Who Was Jacob de Haan?

Since October 7, supporters of Israel have been troubled by the small but visible contingent of “Jewish Queers for Palestine” at street protests and campus encampments from Berkeley to Brooklyn.

“It’s amazing, absolutely amazing,” mused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his July 25 address to U.S. lawmakers in Washington, DC. “Some of these protesters hold up signs proclaiming ‘Gays for Gaza.’ They might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.’”

Palestine ranks 130th out of 175 on the UCLA/ Williams Institute LGBTI Global Acceptance Index. Israel’s ranking is far better at 44th—but the Zionist world was not always a safe place for an outspoken gay man.

In July, the Jerusalem Film Festival premiered a groundbreaking documentary titled Jacob de Haan: A Voice Out of Time. It’s the story of Jacob Israel de Haan, a homosexual Dutch Jewish anti-Zionist who was assassinated—some say martyred—a century ago by the pre-state paramilitary group Hagana after he had brokered an alliance between Haredi anti-Zionists and Arab leaders bent on opposing the creation of a Jewish state. 

With the advance of the gay rights movement in the Netherlands and in Israel since the 1980s and the accompanying interest in LGBTQ history, nearly a dozen books have been published about de Haan in Dutch and Hebrew. But documentarian Zvi Landsman’s is the first film treatment of de Haan’s life, a tale of broken taboos and allegiances presented through poetry and a kaleidoscopic collage of archival photographs and on-camera interviews that uncover the vulnerability and violence of the early Zionist movement.

De Haan’s assassination came in June 1924, just a month after he secured a proclamation from Jordan’s then Emir Abdullah expressing his willingness to welcome Jewish immigrants to Palestine under the condition that they renounce their statehood aspirations and agree to live as a protected religious minority under Arab sovereignty.

Every year, the anti-Zionist Haredi sect, Neturei Karta, commemorates the death of de Haan, their emissary to the secular world, by observing a day of mourning for him and reflecting on their vision of life in the Holy Land awaiting the divine sovereignty of messianic redemption. 

The filmmaker, Zvi Landsman, a gay observant Jew, recounts de Haan’s journey from the village of Smilde, where he was one of 18 children of a cantor in a small synagogue, to his career as a writer for the socialist Het Volk newspaper in Amsterdam and eventual notoriety as the Netherlands’ “first national gay poet.”

A Voice Out of Time captures with lyrical English-language narration the crisp Dutch cadences of de Haan’s 1904 erotic novel Pijpelijntjes (“Little Pipes”). The film also highlights nostalgic tributes to the familial warmth of a European Shabbat drawn from a collection of his poems called The Jewish Song, as well as lucid descriptions and verse written after de Haan arrived in pre-statehood Israel. 

LGBTQ and Orthodox Cultures: An Intricate Intersection

“De Haan made significant changes in his life whenever he felt a shift in his needs, dedicating himself entirely to each transformation,” Landsman says.

The documentarian, whose last film, The Therapy, examined treatment sought by Orthodox Jews to terminate their homosexual attractions, says de Haan had an extraordinary ability to understand and empathize with various groups, even those with different perspectives from his own.

“Initially, he immersed himself in the gay community, becoming the first person in the Netherlands to openly discuss the experience of being gay,” says Landsman. “When I explain the premise of the film, friends always react with, ‘Oh, you’re diving into that theme again?’ And yes, both movies delve into the intricate relationship and conflict between LGBTQ and Orthodox Jewish cultures. I explore whether these two worlds can coexist and the extremes people might resort to when navigating between them.”

The documentary includes interviews with Dutch LGBTQ activists who admire de Haan for his foundational role as the country’s first gay poet, at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in most of Europe. Alongside glimpses of present-day gay Amsterdam, Landsman also demonstrates how the poet’s work is present in the city. 

For example, viewers see lines from “To a Young Fisherman” inscribed at Amsterdam’s pink triangle “Homomonument,” located just steps from the Anne Frank House. And de Haan’s poem “Jerusalem” is shown etched at the base of a memorial column across from the Rembrandt House Museum on Jodenbreestraat (“Jewish Broad Street”) at the heart of the city’s old Jewish quarter.

De Haan poem on a sculpture in Amsterdam. CC BY-SA 4.0

In some ways, these permanent testimonials obscure de Haan’s precarious existence as a gay Jewish public intellectual in the early 20th century. He was fired from his teaching job and lost work editing and writing for the socialist press after the publication of the sexually explicit Pijpelijntjes. In 1907, he married Dr. Johanna van Maarseveen to rectify his social standing, and she bought many remaining copies of the homoerotic novel, which included a period-defying chapter about a man marrying another man. 

He then made a fact-finding trip to Russia, where he investigated the conditions of political prisoners in the jails of Czar Nicholas II. Upon his return, he earned a doctorate in law at Amsterdam University.

Soon after his return to Holland, de Haan resumed a kosher life and swiftly allied himself with the religious Zionist Mizrachi organization.

“His embrace of religious Judaism rejects the dominant [Protestant] Dutch culture,” says Ido Harari, a researcher of modern Jewish thought at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. Harari is one of an expanding number of Israeli humanities scholars finding contemporary relevance in de Haan’s life and work.

“He hated Holland when he lived there,” Harari says. 

In one of his poems, de Haan complains about how Luther placed the Dutch people in a prison with four bare walls and low ceilings. “De Haan turning to Orthodox Judaism can be seen as part of a cultural movement toward a more ample way of living, similar to Oscar Wilde’s return to his childhood Catholicism,” says Harari.

An Embrace of Zionism Dismissed

“De Haan became a Zionist when he became religious again and aligned with the Mizrahi movement. Mizrahi marked the beginning of contemporary religious Zionism, focusing on the necessity of resettling Jews from the diaspora in a nation-state for their survival,” says Harari, adding that it was “less messianic or racist compared to present-day representatives of religious Zionism in Israel such as Bezalel Smotrich.” 

De Haan’s writings prior to settling in Jerusalem are full of personal ambition and  romantic aspirations for the Jewish statehood project in Palestine. 

Jacob de Haan

“I will not be worthy of the title ‘The Poet of the Jews’ if I did not ask to take part in the struggle of the Zionists—one people, one land, one language,” de Haan wrote as he prepared to take his leave from Holland. The Netherlands’ Zionist Mizrachi chapter revered de Haan, and hundreds went to say farewell as his train left Amsterdam’s Central station for the journey to the Holy Land. 

Yet his arrival in British Mandate Palestine was marked by a significant loss of status, as his queer and quaint origins in the Netherlands made him a marginal figure to the emerging leadership of the Yishuv, dominated by Russian socialists who conducted business in Hebrew. 

The Jerusalem leaders of Mirzrachi sent a letter to their Vilna headquarters describing de Haan as “not serious.”

De Haan’s verse was dismissed by Tel Aviv’s Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik, who is not known to have read Dutch. Zionist institutions on the ground had little use for an Amsterdam legal scholar focused on “significs”—a continental academic theory related to semiotics—seen as of little use to the practice of commercial or criminal law in the rough and tumble between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

“When de Haan arrived in Palestine, he wrote a letter to Chaim Weizmann offering his services to the Zionist movement, but they were uninterested. This rejection played some part in his decision to distance himself from the emerging Zionist establishment,” says Harari. “In some ways this sounds reductionist, but in a sense he began to say to the so-called New Yishuv leaders, ‘If you don’t want me, well, I’m going to take my business elsewhere.’” says Harari.

After being rejected by the political and cultural mainstream, de Haan joined Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox community, known as the “Old Yishuv,” within a year of his arrival. The main political force of the Old Yishuv was Agudat Israel, an anti-Zionist organization representing Haredi Jews. Later, de Haan joined the group around Rabbi Chaim Sonnenfeld, a non-Zionist Haredi rabbi who Abraham Isaac Kook defeated in the race for the title of chief rabbi of Palestine. Eventually, de Haan became Agudat Israel’s representative to British rulers and Arab neighbors, advocating for Haredi interests separately from and often in opposition to the Zionist agenda. Alongside Sonnenfeld, he staunchly opposed the efforts of Rav Kook’s movement to establish a unified “state Judaism” in pre-state Israel. 

To cite one example, Kook had suggested constructing a Central World Yeshiva with an attached cathedral-like synagogue at the Kotel, marking the beginning of De Haan’s confrontations with Hajj Amin al-Husseini, his Muslim counterpart, over the ownership of the Western Wall and access to the neighboring Maghrabi (Moroccan) neighborhood.

De Haan raised concerns about building this “center” in Jerusalem where “everyone” could study and pray—under Rav Kook’s directions. He wrote about the debates over which community would own the synagogue and which prayer custom, or nusach, would be observed. He struggled with political Zionists’ push for uniformity and Rav Kook’s assertiveness. This eventually led him to question Zionist ideals and practices toward the Palestinians, including the concept of avoda ivrit, which promoted the exclusive employment of Jews by Jews.

“De Haan, a lawyer and diplomat, successfully defended the Orthodox Jews against the Zionists with the British,” explains Yudel Hirsch, a media-savvy member of Neturei Karta, the Haredi group founded in 1938 when it split off from Agudat Israel. “The Zionists attempted to take over the donations that the Old Yishuv relied on but failed.” 

In contrast to Agudat Israel’s accommodation to Jewish statehood, Neturei Karta remains the most vocal Haredi stronghold of anti-Zionist activism. In a meeting last year with leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Jenin, its leaders declared: “We are Palestinian Jews; we want to live under the Palestinian flag and not the Israeli flag, in one country, which is the Palestinian state.”

Neturei Karta still venerates de Haan and commemorates his assassination every year. 

Landsman’s documentary includes footage of this annual memorial, which features the raising of the Palestinian national banner and the burning of Israeli flags. These provocative acts often lead to violent clashes with the Jerusalem police, offering a gripping inside look at the city’s street-level tensions. The film also shows Hirsh—whose grandfather served as advisor of Jewish affairs to Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and subsequently to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas— getting his neighborhood ready for the annual de Haan remembrance by putting up Yahrzeit pashkevil posters announcing that the founding of the State of Israel was an affront to God. Most pashkevil are printed in Hebrew and Yiddish—but tourists often photograph the English-language pashkevil warning women and girls passing through the neighborhood not to wear “immodest clothes.”

Brave Artist or Deviant Pederast? 

This is quite a legacy for de Haan, who even as he advocated on behalf of the ultra-Orthodox had also continued writing homoerotic poetry and engaging in homosexual activities. The Neturei Karta spokesman Hirsh becomes speechless when filmmaker Landsman asks the Haredi anti-Zionist to read some of his hero’s verse that touches on feelings for a youth likely in his mid-or late teens. 

Perhaps the most well-known of these is entitled “Doubt.”

What is it I await as evening falls,
The city snuck upon by sleep,
Sitting near the Western Wall:
God, or a Moroccan boy?

Another short poem, “Dr. Chiam Sonnenfeld,” spotlights the tension in Jerusalem—and his life—between the erotic and sacred. 

He was once a boy. Has he never succumbed?
He became a Man. Has he always resisted?
Soon, I will wander through the regions again with Adil,
Of light and shadow in the Full Moon

Adil al Huwaida was the thirty-something manager of the Hashemites’ stables in the Holy City at the time of de Haan’s writing and one of his closest associates in the city according to his own and contemporary accounts. 

Landsman asks his audience to see de Haan as a brave artist, not as a deviant pederast. 

“At that time, the concept of distinguishing between male homosexual eroticism and pedophilia, as we we do today, did not exist. It was not a concern at the time,” says Landsman. “The age of a boy, the age of a young man, the age of a young boy—what did these terms exactly mean? I’m not sure.”

Ofri Ilany, a Van Leer postdoctoral fellow whose research focuses on Jewish homosexuals in the early 20th century, argues that “when evaluating de Haan’s life in Jerusalem, it is essential to consider the colonial context in which he acted.” 

Europeans often depicted the Ottoman Empire as decadent, with sodomy being considered typical. Homosexuality was not prohibited in the Empire’s legal code—“mentorship” relations between adult men and teenage boys were especially prevalent in the army, court and upper echelons of Constantinople’s commercial class. Yet even as mandate officials moved to ban such relationships, a homosexual milieu existed among colonial officials in Jerusalem.

“High-ranking officials in the Mandatory administration had graduated from esteemed universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. Their romanticized view of the ‘exotic Orient’ influenced their decision-making and attitudes,” says Ilany. “Some of these men admired Arab men and boys, and their aesthetics and eroticism shaped British policy in Palestine and the broader Middle East.”

The most famous of these was T. E. Lawrence, who dedicated his Seven Pillars of Wisdom to a Bedouin Arab youth, Selim Dahoum, with whom he shared his quarters for three years. Lawrence of Arabia’s colleague Ronald Storrs, who served as military governor of Jerusalem from late 1917 until June 1920, was another.

“Storrs was a sophisticated officer with a deep passion for art. He founded the Jerusalem Shakespeare Company, and floated ambitious plans to establish an opera in the city, which still needs one,” says Ilany. “This aesthete surrounded himself with like-minded advisers, one of whom was Charles Ashby, associated with the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain and a member of a London-based homosexual society…From the viewpoint of these British Orientalists, the chutzpadik Zionist Jews were disrupting an aesthetic equilibrium in Palestine juxtaposed with the sophisticated, sensual allure of the Arab world.”

As de Haan became increasingly alienated from the local Zionists, he drew closer to this group of British administrators and Orientalists. Storrs dedicates several passages to de Haan in his memoir, Orientations. He describes de Haan’s face as resembling that of Vincent Van Gogh and recalls an incident when he left a volume of Baudelaire’s poetry at the general’s door with the inscription: “When all my people are cursing you, I send you this as a token that I believe in you and in what you are trying to do.”

“De Haan was anti-Zionist but not anti-colonial; in fact, he was a supporter of colonial rule in Palestine. His political stance seemed to be driven by aesthetics, similar to Jews in the diaspora in the 19th century who sought patronage from the aristocracy to preserve their traditional way of life,” says Ilany, who is dubious of elevating de Haan to the role of patron saint of Queers for Palestine.

“I don’t think using contemporary political terminology is relevant in the case of de Haan, and I find it somewhat absurd. He wasn’t queer; he was homosexual, but he wasn’t politically involved as a homosexual. There were politically active homosexuals at the time, such as Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin, but de Haan didn’t embrace this gay political agenda. He was also married to a woman in Holland.”

Justifying an Assassination

In February 1922, de Haan met with Lord Northcliffe, publisher of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, during his trip to Jerusalem. By this time, de Haan had started to denounce “Zionist tyranny” and proposed that Sonnenfeld’s Agudat Yisrael group could provide the structure of a religiously autonomous but non-national Jewish community in Palestine.

He found a receptive ear in Northcliffe, who believed the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a strategic blunder for Britain. Northcliffe started introducing de Haan to the higher echelons of colonial foreign policy officers.

In early August 1923, de Haan took the 60-mile road trip to Amman to meet with Emir Abdullah of Jordan and his brother, King Faisal of Iraq. They discussed ways to ensure political and civic rights for the Jewish community within an expanded Hashemite kingdom to convince the British that this could slow the Zionists’ drive toward statehood while not fully reneging on the pledges of the Balfour Declaration.

Abdullah expressed his willingness to welcome Jewish immigrants to Palestine under the condition that they renounce their nationalist aspirations, and the lawyer de Haan had little trouble convincing the king to put his offer in writing.

By the end of August, Jerusalem’s Haredi leaders proudly presented their diplomatic achievement at Agudat Israel’s first international conference in Vienna. The following year, de Haan organized another delegation, this time led by Rabbi Sonnenfeld, to visit Abdullah’s father—Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca. At the same time, a Zionist delegation in Amman became livid at the warmer reception given to de Haan and the ability of Agudat Israel to elicit a financial contribution from the Hashemites.

De Haan assassin Avraham Tehomi

Landsman’s documentary presents de Haan’s subsequent murder, ordered by Yitzak Ben Zvi (the longest-serving president of Israel), as a newly solved crime. Suspects are identified through trips to the oral history libraries of a Galilee kibbutz and Jabotinsky Archives in Tel Aviv, where the testimony of the shooter Avraham Tehomi is stored along with memoirs of others involved in the assassination plot. 

The descendants of the alleged perpetrators make two things clear in their interviews with Landsman: When given the facts of the case, mainstream Zionists believe de Haan presented a clear and present danger to the Zionist project, and while the Haganah did not kill the Dutchman because he was gay, the understanding that he was a Jew who had intimate relations with young Arab males meant it was easier to justify terminating his life.

“De Haan’s approach was truly unique. He fearlessly followed his path, regardless of the expectations of those around him,” says Landsman. “While many of us hesitate to deviate from our established beliefs, de Haan was unafraid to embrace new perspectives and truths, no matter the perceived consequences. His selflessness and unwavering dedication to his own truth set him apart in history.”

“I think it used to be easier before the post-World War II era to reconcile being religious and having a different sexual orientation,” says Harrari. “However, today, engaging in certain behaviors is considered wrong, and having an identity that goes against religious norms is also seen as a threat to our identity as Jews.” Harrari sees an alternative way of thinking about it vis a vis de Haan. “All these aspects make him one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking Jewish figures of the 20th century.”

Top image: Director Zvi Landsman (L) shows Yudel Hirsh how the frame looks on set. Credit: Zvi Landsman.