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This chapter provides an overview of how developments in Dutch society, combined with international tendencies in Jewish life, have led to a number of major changes in the lives of Dutch Jews since 1945. It tackles how the Jewish community faced the post-war years in the Netherlands. In the eastern district of Amsterdam-Oost in 1956, a new synagogue had been built and its consecration illustrates the four characteristic elements of post-war Dutch Jewish history: the dynamics of rebuilding Jewish community life; the constant doubt that Jewish life would go on much longer in the Netherlands, or the ideological certainty that it would not; the influence of Zionism and, from 1948 onwards, of the existence of the State of Israel; and finally, the aftermath of the fateful war years—the emotional impact, the after-effects, and the acts of remembrance. Based on the belief that the organization of the Jewish communities was determined, in large part, by the legal possibilities and dominant beliefs in Dutch society as a whole, the chapter divides the post-war era into periods reflecting general changes in Dutch society.

This chapter looks at the demography and economic activity in the United Netherlands until 1750, with a focus on the role of the Jews in the Republic and in Dutch culture. Dutch Jews from the early seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century constituted one of the most influential Jewish communities in the world and by far the most prominent in north-western Europe, considering their importance in international trade, finance, culture, and politics. The chapter discusses the contexts in the early decades of 1595–1648, including the settlement of the Sephardi Jews in Surinam and the growth of their overseas trade. Then it takes a closer look at the Amsterdam Sephardi community, the rise of a prosperous new Sephardi community in northern Brazil, the entry of Sephardi immigrants in the Netherlands, and other immigrations that occurred. Then the discussion progresses to the burgeoning of commerce and of the credit system from 1648 to 1713. The chapter also describes the improvement of the Ashkenazi elite's economic position in the Republic. Finally, it tackles the growing population of the Jews during the period of economic decline from 1713 to 1750.

This chapter takes a closer look at the Jewish life during the six decades between 1750 and 1814. It reflects on the dynamics of Jewish history, underscoring that there are different schools of thought on how to understand the interaction between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours. What models have been developed by historians to grasp the difficult balance between Jewish self-reliance and its receptiveness to outside influences? How should one characterize the impact of the Enlightenment from that perspective? The chapter also examines how the Jews in the Low Countries fared after they had been granted equal civil rights in 1796. After sketching a preliminary profile of the modern Dutch Jew, the chapter focuses on the short half-century between 1750 and 1796.

This chapter looks at the many faces of the Jews in the Netherlands. It starts by acknowledging that historians have found a great variety of patterns in the rich past of the Jews, generally inspired by their equally wide range of ideological agendas: the religious historians regarded the Jews as a “chosen people”; those who focused on integration saw them as model Dutch citizens and sought mainly to emphasize both how privileged they were to live in the tolerant Netherlands and how much they had contributed to the country; while other historians targeted to show—sometimes, but not always, from a Zionist perspective—that no matter how firmly the Jews in the Netherlands had believed they were Dutch, they had never been accepted as such, and that their integration had been an illusion. The chapter explains that the first edition of this book took the more neutral approach of studying Jews as a minority group but with the avalanche of new monographs, biographies, scholarly articles, exhibition catalogues, conference proceedings, dissertations, and MA theses on a multitude of topics concerning the history of the Jews in the Netherlands, and the general field of Jewish history, the publication of a new edition made sense. The aim of the present edition was to arrive at a better balance, one that does greater justice to the fact that Dutch Jewish history has an international Jewish context.