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oa Criticus èn verdediger
Een causerie naar aanleiding van Abraham Kuypers brochure Liberalisten en Joden uit 1878
- Amsterdam University Press
- Source: DNK : Documentatieblad voor de Nederlandse kerkgeschiedenis na 1800, Volume 45, Issue 97, dec. 2022, p. 183 - 198
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- 01 dec. 2022
Samenvatting
Critic and Defender. A talk in connection with Abraham Kuyper’s pamphlet Liberalisten en Joden from 1878.
What did the Dutch politician and theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) think about Jews, and how did he approach them in the context of the Netherlands? To answer this question, we focus on one of his key texts related to this subject, his pamphlet Liberalisten en Joden (1878). When he distinguished the Jews as a separate group, he did so mainly because of their non-Christian religion. This approach was complicated, for the Jewish community was quite diverse in its relation to Judaism: some were orthodox indeed, but the majority was not orthodox, or not even religious. In addition, most Jews did not like to be distinguished as a separate group, they preferred to be Dutch like every other citizen in the country. Kuyper struggled with this complication, and combined antisemitic utterances with a defense of Jewish civil rights. This resulted in an ambivalent appreciation of his relation with Jews.