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Amsterdam

Amsterdam and Jews-Twentieth century progress and Jewish humour

Introduction

Amsterdam and jews contents

The wipeout of the
Jewish area
First Jews

Evoluating to
integration

20th century progress
and Jewish humour

A nightmare begins

Strike, raids and terror

A scar on city's face,
winter of desolation

Amsterdam and Jews

Kroller Muller Museum

In the Jewish museum where I saw the Overijssel poster, the main exhibits are precious objects from synagogues. These gold and silver objects may give an impression of general prosperity that would be far from the truth. By the end of the 19th century, when the city’s Jewish population had reached 54,000, the Jodenbuuurt could compete with the Jordaan for slum conditions. Picturesque it may have been, but that much-vaunted quality lay in the eye of the beholder: the hawkers of oranges, second hand suits, or broken cups and saucers would have gladly sacrificed picturesqueness for decent clothes and a decent meal in their stomachs. Yet, as in the Jordaan, shared miseries helped foster a strong neighbourhood spirit, as well as humour and a local slang that entered into the general language of Amsterdam. The Jews called Amsterdam “Makom”(meaning “the place” in Hebrew), and other Amsterdammers eventually adopted the word as slang term for the city, although they corrupted the form of the word to “Mokum”.
I’m very grateful to a few persons who help me to write and have the necessary historical and anecdotal background for this series of essays. I even have a Jewish English teacher who corrects my articles about the Amsterdam Jews and makes them sound impeccable in syntax. Didn’t you notice? This is not my usual writing with so few English errors…(I hope ;-))
Anyway, Moses Mandelbaum, he is 83 now but has an extraordinary remembrance and is vivid and active as a 30 year old man (may he live up to 120 years!) told me the following:
“By the 1930’s, when I was a boy, the slums of the Waterlooplein area had vanished. There were decent  schools and decent housing. Moreover, the Amsterdam municipal health service—free for anyone who needed it—was as good as science could make it. Yet, these benign changes had not diminished the old spirit of the quarter. Waterlooplein and the Jodenbreestraat still scintillated with life, and the Sunday morning markets in the Jodenbuurt brought people from the farthest corners of the city. Vendors there had pitches so artful that they could have sold a hairbrush to a bald man”.
The essence of Jewish humour is perhaps a capacity for irony, a dismissal of life’s disasters with a joke at one’s own expense. If so, that tallied precisely the mood of Amsterdam of the 1930’s. Holland was poor, small and powerless against the vast political turbulence shaking the world. But because of its political neutrality, the country was also tranquil. Their disasters were minor, or at last they lay within the compass of normal human experience. But that would change with awful suddenness.