Antisemitism among Dutch socialists in the 1880s and 1890s

Antisemitism in the Dutch labour movement has not been studied sufficiently. This is certainly true with regard to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis and the early socialist movement of the nineteenth century. However, anti-Jewish propaganda needs to be taken into account in order to understand why the Jewish proletariat joined the socialist ranks at such a late stage, that is, only after the reformist wing split from Domela Nieuwenhuis's Social Democratic League (SDB) into the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDAP) in 1894. Stutje aims to address this lacuna, and demonstrates that Domela Nieuwenhuis had been using antisemitic stereotyping against the parliament-orientated reformists because the latter's main rival, P. J. Troelstra, was dependent on a modest group of Jewish diamond workers in Amsterdam. Once that conflict was over antisemitism faded into the background again.