed to embody them all. Somehow, it seems just
right that he would be the victim of the Jewish community’s first-ever
political assassination: To both the men who killed him and to those who
supported him in life, some of whom were my relatives, de Haan was more
convenient as a martyr than as a living friend or adversary. But in the
snippets of his diary accounts that survived in archives, in his poems, and in
the printed recollections of those who knew and cherished him, de Haan remains
every bit as vibrant, as vital, and as impossible as he’d been in life.
*
Jacob de Haan was born in 1881 in a small Dutch town named Smilde. His
mother came from a well-to-do family, but suffered from depression, delusions,
and a host of other mental afflictions. His father was a foul-tempered cantor,
butcher, and teacher who moved his family to Zaandam in the north when Jacob
was young. As a boy, Jacob was sent to a heder and raised religious, but
when he reached his teenage years he enrolled in a teachers’ college in Haarlem
and cultivated his adolescent rebellion with a ferocity matched by few. He
denounced his faith, moved to Amsterdam, joined the Social Democratic Party,
and married Johanna van Maarseveen, a non-Jewish physician a decade his senior.
Even more important, he fell in with a pride of bohemian psychiatrists who, as
their colleague Freud was writing his ideas in Vienna, went much further in
their assertions on the nature of the human psyche.
Frederik van Eeden, for example, his eyes intense and his mustache
trapezoid, infused his writings with concepts he borrowed from the Hindus,
believing we are all in possession of a manifestation of a universal soul,
collective and eternal and glorious. Moved also by Thoreau, he established a
commune called Walden, and lived there in squalor, helping for free anyone who
sought him and writing convincingly about “lucid dreams,” a term he had coined.
Another friend, Arnold Aletrino, found another path to controversy, becoming
among the first physicians of the period to assert that homosexuality was not
deviant but a wholly normal condition. Both van Eeden and Aletrino wrote
irreverent novels and poetry, both of them preferring the bleak and the
realistic over the prettily artificial: van Eeden’s famous work was The
Deeps of Deliverance, a description of a woman succumbing in body and mind to
the terrors of morphine addiction.
This frank discussion of vice made de Haan giddy. He had long noticed in
himself what he considered abnormal tendencies. Working as a tutor, for
example, he admitted that whenever he meted out punishment, he took a touch of
pleasure from watching his young charges cry. He was soon writing as well, and
was quickly acknowledged as a capable enough poet to merit a job writing for
the Social Democrats’ newspaper. He published scores of poems, mainly for kids,
about inspirational topics like the railway workers’ strike. But it wasn’t
enough; de Haan needed to get personal.
Entitled Pijpelijntjes, or Pipelines, de Haan’s first book,
published in 1904, was a sweet love story. “Give
me a kiss,” says one of its protagonists in a typical passage, to which the
other replies, “No and no. If you want
it, you’ll come and take it.” The first protagonist smiles, saying, “We’re not doing anything bad; it’s just that
I love you.” The protagonists, Joop and Sam, were both men, making the book
Holland’s first published tale of homosexual love. If that wasn’t scandalous
enough, Joop was a popular nickname for Jacob, and the book was dedicated to
Aletrino, champion of same-sex desire. Soon, a rumor was spread that Pijpelijntjes
was the autobiographical account of de Haan and Aletrino’s love.
Distraught, Aletrino alerted de Haan’s wife, and together they bought
most of the book’s existing copies. When its publisher insisted on a second
edition, Aletrino had the dedication removed and the characters’ names changed.
But the damage was already done: Even in tolerant Amsterdam, the author of an
explicitly gay novel could not hold any prominent position, and de Haan was
fired.
He spent the next decade erring in the wilderness, sometimes mentally
and sometimes literally. An impassioned crusader by disposition, he travelled
to Russia and wrote a fiery book about the abysmal condition of its prisons. He
went back to school, and received his law degree shortly after his 28th
birthday. He dabbled as an attorney, and wrote two other books, Pathologies
and Nervous Stories, both dense with homosexual affairs, sadomasochism,
and other titillating stuff. His soul, however, was never at rest; it was
missing, he felt, some great calling.
The Bitter Edge agreed. A biblical demon who first appeared to de Haan
when the poet turned 30, The Bitter Edge would, de Haan wrote in his journal, “torture me, confuse my soul and my senses.”
Above all, the demon wanted de Haan to find his way back into the fold,
inundating the young man with messages of piety and teshuva, or
repentance. One evening in May of 1913, strolling through an Amsterdam park at
dusk, de Haan heard a childlike voice that he had never heard before. He
stopped strolling and listened. “Return,
oh Israel, to the Lord your God!” the voice said. “Return to me for I have redeemed you!”
It was all the convincing de Haan, already profoundly moved by his
visions, needed. Before too long, and with the same fullness of spirit common
to all of his pursuits, he once again became a religious Jew. In 1915, he
published his new collection of poems; it was entitled The Jewish Song
and contained none of the psychosexual provocations of his earlier work.
Thrilled with a talented writer so outwardly passionate about his faith,
the Jewish community in Amsterdam embraced de Haan as a luminary. He was
thrilled, but quickly realized that being married to a non-Jewish woman was a
liability for his new round of reinvention. He asked Johanna to convert, but
she refused; a proud agnostic, she saw all religions as fraudulent, and refused
to affiliate herself with any. De Haan was furious. Frequently, he would
humiliate Johanna, often in public. She forgave him every time.
Merely being a famed Jewish poet, even in a community as large and as
vibrant as Amsterdam’s, was not quite enough for de Haan’s metaphysical
appetites. He wanted more. He craved the tremors of a colossal drama, and was
fortunate enough to find it with the Balfour Declaration, the 1917 letter from
Great Britain’s Foreign Secretary to the Baron Rothschild confirming the
British government’s commitment to establishing “a national home for the Jewish
people in Palestine”: if a Jewish homeland was rising from the ashes of
history, then de Haan needed to be there and play a part. In 1919, he wrote a
letter to Chaim Weizmann, the declaration’s key facilitator, and announced that
he was ready to join the struggle. He was, he wrote, “anxious to work at rebuilding Land, People and Language.” Lest
Weizmann think that his correspondent was just another provincial laggard, de
Haan took pains to describe his situation as plainly—and as grandiosely—as he
could: “I am not leaving Holland to
improve my condition,” he wrote. “Neither
materially, nor intellectually will life in Palestine be equal to my life here.
I am one of the best poets of my Generation, and the only important Jewish
national poet Holland has ever had. It is difficult to give up all this.”
Cloaked in the thin veil of self-sacrifice, then, de Haan prepared for
his departure. Johanna, it was clear, would stay behind, and her husband would
make a living by writing the occasional dispatch for the Dutch papers, an
assignment for which he was handsomely paid. He didn’t care much, however: as
soon as he got to Jerusalem, he was sure, all he had to do was present himself
to the leadership there and he would immediately become the fledgling community’s
mightiest literary lion. On the day of his departure, thousands of fans crowded
Amsterdam’s train station, waving frantically and singing “Hatikvah.” At
least one chronicler of the occasion joked that many present just wanted to
make sure that he’d really gone.
*
De Haan arrived in Jerusalem in February 1919, on a bitterly cold day.
He had sent a telegram to several senior Zionist leaders, and expected a
delegation of dignitaries to greet him at the station. None appeared. Under
heavy rain, he found his way to the Hotel Amdursky.
Situated right across from the Tower of David, the Amdursky has long
attracted a certain brand of mystic seeking revelations in the Old City.
Staying there in 1857, Herman Melville described it as a “chamber low and scored by time, / Masonry old, late washed with lime /
Much like a tomb new-cut in stone.” De Haan took his place in this tomb and
waited for the rain to subside and for the Zionists to come calling. Neither
happened, and a few days later, feeling wronged, de Haan presented himself at
the Jewish Agency’s headquarters.
“I, the poet of The Jewish Song, place myself and my
great capacity at your service, to build the homeland,” he told the junior
clerk who finally showed up and agreed to meet him. The clerk sneered. “We’ll take care of the building,” he
told de Haan. “You just make sure there’s
cash in our drawers.”
Offended and disheartened, de Haan nonetheless resolved to remain in
Jerusalem and work his way into the Zionist movement’s inner circles. The
Zionists, however, were impervious to his charms: bespectacled, quick-witted,
and excitable, with a receding hairline and a jumpy manner that reminded more
than one observer of a frog, de Haan was far from the New Jew the men who
populated the upper echelons of the Yishuv’s leadership had in mind. Two
years after the Balfour Declaration, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in
Palestine, needed farmers and soldiers, not self-aggrandizing poets who cracked
jokes and spoke in foreign tongues.
While the Zionists rejected him, however, the British officers entrusted
with the Mandate found him charming. He was playful, and had a manner of
winning over, by sheer persistence, even those who did not like him. De Haan,
one acquaintance sighed, just grew on you; as outrageous as he could be, he was
impossible not to like. Not that the British probably needed much incentive to
feel amicable: in a Jewish community thick with men and women busy being reborn
as tanned and terse redeemers of the land, De Haan was, to the British, a more familiar
creature, brainy and wordy and well-mannered. Soon, he was invited to all of
Jerusalem’s parties. And no party was more socially essential than the annual
Hannukah reception of Annie Edith Landau.
Miss Landau—no one ever seemed to call her anything else—was the closest
thing the small and sun-bitten town had to a grand dame. She ran the legendary Evelina
de Rothschild school for girls, which she transformed from a finishing
school to a first-rate academic institution by reforming the curriculum, which
had included only religion, sewing, and arts and crafts when she arrived, to
which she added math, history, geography, and science. Eventually appointed an
M.B.E. by King George V, she also ran her own salon, which drew representatives
of all of Palestine’s warring circles. She was just as respected by the
Orthodox Jews, whose faith she shared, as she was by the British
administrators, her fellow aristocrats, and the Arabs, who saw in her a figure
of dedication and grace. All three groups were heavily represented at Miss
Landau’s annual Hannukah shindig, and De Haan managed to shock them all with a
few cutting sentences.
“Two people can’t sit on the same
chair,” he was said to have bellowed to no one in particular. “This land was given to us, and you”—he
was now addressing a notable sheikh—“should
take your wives and your children, load up your camels, and go away. The Arab
lands are large, but here there’s no more room for you.”
So, at least, went the rumor that began circulating while the custodians
were still piling up the dirty glasses and stacking up the chairs. Soon, it
reached all corners of Palestine, making de Haan the small country’s enfant
terrible. Which sounded strange to the man himself: De Haan had no
recollection of ever speaking such lines, and didn’t precisely share the
sentiments know so vociferously attributed to him. He set out to defend his
good name, but discovered quickly that his version had few takers. The British
authorities, pressured to show evenhandedness toward Palestine’s Jews and Arabs
alike, launched an official inquiry.
De Haan, flustered, appealed to the Zionists to support him in his
denial; not wishing to be aligned with the voluble and mercurial Dutchman, the Yishuv’s
leadership refused, distancing itself from de Haan. It was a blow from which he
would never recover. “Here,” he wrote
in a dispatch at the time, “everything is
wilderness and emptiness. Control lies in the hands of professional and
materialist Zionists.”
Unable to forgo the strong romantic currents that had brought him to
Jerusalem, however, he sought another object of infatuation, and found the
city’s Arabs. The old pattern resurfaced: the Arab cause was now his obsession.
Ever the polyglot, he quickly studied Arabic, and took great pleasure in
upsetting the Zionists he’d meet by demanding that they speak to him in Arabic,
an official language according to the British bylaws. He developed a similar
passion for Arab politics, and sharply distanced himself from the Zionist
cause.
The deepest expression of his newfound passions, however, was carnal.
Arab men—very young men in particular—became his obsession. He wrote poems
about men like Mahmoud the stable boy, being explicit about his lust. As
always, he saw his stirrings in metaphysical terms. In one poem, entitled “Doubt,” he wrote: “The year sneaks in in God’s capital city / Near the Western Wall /
Tonight, what is it that I long for? / The sanctity of Israel, or an Arab male
prostitute?”
Taking residence with a well-heeled Jerusalem family, de Haan demanded
that the family’s Jewish maid be barred from his quarters—she stole from him,
he argued angrily—and hired instead a handsome young Arab man as his valet.
Each afternoon, de Haan and his friend would lock themselves in the room. No
one in Jerusalem had much doubt as to what the two were doing behind closed
doors.
“Last week, I had a sort of
adventure,” the future Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon wrote to his wife.
“I was looking for an apartment, and was handed from one Arab to another
until I made the acquaintance of one Arab who spoke fluent Ashkenazi… When I
told Mr. Greenhaut the man’s name etc., I was informed that the man was the
good friend of de Haan, curse him, meaning his wife, darned devil.”
De Haan didn’t care much; he was no stranger to the wagging tongues of
detractors. But, as always, he sought to align himself with a higher cause, and
when Zionism failed him, he turned again to religion. O, more accurately, he
turned to Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, my great-great grandfather and the leader of
Jerusalem’s haredi community.
*
Brilliant, ascetic, temperamental, and immensely charismatic, Sonnenfeld
was as well-versed in the intricacies of world affairs as he was in the
mysteries of the Talmud. When, for example, Tomas Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s
philosopher president, visited Jerusalem late in his career, he made a point of
consulting with the hunched-over, robed sage.
Like de Haan, Sonnenfeld was a man of intricate extremes. He’d emigrated
to Jerusalem from Slovakia, and was so moved by seeing Eretz HaKodesh,
the sacred land, that he climbed on board the ship’s mast, vying for a better
view. Once in Palestine, however, he became a fierce opponent of Zionism, which
he saw as utmost heresy, believing, like most religious Jews, that it was
strictly forbidden to try and “hasten the end” and that a Jewish homeland was
only possible once the messiah arrived. It was a subtle contradiction:
Sonnenfeld opposed Zionism with all his might, but would only do so once firmly
ensconced in Zion.
Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook had different ideas. Sonnenfeld’s close
friend and main rival, Kook believed that Zionism’s stirrings may very well be
the beginning of redemption, and that the muscular and secular pioneers in the
kibbutzim were the unconscious heralds of salvation. In 1913, the two rabbis,
accompanied by a few of their colleagues, rode mules to Palestine’s north to
meet the young Zionists in person. Elated, Kook joined the tanned youth in
dance; Sonnenfeld, distraught, wept. Upon their return to Jerusalem, Kook wrote
enthusiastically in support of the Zionist ethos, even celebrating calisthenics
as a mystical exercise that not only makes the body stronger but prepares the
soul, too, for the holy task of building the Holy Land. Sonnenfeld, furious,
published an essay accusing Kook of “praising the wicked.”
The two rabbis maintained a mutual admiration, but the stage was set for
a fissure. Kook, naturally, was embraced by the emerging Zionist leadership, if
not always unproblematically, and appointed Jerusalem’s chief rabbi.
Sonnenfeld, sensing that his war was being lost, sought an ally with a gift for
politics. De Haan was a natural fit.
When he first met Sonnenfeld, in May of 1919, de Haan wrote in his
journal that the rabbi stood in stark contrast to the petty Zionist leaders who
ruled the roost in Jerusalem, and that Sonnenfeld was as holy and devoted as
the secular bureaucrats were narrow-minded and uninspiring. But even such deep
admiration was not enough for de Haan; before too long, he was writing poems
about his new shepherd, Sonnenfeld. “Above
all, the Torah is his treasure,” went one of them.
“From
morning until evening, he desires nothing else.
Even though
he is impoverished, his life is happy and secure
More than the lives of all those who revel and
rejoice.”
Sonnenfeld was quick to make it clear that the admiration was mutual,
admitting the Dutchman into his inner circle and appointing him his right-hand
man. The confidence moved de Haan greatly: Here, for the first time in his
life, was a man in a position of authority who recognized his genius and sought
to reward him for it, with no caveats or reservations. In March 1920, de Haan
was elected to the 70-member City Council for the Ashkenazi Community, the haredi
community’s governing body, with the expectation that he would lead it into
battle against the Zionists.
After a botched attempt at a coalition with the religious Zionists
against the secularists, de Haan finally had a strategy in mind. The British,
he knew, categorized the people under their rule according to their religious
affiliation; as far as the Mandatory government was concerned, all of
Palestine’s Jews belonged to the same ethnic and religious group, which, for
convenience’s sake, was represented by the Zionist leadership, the
best-organized Jewish group around. For His Majesty’s administrators, then,
Jews were synonymous with Zionists. It was that assertion that de Haan sought
to challenge.
Like a man possessed, he set out to convince the Brahmins in London that
there was another Jewish community in Palestine, one that abhorred the idea of
independence, one that was ready to make common cause with the Arabs, one that
welcomed the crown’s continued sovereignty. He wrote long and eloquent letters
to Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, as well as to
the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour himself.
All that, however, transpired in private, and politics, de Haan knew,
was one part procedure and three parts spectacle. He needed his big coup de
theatre, and he got it with the visit of Alfred Harmsworth, the First
Viscount Northcliffe, in February 1922. Publisher of The Times, The
Daily Mail, and other newspapers, Lord Northcliffe was among the most
influential shapers of the United Kingdom’s public opinion. So great was his
renown that, during the Great War, the German Navy, exasperated by his tireless
anti-German propaganda, sent a warship to shell his country home in Kent,
killing his gardener’s wife. Northcliffe, it was known, was a man of great
passions, fond of fast boats and car racing and women—he fathered his first
child when he was seventeen, the mother being a sixteen-year-old maidservant in
his family’s employ. A man like that needed to be engaged not with politics but
with poetry.
The poet, de Haan, had the perfect plot in mind. He purchased a
round-trip ticket on the train to Alexandria, the one he knew would carry Lord
Northcliffe from Egypt to Jerusalem. Dressed in his finest, he boarded the
train and paced around until he spotted his target. Then, as if by serendipity,
he befriended the influential aristocrat, reciting some of his verse and, more
important, regaling his new friend with tales of how terrible and cruel those
dastardly Zionists really were.
When the train pulled into the station in Jerusalem, a committee
consisting of the Zionist leadership’s brightest lights was there to welcome
him. Banners were prepared, and the mood was festive. Then, however, the
train’s doors opened and down walked Northcliffe, arm-in-arm with de Haan,
shooting the Zionists a disdainful glance and walking right past their
receiving line. It was a major blow.
Immediately, and with rarely paralleled vitriol, conspiracy theories
started swirling. De Haan, went a popular one, had managed to convince his new
friend Northcliffe to press Balfour into retracting his famous declaration in
support of a Jewish homeland. “Traitors
and provocateurs in the guise of Orthodox Jews,” wrote one Zionist
newspaper, “are severing their nation
with their tongues, teaming up with the Arab delegation in an effort to
extinguish Israel’s last hope.” Other publications were not so subtle: a
popular weekly magazine ran a poem about de Haan that left little room for
interpretation. “The man is insane,”
it ran, “and his villainy without end /
And no one throws stones at him / And no one bashes him with a bat.” These
last lines were not so much a statement of fact as a lament: to most Zionists,
de Haan was despicable enough to merit a swift and violent end.
This burning hatred delighted its recipient. The same bureaucrats who
failed to genuflect when he’d first arrived and offered his services were now
in awe of his powers. He took pleasure in being Jerusalem’s most hated man. One
day, showing a Dutch visitor around, de Haan encountered a group of people who,
at the very sight of him, spat on the ground in contempt. De Haan’s visitor was
stunned by the crude gesture. “They’re
not doing this out of respect for you,” he noted. “No,” de Haan said gleefully, “they’re
spitting on the floor out of respect for you! If I was by myself, they would
have spat in my face.”
While some spat, however, others took more extreme measures. “I hereby inform you that unless you leave
our country by the 24th of this month, you will be shot like a rabid dog,”
read a note de Haan received in May of 1923. It was signed “The Black Hand.”
De Haan filed a complaint with the police, but he greeted the death
threat with his signature gusto. Whenever making appointments now, he’d smile
and add, “that is, if I’m not murdered
beforehand.” On the May 25, the day after the ultimatum had expired, he
wrote in his journal: “how innocent is
the 25th when one is not assassinated on the 24th.” But with every day that
went by, de Haan grew more convinced that the threats against him were idle,
and that the Zionists hadn’t the guts to gun him down. It was time for his next
act.
*
Early in 1924, King Hussein visited his son, Abdallah, in Amman, Jordan,
eager to form a united Arab federation that would include all of Palestine.
Recognizing Hussein as a powerful regional actor, the Zionist leadership
dispatched a delegation to Amman to meet with the king and impress him with the
necessity of Jewish sovereignty. De Haan put together a delegation of his own;
to the Zionists’ great chagrin, Hussein received it with great fanfare. De
Haan’s message, the Zionists knew, was one that the king was likely to endorse:
the real Jews, went de Haan’s main talking point, had no patience for all that
talk of independence, and would be His Majesty’s most loyal subject should he
establish his kingdom and oversee the Promised Land. The Zionists tried to
convince de Haan—desperately, angrily—not to meet with the king, but de Haan
refused. He left his meeting with Hussein with a royal promise to take the haredi
point of view into account, as well as with a sizeable financial contribution
to a number of haredi institutions in Jerusalem. Even worse, de Haan
returned to Amman a few months later, and convinced Hussein to sign a statement
denouncing “the anti-religious Zionist
movement as unjust towards Muslims, Christians, and Orthodox Jews.”
And now he was about to travel to London, the Zionists knew, to meet
with God-knows-who and ask for God-knows-what. Reading reports about de Haan in
the papers, Avraham Tehomi, a senior member of the Hagannah, the pre-state
underground army, was livid. “I saw that
we, too, had traitors,” he said in a later interview. “And not Communists, who, by their very nature, are traitors to their
country, but a Jew organizing a crusade against Zionism.”
Tehomi was born in Odessa and emigrated to Palestine as a young man.
Legend had it that upon his arrival, he walked from the port Haifa to
Jerusalem, and then set up a tent in the holy city and lived in it for months.
Even if not true, the story was believable: Tehomi was a tough Jew with a
penchant for action, whose shock of black hair and burning blue eyes made just
as much of an impression as his decisive demeanor. Soon, he found his way to
the top ranks of the Hagannah, and, later in life, to the Irgun, the
Revisionist movement’s military group.
As a senior Hagannah officer in Jerusalem, Tehomi began circulating the
idea that de Haan should be shot. Among those he consulted were Yitzhak Ben
Tzvi, the Zionist leader who’d eventually become the State of Israel’s second
president. And while the precise details of just who had ordered the
assassination are still, even after all these decades, unclear, there’s little
doubt that many in the senior Zionist leadership in Jerusalem knew about the
proposal to kill de Haan—and that none objected. And there is no doubt that
Tehomi was put in charge of the operation.
In later interviews, Tehomi recalled that reading about de Haan’s
travels to Amman, he was so livid that for days he could think of nothing else.
But once he was entrusted with the operation against the Dutchman, he grew calm
and focused. Meticulous in his work, Tehomi began following de Haan, studying
his daily routine and mapping his usual routes. Before too long, he was ready.
But the assassination of a fellow Jew was a tall and terrible order, and Tehomi
felt he needed to allow de Haan one more chance to repent. He followed him to
the Sha’are Tzedek hospital one afternoon, and sneaked into the pew directly
behind de Haan’s.
“There’s a lot of bitterness
towards you in the public,” he whispered mid-prayer.
“We don’t understand what you’re
trying to do. We came here from Russia after pogroms that killed many Jews. We
came here to save our souls, and here comes a Jew like you and destroys our
last place of refuge. What are you doing to us?”
Stop doing what you’re doing, Tehomi concluded his hushed message, “or it won’t end well.” De Haan, however,
was in no mood for a conversation. “Epikores!”
he yelled at Tehomi, a word that connotes a Jew who’d abandoned his faith.
Tehomi got up and, with de Haan still shouting, quickly left the synagogue.
The encounter left de Haan shaken. In typical fashion, he saw his
poetry, his politics, and his persona as one indistinguishable drama. One of
his friends recalled seeing him lost in thought; suddenly, de Haan looked up,
speaking of himself in the third person, and said dreamily, “In a few days you will hear that Dr. de Haan
was murdered.” He injected the same anxiety into his art. A new poem,
called “Betrayal,” took the bullet as
its central metaphor: “As a tender chick
flies / So flies my poem / Until the gun / Shoots my heart.”
Sonnenfeld and other colleagues begged him to take precautions, but de
Haan refused. He was sick, he told them, of living in fear. “I’m afraid of the past, because I can’t
forget it,” he wrote shortly before his death. “I’m afraid of the future, because I can’t prevent it. And this is how
I live in the present, like a tightrope walker. It must end in disaster.”
It did. On June 30, 1924, as he was walking out of the synagogue late on
a Friday afternoon, a man in white walked up to him, asked him for the time,
and shot him three times at close range. That man, most likely, was Tehomi.
Asked repeatedly throughout his life if he was the shooter, Tehomi neither
confirmed nor denied. Even before de Haan’s body was interred, however, the
identity of the shooter became the subject of wild speculation. Who one
believed had shot de Haan said everything about one’s politics: was it one of
his Arab lovers? Was it a fellow haredi, outraged after having
discovered de Haan’s homosexuality? Was it the Zionists?
Paranoia ran deep: senior Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion,
blamed each other for the bloodshed, escalating their rhetoric, threatening
more violence. The haredi community, too, was gearing for a fight.
Hundreds attended de Haan’s funeral. “This
murder,” Rabbi Sonnenfeld thundered at de Haan’s graveside,
“was committed by the descendants
of Jacob who acted with Esau’s sword and Esau’s craft in order to silence Jacob
and Israel … Look at the abyss into which the heads of the Zionist leadership
had tumbled and shout out loudly that you wish to be no part of this evil
congregation.”
After the funeral concluded, the throngs headed to the city’s center to
confront the Zionists. The police just barely curbed the violence.
*
The storm, however, died down within a matter of weeks. Maybe it was the
shock and the shame inevitable in a small, close community having suffering its
first political assassination. Maybe it was the Fourth Aliya—the largest wave
of migration the small Jewish community in Palestine had known—thickening the
ranks of the Yishuv by more than 80,000 people and making the community
larger, more diverse, and less apt to care about the arabesques of political
infighting. And maybe it was de Haan’s new book, published very shortly after
his death and rich with poems about his affairs with young Arab men, candid
revelations that made him, in the eyes of many of his pious friends, a
less-than-ideal martyr. Whatever the reason, the memory of de Haan soon faded
away, his assassination a curiosity and the circumstances of his life largely
forgotten.
Perhaps it’s only right. In a century of passionate and purist
ideologies, de Haan straddled too many fault lines, embodied too many
possibilities and potentials, and refused—even in his most fervent phases—to
ossify into something dead and hard. He was alive in a way that the affairs of
men could never really contain. And he knew it. In his final collection of
poems, one poem accurately charts the course of de Haan’s life and afterlife: “I have fled God in the paths of lust / To
where? To God, only to Him. / I wish to return to my Godless life / And God,
and only he, will secure my return.”
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