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Writer Jacob Israël de Haan: The “precursor of Wikileaks” lived a life full of scandals
Professor Gaston Franssen will give a Jacob Israel de Haan lecture at the Allard Pierson on Thursday. The focus is on scandals. “De Haan knew exactly how to use alleged scandals via the media to his own advantage.”
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“Just as we were about to announce my lecture on Jacob Israël de Haan, the Hamas raids took place,” says Gaston Franssen, professor of Dutch literature and intermediality at the UvA. The result? The annual lecture—initially scheduled for November 8th at the Allard Pierson Museum—was postponed to this Thursday. “The organizers decided to take more time for preparation, in light of events in Israel and Gaza at the time,” the Allard Pierson Museum wroteon the social media platform X at the time.
In reality, the situation in the Middle East was still so uncertain at that moment, Franssen says now, “that we wanted to wait and see. See how things developed.” It marks the sensitive relationships surrounding the Jewish writer and reporter Jacob Israël de Haan (1881-1924). As a Zionist who later became an anti-Zionist, he was no stranger to controversy.
“He is someone who went to Palestine and played a special role there,” Franssen says euphemistically. His radical behavior eventually cost him his life: A member of a Zionist movement fired three gunshots at De Haan in the summer of 1924. It entered the history books as the first political murder in Jewish Palestine.
Scandals
Franssen will not dwell on that in any particular detail in his lecture, but on other “scandals,” of which De Haan's relatively short life was full, all the more so. Take his first novel Pijpelijntjes, about a homosexual relationship, “which also had something masochistic about it,” Franssen said.
It was considered “scandalous prose,” in the early 20th century. De Haan, working for the socialist daily Het Volk at the time, was summarily fired by his editor-in-chief P.L Tak. “He is disowned, as it were, by his community at Het Volk and the socialists,” Franssen explains. De Haan then files a complaint with a committee of arbitration within the SDAP (one of the forerunners of the PvdA).
“And then he does something very interesting.” De Haan publishes a booklet containing all the reports of the committee and his (until recently) private correspondence with Tak. The title: “The Open Letter to P.L. Tak.” Behold: the public reckoning, anno 1905—a ploy De Haan mastered to the nth degree. “He knew exactly how to use alleged scandals in the media to his advantage,” Franssen emphasizes.
Forerunner of contemporary writers
But in doing so, he neither frames nor selectively reproduces passages. He makes everything public and leaves nothing out. What does that teach us, Franssen wonders aloud—besides being a media scholar by virtue of being a Dutchman. “I think you could say that De Haan shows how important disclosure is for the media. In one fell swoop, he makes visible what goes on behind the scenes.” Something that Franssen believes is a core task of the media: to shine light into corners, to be transparent.
According to Franssen, that makes him a precursor of Wikileaks or contemporary writers such as “Arnon Grunberg, Lieke Marsman, and Maxim Februari,” who tried to do the same thing. “Not just write novels or poetry, but seek out the media and take a stance on public affairs,” says UvA professor Franssen. “That task, given the allowances affair, is perhaps more important than ever.”
