The Rest Is History - 352: Amsterdam: Kings, Canals, and Coffee Houses

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

A city which played a fundamental role in the Dutch Golden Age and in the birth of the Dutch monarchy, Amsterdam has also stood in the avant-garde of European liberalism since the Second World War. Join Tom and Dominic on the second part of our walking tour through Amsterdam, as they look at the importance of its canals, the changing role of the Amsterdam Royal Palace, the Portuguese Synagogue and its relationship with the city’s jewish population, and more. Read more about Tom and Dominic's trip to Amsterdam, in partnership with Wise: https://wise.com/campaign/restishistory *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History, and we are in the heart of Amsterdam, aren't we, Tom? Now, if you didn't hear our last episode, we are exploring the history of Amsterdam with WISE. Now, Tom, as you will know, WISE is the international account that is built to save you money around the world. You love that, don't you, Tom? 150 countries, 40 currencies, and just one account. And as you are always saying to me, I mean, God almighty, if I had a pound to pay the number of times you've said this to me, with WISE, you can spend like a local. And Dominic, more importantly,

you could spend like a Dutch capitalist in the golden age of amsterdam so dominic uh the end of the last episode we were talking about um amsterdam as simultaneously this inward looking and this outward looking city yeah so this concern with the domestic with the interior kind of privacy while at the same time amsterdam is really the kind of the great smithy of what will become European globalization. Expanding trade networks, all the wealth and goods and commodities of the world coming to Amsterdam. So the people here are, certainly the elites, are fabulously rich.

So Amsterdam is absolutely a boom town. This is the 17th century 17th century but the dutch republic is still at war you know the the spanish are still out there yeah and so the old center of amsterdam is is kind of girded around by this canal the single and by a wall and basically you know you're not encouraged to build out beyond that but people ignore that they're camping out on what remains basically a bog yeah um the amstel literally means you know boggy land next to a river and the land beyond the old town hasn't yet been drained but amsterdam is is becoming so rich and it's becoming so full that over the course of the 17th century, people decide this

is insane. We need to expand. So they start to move beyond the single, this canal that surrounds the old town. And they build what are probably the iconic image of Amsterdam in people's imagination. If they kind of think of Amsterdam, they will think of these three great ring canals that were built in the 17th century. So the Herrengracht, so that's the canal for gentlemen. The gentleman's canal. The Kaiser's gracht, the emperor's canal, and the Prinzengracht, the prince's canal. And we are standing on the Herrengracht,

which is the most exclusive of those three canals. And just to compete with the traffic and to paint a picture for those three canals and just to um compete with the traffic and to paint a picture for those people who haven't been to amsterdam forget about the traffic noise it's an idyllic scene these tremendously impressive kind of merchants townhouses along the sides of the canal um bicycles and all that yeah and where we're standing is called the golden bend so it's the the most prestigious stretch of the most prestigious canal. Yeah. And the amazing thing about these three canals, that they look perfect.

And people have always thought, historians of the development of Amsterdam, have always traditionally thought that there is a kind of a master plan. Yeah. But it turns out actually there probably wasn't't that it was built in three separate stages which makes the site kind of the sense of coherence the um the controlled sense of beauty all the more extraordinary i mean it's one of the the great urban panoramas of europe and the world i would say and what makes it all the more extraordinary is as i say the effort of construction because all these stunning houses the the roads, all the infrastructure is built on the marshiest terrain imaginable. And so the reason that there are canals,

these have to be kind of dredged out. The mud has to be piled up on the banks, has to be mixed with sand and with gravel. Roads have to be laid down with brick. And if you're going to build houses, then you need to kind of drive down wood, great piles of wood. So logs that are sourced from Scandinavia. And they have to be jammed down kind of 50, 60 feet into the peat, into the sand, into the clay. And those logs are still there to this day because they've been covered over by water. So the wood has been preserved. And it was such an effort to build these. But one of the reasons why these houses are very high, kind of five, six stories,

is that basically if you've gone to all the expense and effort of driving down these kind of piles to support the houses on, you might as well build it high. And so throughout the 17th century, it's the golden age. It's the age of Rembrandt. It's the age of kind of scientific inquiry. And we look around and this is a beautiful, beautiful urban cityscape. But throughout the 17th century, this was a massive, massive building site. I mean, ongoing for decades and decades and decades. One of the ways in which you can measure what the impact was of this on people who lived in Amsterdam is to look at the paintings and the drawings of Rembrandt, his greatest artist, the artist who moved and lived here for most of his life. And what you will find is that he doesn't actually paint or draw anything of what is going on with this new development. So again and again, if he's making sketches of the cityscapecape he will do views towards the old city or towards

the open fields he will not sketch what is being developed so almost like he's literally turned his back on this new i suppose the equivalent of the megalopolises of uh 21st century china temples to capitalism absolutely so there's a sense that um that rembrandt in his attitude to this new architecture is a bit of a King Charles III. Right. He's not in favor of it. But clearly, if you're a massive, high-spending capitalist with lots of cash, you're really into it. And so the house that we're looking at at the moment

is one of the grandest, most impressive, most beautiful houses on the entire stretch of the Herringbrack. And this is the House van de Graaf. So this is the mayor of Amsterdam's house. Andries, what's his name? Andries de Graaf. Yeah. Yes.

He was a mayor of the city. He was one of its richest men. And he's one of two brothers who basically run Amsterdam as a Republican form of government throughout its golden age. So Tom, just as we start talking about the politics, let's move away from the man assembling an air conditioning unit.

It's always the way, isn't it? Right by where we're talking. It's always the way. So at this point, the Netherlands is the Dutch Republic. It is not a monarchy. Am I right? Right. So basically, there are two kind of political factions

in the various provinces that constitute the Dutch Republic. So there's a Republican faction, of which the de Graaf brothers are leaders in Amsterdam. There are also the de Wits in The Hague. And these are kind of the equivalents of grand senators, leaders of what are effectively city states. But over and above that, you have the figure of the Stadtholder, which has become a kind of hereditary post held by the descendants of William the Silent, Willem of Orange, who was the great hero of the Dutch revolt.

And so the Stadtholders are, well, I suppose actually dominate the best English translation would be Lord Protector. Very good. You know I love a Lord Protector. Yes, I know you do. So there's a tension there between the claims of the cities and the claims of the Stadtholder. Of the House of Orange. So these tensions come to a head in Amsterdam in 1650, when Willem II, who is the Stadtholder,

the Prince of Orange, he comes to Amsterdam and he basically tries to kind of conquer it and suppress the pretensions of the town council town council the de graffs play a blinder they basically say to villum look um we're on your side uh there are people opposed to you on the town council let's get rid of them and they serve up their rivals on the town council get rid of them and then they're able to install this and with enormous stroke of luck that obviously to the digraphs would be the sign of god um villum then then dies of smallpox right and he leaves a very young son villum again they're not very original with their naming who will be the william the third who conquers england in 1688 but he's a very young boy at this point so essentially the digraphs now have a kind of free hand to run the city.

And they do this up until 1672, which the Dutch commemorate as the Rampja, the year of disasters, which is when Louis XIV invades the English, I'm afraid to say,

institute a naval blockade. Afraid to say. The de Witt brothers are lynched and, according to some stories, devoured by a hostile mob. Willem III kind of absolutely establishes his authority as Stadtholder. The de Graaffs lose power, but Andries de Graaff doesn't.

I mean, he keeps his life, he keeps his wealth, and he keeps this absolutely splendid house. So we are looking at the house right now, aren't we? There's a bit of scaffolding, but you can see the tremendous coat of arms at the top top which is this sort of swan and it looks like a bit like a mushroom i don't know what it is no it's it's um it's a shovel a shovel okay and the the motto of the graph was um death makes scepters and hoes equal okay so this is idea that you know the um his house is built on the side of this canal which has been dug with ho hose and with shovels and with spades. And he's kind of glorying in that as something that is greater than the monarchical pretensions

of the House of Orange. He also, inside, he had one of the greatest art collections of the age. So we've mentioned Rembrandt. He had Rembrandts in there. Rembrandt painted him, but various other artworks by the great painters of the age. So on one level, it's absolutely sumptuous and splendid. But on the other, bearing in mind that this isn't, you know,

he's not just one of the richest men in Amsterdam. He's one of the richest men in the world. He is a plutocrat on a scale of a kind of Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. It's actually pretty modest. Yeah. So that is actually the most striking thing about this, I think. So there are working class districts being built at the same time. There's a place called Jordan, which is kind of beyond the Prinzengracht, which is the canal for merchants. It's a lovely area, actually, the Jordan now.

Yeah, it is. But I think one of the striking things about this is that the streets that kind of join the canals are actually actually they were built as much more working class areas so it's exclusive but it's not completely exclusive right um it's not a kind of upper class ghetto right and again i think that that is expressive of this dutch sense of kind of civic community that is a contrast with the kind of grandiose pomposity of architecture particularly in france right absolutist monarchy catholic monarchy of louis the 14th there must be a self-consciously deliberate political contrast the dutch see themselves as protestants as as you said civic as modest yeah

modest yes yeah absolutely and so looking at the you know this crest that you've mentioned that's on the top of this, and it does look, I mean, it looks very splendid, but it's nothing compared to the coat of arms that you get at Versailles or anything like that, or indeed in the palaces in England. You get these crests and these emblems all over the city. So as scribes, for instance, you'll see a hand with a quill. Or when I came here with Sadie, my wife, she's a midwife, she was very excited to see that there was a stork outside a house, you know, emblem of a midwife who lived there. And my favorite one of all,

so there is one of these secret churches that we talked about in the first episode. It was a remonstrant church, so another kind of Protestant sect on the Kaisersgracht. And they bought this building from a guy called Ruthut, which means red hat. And so they advertised this completely secret church by whacking an emblem of a great red hat on it. So that's splendid.

And what you will also see on lots of these houses, and particularly the houses on the Prinzengracht, but also on the Herrengracht and the Kaisersgracht as well, is that at the top of these houses, and particularly the houses on the Prinzengracht, but also on the Herrengracht and the Kaisersgracht as well, is that at the top of the houses, so where the crest is on the Graf's house, you will see kind of hoist beams. Right, and hooks. Now, I was going to ask you about the hooks.

So what's all that about? Warehouses or their little stuff? Yes, particularly on the Prinzengracht. So for merchants, their houses double as storehouses and warehouses. And so stuff will be lifted up. Right. And they will keep stuff right at the top of the house.

But they're not just warehouses, right? So they're not just public spaces, they're private. I mean, we talked last time about their Begeinhof and this inward looking, the sense of privacy and domesticity. And that's true of these houses as well, isn't it? Yes, because the wealth that these merchants have and these kind of great princes of the city enables them to construct within a single domestic space the kind of inward turning the love of privacy that um in the middle ages had been confined within squares um and so whether it is a great kind of you know a mayor of the city like andres de graff or whether it is a kind of much more modest house. Amsterdam in the 17th century in its domestic architecture is committing itself to something that is really novel and incredibly influential. The idea that a house can be a private and personal space. And this is the ideal that I know that both of us have been to see the

Vermeer exhibition, which is on at the Rijksmuseum here in Amsterdam at the moment. And famously, Vermeer is, you know, in his paintings is kind of articulating this sense. And it's the same sense that in the episode that we did on the Dutch maid, the housemaids, you know, English and foreign visitors, when they come here and they walk into the house and the housemaid has just spent all day cleaning the floor and she will attack visitors with her broom and forcibly remove their shoes so that they don't spread dirt in. This obsession with cleanliness, obsession with kind of scrubbing, it's something incredibly momentous. I mean, basically it's the birth of the bourgeois domestic ideal that middle classes across the West and indeed increasingly across the world are now wedded to. And it has its birth here in Amsterdam.

Okay. Let's move on to the next location in just a second. So we are going to be moving on to the Royal Palace now. Very exciting. So let's go there. Right. So I mentioned how these houses on the canals need a lot of wood and support. The Royal Palace, which is back on Dam Square. square i mean that really does require an awful lot of wood and we're going to look at it now so tom you were just talking to me about wood that was very exciting i was um and we've moved back to um dam square where we began and we're facing this enormous building and i believe you're going to say talk to me some more about wood yes so this this was the um the town hall that was opened by andres de graff's brother cornelis right um on the 29th of july 1655 and when it was built it was by miles the largest building in amsterdam in fact it

was one of the largest buildings in europe i think saint peter's in rome the scorial the dojo palace in venice were basically the only buildings that could rival it so it's a very very large kind of 17th century palace basically pretty monumental yeah it is and the total number of wood required to support this because it's basically floating on a bog right 13 659659 pieces of Scandinavian timber. Right, crikey. And this was the town hall. So it was a monument not to a king or a royal family, but to sort of civic virtue. To civic virtue.

And so inside, it is decorated with all kinds of improving murals. So you've got scenes from classical history, obviously scenes from the Bible, illustrating patriotic sacrifice, incorruptibility, civic virtue, lots of comparisons being made between Amsterdam and ancient Israel. That's one thing you haven't mentioned that I was going to ask you about. So people in the Dutch Republic, they do have a sense of themselves as a kind of chosen people, yes, absolutely. They do. And, and also it's rather like the east india house which is situating amsterdam as the kind of the center of the turning world yeah this is made

manifest inside the the city hall because you have a great map of the world there with amsterdam absolutely at its center and this building becomes the emblem for the greatness, the wealth, the power of Amsterdam and of the Dutch Republic more generally. And so there's a famous encomium that is given by a palpably very, very jealous Englishman, a man called William Algianby, who was a fellow of the Royal Society in the mid 17th century, who said that scarce any subject occurs more frequent in the discourse of ingenious men than that of the marvellous progress of this little state, which in the space of about 100 years, hath grown to a height not only infinitely transcending all the ancient republics of Greece, but not much inferior in some respects, even to the greatest monarchies of these later ages.

The irony is, Tom, that precisely this moment, the 1650s and then the 1660s and so on, the Dutch are fighting wars against the English, winning some of them. And the French in due course. And the French. But of course, they are about to be outstripped by the marvellous progress of an even more admirable state.

Am I wrong? Well, so the English in particular are incredibly jealous of the Dutch. So we have had occasion before to speak of the disgraceful behaviour of the Dutch fleet in raiding the naval dockyards at Chatham, the raid on the Medway. So there is absolutely Anglo-Dutch rivalry throughout the 1650s under Cromwell, throughout the 1660s under Charles II.

And then, of course, under James II, who's a Catholic, the Stadtholder, William III, who we talked about while we were standing outside Andries de Graaf's house. Yes. You know, he's a little boy when his dad dies of smallpox. But by 1688, he's the most impressive protestant leader in europe and basically 1688 he launches an invasion of england yeah he occupies london and it's effectively a merger between amsterdam and london between the two great capitalist engines this is not really a conquest is it in the set he's been invited by kind of weak oligarchs.

And there is a real sense of a kind of merger of the sort of the wealth, the manpower, the resources of England, the naval resources and so on with the naus, the financial innovations, the sort of civic culture, the ambition of the Dutch. Yeah. I mean, you see the influence of dutch in all kinds of english maritime words so yacht is a dutch word right blunderbuss schooner all that kind of thing so the influence of dutch capitalism and dutch globalism on the english is enormous both as an inspiration and as a kind of rivalry and so basically by the the late 17th going into the 18th century, there's a sense in which the English are doing to the Dutch what the Dutch had done to the Portuguese.

That's karma, Tom. But I want to ask you, we're in Amsterdam, we'd be talking about Amsterdam, but what about New Amsterdam? So that's what becomes New York. So is that a kind of symbol of that? Yeah, absolutely. Because New Amsterdam is a Dutch settlement, but gets lost to the English by terms of a treaty that ends one of the kind of perennial

Anglo-Dutch wars and becomes New York. So that's the perfect kind of illustration of this process whereby the Dutch East India Company, also on the other side of the world, is increasingly put under the shadow in India of the British East India Company. So in the 18th century, Holland is regressing, isn't it? It's falling down the table of world powers. It is, but there's a sense in which, I mean, it's still fabulously rich. It's still very, very significant center, but I think it is coming to seem less exceptional. So the path blazed by the Dutch is one that others are now following. I mean, one way in which the Netherlands and Amsterdam in particular does remain incredibly significant is that the tradition that was there right the way through

the 16th and 17th centuries of this being a place where you could say and think and publish things that you couldn't do anywhere else yeah that remains a very very kind of vivid tradition the paradigmatic figure who illustrates that is spinoza a jew who famously gets kind of excommunicated by the jewish community here in amsterdam and whose writings they like the touch paper to what Jonathan Israel, the great historian of early modern Netherlands and the Enlightenment, has called the radical Enlightenment. So throughout the 18th century, books that are incredibly scandalous. So the most notorious is a book called The Three Impostors. And The Three Impostors are Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad.

Right. And that's published in Amsterdam. And really, I mean, it's the only place where you could publish it. Yeah. And that's drawing on the legacy of Amsterdam, not just as a great capitalist entrepot, but it's a place where people from other countries come to explore and express ideas that can't be explored and expressed elsewhere. Yeah. So Descartes, we've mentioned already.

Descartes spends... Tom, they're loving you. They love it, yes. The people are applauding over there. Descartes comes here. Thomas Hobbes is published here. Locke comes here. Yeah.

So there is absolutely a sense in which this remains kind of, in intellectual terms, you know, incredibly important. And so when in the second half of the 18th century, you get first the American Revolution and then the French Revolution, there is a sense in the part of people in amsterdam who feel well this is an expression of of stuff that we started right but then they end up fighting the french don't they the french invade in what 1795 well actually kind of less than you would think because there's such enthusiasm first for the American cause, um, against the British very shameful behavior on the part of the, of the Amsterdamers.

Yeah. But then in, in the, in the French revolution, large numbers of people in Amsterdam are on the side of the French revolutionaries to the degree that the, the stat holder who's still, you know, a descendant of William the silent, um, the house of orange, he goes into exile in england and um dutch revolutionaries in amsterdam proclaim a republic so it becomes the batavian republic after the batavians who are the kind of the ancient people who lived in this vicinity um back in the early roman times and the french invade the d Dutch revolutionaries rise up, and it's a little bit like 1688 in reverse.

It's both an invasion and a revolution and a merger. So the Batavian Republic is proclaimed in January 1795, and the Dutch welcome the French to Amsterdam by hanging tricolours over the canals. So hurrah for the Republic. The Dutch have this indigenous tradition of republicanism that doesn't actually need the French to inspire them. But the French, I'm afraid, then behave very badly.

You astound me. They badly let the Dutch republicans down. Because in 1806, Napoleon installs his younger brother, Louis, as king. Oh, yes. And so Louis moves into the city hall, the town hall. Oh, the building. Over there, which is the great emblem of Dutch republicanism. Yeah.

And he turns it into the royal palace. Of course he does. He's actually surprisingly popular. So he goes to great lengths to learn Dutch. And everybody who's shown me around Amsterdam always tells the same story. My Dutch probably isn't up to recycling it, but apparently his Dutch was very bad. I mean, who am I to cast a stone? And he described himself as Koen van Olland rather than Koen van Holland. So this apparently is hilarious because apparently

he was calling himself the rabbit of Holland. So this apparently is hilarious because apparently it means he was calling himself the rabbit of Holland. I genuinely heard someone saying that in the street yesterday. Right. To a group of tourists.

So it's a great story. Clearly this is the one Dutch story. About Louis Napoleon. Yeah. So he became himself a rabbit rather than the king.

And he was such a good king that he got called Louis the Good. Right. So he sets up the museum that in the long run will become the Rijksmuseum.

Oh, see. So the Rijksm museum is founded by a frenchman which is really something yeah but generally isn't theo our producer loves this he's nodding away he purports to be french but um but napoleon is very contemptuous of this title that that louis napoleon gets of louis the the good um and says that brother when they say of some king or other that he is good it means that he has failed in his rule i'm with napoleon on that actually absolutely well but i think napoleon is saying this because in 1810 he he basically abolishes the kingdom of of the netherlands just resorts into france so amsterdam becomes part of greater france um and then in 1813 napoleon's empire is collapsing the french withdraw Willem comes back from exile the Stadtholder

and is proclaimed king so he's the first Dutch king so the city hall remains the royal palace and it is the royal palace to this day 19th century things speed up but Tom you know what you haven't talked about what?

that the Dutch never talk about what? because they're ashamed what? the loss of Belgium so the Belgian Revolution, when the Belgians cast off Dutch oppression.

But it's nothing really to do with Amsterdam, is it? Well, it's the dark side of the Dutch character, isn't it? No.

They were such hideous overlords that the Belgians couldn't take it. Everything in 19th century Amsterdam, it's still very liberal, Dominic. Very progressive.

So the first railway station is built in... I'm going to put my cards on the table, Tom. I actually prefer Belgium to Holland. I think the food is better. I think the food is better

in Belgium. I love Belgium, but I... The chips are better in Belgium. I love Holland better. Holland has a better name. Go on. Finish your...

Okay. Okay. So railways, First Dutch Railway built in 1839. They've got all of them in Belgium as well. I know, I know, I know.

So actually, although they're built later, the Rijksmuseum and the Railway Central Station are both built by a Catholic. Are they? Yeah, so if you like Belgium, art galleries and railway stations built by Catholics, Amsterdam's got them too. So there you go.

1848, we talked about with Christopher Clarke. He sang about it. He did, yes. That this kind of liberal revolution basically establishes the Dutch constitution that survives to this day. So the Dutch have, at this point, they're a monarchy. They are, and they're still a monarchy.

Yeah. I mean, that's the interesting thing, isn't it? Were it not for the French Revolution and Napoleon, that they would still be a republic. Yeah. So the French Revolution results in the city palace becoming the royal palace. The irony. Yeah.

And then it becomes one of these European cities that are kind of motors of international capitalism and industrialized capitalism in the late 19th century. They've always been a very commercial people, a polite and commercial people. And really where we're sitting now in Dam Square is the perfect exemplification of that. The beehive. The beehive. The beehinkorf. The beehinkorf, Tom. Sorry, sorry. Neither of us, by the way, speak Dutch, but do address all your, as I've already said, address all your remarks to Tom, please, not to me. So it's founded in 1870 as a haberdashery store. But it's rebuilt in 1909, basically to be the Dutch Selfridges.

And in fact, it is owned today by the Selfridges Group. Now, Tom, I do like a department store and I also like a trinket or knickknack or souvenir. A clog, a windmill. I'd like to get a miniature windmill. That's what I'd like to get.

Cheese wrapped up in red wax. Shall we go over there right now let's go and do that and do you have um perhaps a card i've got my wise card your wise my wise app match i'm going to be using the app on my phone i heartily recommend it to our listeners let's go and do that right now so tom here we are and we've actually gone to a different place we went to 100 holland you chose this shop for narcissistic reasons. It literally had my name on it. It had your name on it. Now, we've selected this lovely tin of Holland waffles. Stroopwafel, I think they call them.

I'm going to pay for them, Tom, with something very exciting. I'm going to pay for them with my Wise app. Because the thing about Wise, you can spend in 40 different currencies. And if you're on the go, as you so often are with your travels, and you don't have the local currency in your Wise account, Tom, they were auto-converted at the mid-market exchange rate with absolutely no markups and no hidden fees. Because I hate a markup and I hate a hidden fee. Well, you don't have to worry.

So Wise is the card for me. You're in 100% Holland. You've got your Wise thing. No markups. You're laughing. I literally you don't have to worry. Wise is the card for me. You're in 100% Holland. You've got your wise thing. No markups. You're laughing. I literally couldn't be happier. Right. Brilliant.

Everybody's happy. Let's go and pay for these waffles. Hello. Let's pay for these lovely waffles, please. Yes, please. Thank you.

Just going to pay with my wise app here. That was incredibly convenient, Dominic. Thank you. Thank going to pay with my Wise app here. That was incredibly convenient, Dominic. Thank you. Thank you, Bill. No markups, no hidden charges. Wonderful. That's probably the best transaction I think I've ever done.

So, Tom, we've just moved 10 minutes down the road, and we were talking about the Beehive, the Beienkopf, and the founder of that haberdashery store. The interesting thing about him, Simon Philipp Goldschmidt, he was Jewish. He was. As by the 1930s, almost 15% of the population was Jewish. Right. 15 of the population was jewish right there were 80 000 in amsterdam and the roots of the jewish population in amsterdam go back as so much does in this city to the 17th century right you amaze me so you remember that in the first part we were talking about how uh the beguines and the anabaptists and the mennonites and the Remonstrants and all these various guys are

setting up their own communities and the Calvinist city authorities are kind of legalizing them, kind of not. They're kind of operating. And the same approach is brought to Jewish settlers. And the word gets out to Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, Sephardic Jews, as they're called. And particularly from Portugal, they start moving to Amsterdam. Because this is, of course, the moment at which, in Spain and Portugal, the authorities are moving very aggressively against local Jews. So obviously, Amsterdam must seem, by comparison, a haven of tolerance. Completely. amsterdam must seem by comparison a haven of tolerance completely um so in contrast to the inquisition that you're getting in portugal here within a few years of of jews being allowed to

settle here they are allowed to worship openly and freely so they they can stop pretending to be kind of christian yeah and and openly practice judaism and more and more numbers of of jews from portugal come here and the the area that we in, we're just down from the house that Rembrandt bought, just a few minutes walk down from there. And this became one of, it was kind of like Little Lisbon. Everyone here speaking in Portuguese. And some very famous names came from this community. One of them, Manasseh ben Israel, is the rabbi who went to London to convince Cromwell to allow Jews to return to England. They've been expelled by Edward I.

He's very successful. And probably the most famous name of all is Spinoza, the great philosopher who we mentioned a little bit earlier, the hero of the radical enlightenment. But just going back to Manasseh Ben Israel, the guy who gets the Jews into London, Bevis Marks, which is the first Jewish synagogue to be opened in London in the 17th century, it's rather like the Beguinhof. There's a doorway on a kind of city street and you wouldn't know what was inside unless you went there. But the place that I've brought you to is very very

different because the synagogue here portuguese synagogue as it's still called the eisenoga is on a massive scale it couldn't be less like the big enough because it's it's not inward looking it's a huge monumental building i mean huge and monumental by any standards but certainly by the standards of 17th century amsterdam yeah um so this is what 1675 something like that completed in 1675 and it's designed to look like solomon's temple so it's modeled on the the proportions um given for solomon's temple in the bible inside it's it's incredible i mean it has this massive barrel vaulted ceiling candles everywhere back in the 17th century the floor was made of sand um so an incredible statement about

basically how confident the jews were in the tolerance of the city that had given them host yes that they could advertise their presence in this way without Without fearing any backlash. Without fearing any backlash. Right. And nothing in Dutch life since the 17th century gives them any reason to think that that will change. I mean, they're incredibly well integrated. Yes. But of course, notoriously, and the one thing that everyone around the world knows about what happens in amsterdam in the war is that the germans invade and the jews suffer terrible persecution because of the iconic figure of anne frank right so i was wondering why you haven't picked anne frank's house as one of the as one of your destinations but obviously this building tells the story just as well

um and it's more surprising choice is. This is testament to the success and the integration of Jews into Dutch life. Yeah, so the sense of this being a ghetto, I mean, this was very much where Jews had settled in the 17th century. But by the 1940s, they've scattered out across Amsterdam. So the Franks would be an obvious example of that.

They live out beyond the canals would be an obvious example of that. They live out beyond the canals. And so you might think that that would make it difficult for the Nazis to round the Jews up, but unfortunately not. Basically because of two distinctive features of life in Amsterdam and the Netherlandslands more generally one of which is that as society in the netherlands becomes kind of more culturally complex less monolithically calvinist they develop this concept that in english is called pillarization this idea that there are

different pillars say catholic calvinist um whatever socialist, liberal, that society is considered forming different pillars and that therefore you are catalogued and categorised as belonging to one of these particular pillars. And each pillar has its own institutions, right? Yes. So it's kind of vertical, sort of vertical integration. So it has its own newspapers, schools, banks, radio stations, and the Jews are catalogued in the socialist pillar. Right. So confirming the Nazis' darker suspicions of the Jews.

And that means that they, because they're catalogued, their addresses are on file and they're marked as being Jewish. Oh, right. Crikey. Okay. And the other thing is that the Netherlands has Europe's most counterfeit proof identity card. Right, so you can't escape. So again, there's kind of no escape.

Now, the process by which the Nazis start to persecute the Jews is gradual. So the Germans declare war on the Netherlands on the 9th of May, 1940. I mean, the Dutch, they don't have tanks. They have two cyclist regiments. Sorry, I saw a slideshow in the Anne Frank house. They had two tanks, the guide said, one of which was broken. Yeah. And they had a regiment of, yeah, those regiments of cyclists.

Who were incredibly brave. Right. I mean, they suffered terrible casualties. Yeah. And of course, the reason that the Netherlands surrenders is that Rotterdam gets, the center of Rotterdam gets bombed. Yeah. And the surrender is basically, I suppose, what saves Amsterdam because otherwise the

same fate might have been visited on Amsterdam. So the Germans occupy Amsterdam on the 15th of May. So that's, you know, less than a week after the declaration of war. And to begin with, because the Dutch are seen as being Aryan, they are part of the racial community that the Nazis are celebrating, the repression in the Netherlands is not as bad as it might have been. And even Jews are not immediately targeted. So there's that famous footage, again, I'm sure you must have seen it in the Anne Frank house, of the wedding wedding party which is waving from a window she's waving from a window so it's it's possible

for for jews to be seen in public but there's this kind of classic ratchet effect you know yeah jewish teachers get dismissed and then counselors and more and more prohibitions get uh get brought accelerated version of what they'd already done germany i suppose completely but one of the most striking things that happens in amsterdam one of the most heroic episodes get brought in. Accelerated version of what they'd already done in Germany, I suppose. Completely. But, one of the most striking things that happens in Amsterdam, one of the most heroic

episodes in the entire history of the city, is marked by a statue over there. I'll just point, it's kind of large, I mean, a fat looking gentleman.

Yeah, sturdy, I think. Sturdy gentleman, yes. And this is a statue of a docker, a worker, to commemorate the extraordinary thing that happened in February 1941

when the unions in Amsterdam staged a general strike. And in part, this was a protest against Dutch citizens in general being moved to Germany to do forced labor. But it was also specifically a protest against what was happening to the Jews so Lou de Jong historian of Amsterdam describes this as the first and only anti pogrom strike in human history right and of course it's it's a strike that is held by people who assume that the authorities will play by rules that have been laid down in Dutch society for many, many decades. But the Nazis are not playing by these rules. And indeed, the structures of

bureaucracy are there to be exploited, not to be followed. Well, because there are lots of people who collaborate with the Nazis, though, aren't there? I mean, when Anne Frank is finally, when the Franks are finally shipped off to the camps, it's because of when the Dutch police are involved with that. Yeah. And actually actually Jews in Amsterdam also become complicit. You know, they're kind of forced into this awful situation. It's a bit like in the two episodes we did with Jonathan Friedland. Yeah. Jews in positions of authority are trying to negotiate with the Nazis,

but are basically being kind of drawn to collaborate. And because the Nazis have access to all these files, these addresses, the identity cards, it's incredibly difficult for Jews to escape. And so hence Anne Frank hiding in the attic. But the fact is that of all the countries occupied by the Nazis, the Jews in the Netherlands had the lowest survival rate. So three out of four Jews who are living in the Netherlands, Jewish, Dutch men and women and children die. Then they're taken to the camps.

So that population of 80,000, 58,000 are killed. Right. And obviously the scale of the human tragedy, which has been so profoundly articulated by the survival of Anne Frank's diary gives a human face to it. So the horror of, of, of what happens to the Jews is personalized in Amsterdam in a way that perhaps it isn't in any other city occupied by the Nazis. I don't know whether you'd agree. I would agree with that. Yeah. But I think on top of that, what gives it an extra dimension of horror is that basically

Nazism is pretty much the opposite of everything we've been describing that characterizes the civilization of amsterdam in the modern period internationalist liberal tolerance let live kind of approach yeah which the nazis are having none with and for amsterdam what sets the final seal on the horrors of the war years is that in the winter of 1944 and 45, when the rest of Europe in the West, so France and Belgium and so on, have been liberated, Holland isn't liberated. It's a bridge too far, the failure of the Battle of Arnhem. And that winter is unbelievably terrible. So the Dutch remember it as the honger winter. The honger winter.

And we're sitting outside a flower shop and the Dutch are famous for their gardens. And many people in Amsterdam were reduced to subsistence on the kind of bulbs. Yeah, it's a pretty grim story. The scale of the famine was terrible. And so coming out of the war, I think the impact of the war on the city that Amsterdam becomes in the post-war period, they choose Amsterdam for that. I think that the character of the city, the liberal city,

is massively, massively informed by the horrors of what happened in the war. Well, before we get on to the liberal city, I'll just say we will definitely return to the story of Anne Frank because I think it's such a heartbreaking story, both in itself, but also as a way into discussing the experience of the Jewish population of the Netherlands and indeed of Europe in the Second World War. So I'm sure we'll return to that

at a future point. But I know, Tom, you're very keen to end the episode by talking about Amsterdam's transformation into the most liberal city, arguably in the world, the crucible of kind of 60s liberalism. And so now we will retrace our steps

back towards the old heart of the heart of the city and uh tom holland will be venturing into the red light district so let's go let's go so tom we've now walked back from the portuguese synagogue into the the old heart of the city so we're the place where amsterdam was founded and i think it's fair to say this is not the part of the city that i would choose to come on a family friendly break and yet i mean as you say deeply historic so the udekirche the the oldest church in the in the city is just around the corner yes and the street names many of them are redolent of medieval catholic piety yeah so we're just standing next to uh grau monik and kluster the cloister of the gray monks that's your lovely dutch again thank you um but the reason that you wouldn't uh

bring people on a family holiday is that this is the epicenter of the the kind of the liberal dutch attitudes to prostitution and to drugs. Yeah. For which Amsterdam is probably, it's probably the most famous thing about Amsterdam. It is, exactly. More famous than Rembrandt, more famous than the canals. When you say you're going to Amsterdam. More famous than the glories of 17th century culture.

This is what people think of. And I just want to make it absolutely clear for the listeners. I suggested that we walk to look at some more merchant's houses. But Tom said, no, let's record the next bit opposite a massive neon sign saying, sex pass. So when I was in the Brexit passport queue yesterday and the guy behind the counter saw I was British and asked me in very suspicious tones what I was doing here,

because I think that so many British tourists come here on stag do's, that there's a kind of move by the Dutch authorities. Tom, don't say this the wrong way, but you're a trifle old for a stag do. Well, I said I'm here due to my love of 17th century Dutch culture. He waved me through. But Dominic, the reason that I wanted to bring you here, particularly, you know, coming off the horrors

that we were discussing by the Portuguese synagogue, is that I think that there is absolutely a case to be made that this kind of hyper-liberalism in attitudes towards sex and drugs and indeed to immigration is absolutely a reflection of the trauma that Amsterdam went through in the war. But I think you could also argue that the roots of 1960s liberalism and the aftermath of that go back even further. Because throughout these two episodes, we've been talking about this distinctive attitude in amsterdam yeah whereby things are allowed to operate on the kind of the margins of the legal and the illegal yeah so we've been talking about you know catholics and calvinist amsterdam

various assorted religious minorities and in a way the attitudes to kind of the sex and drugs here in the red light district is a kind of legacy of that so there's a continuity between this place the sex palace that you very kindly brought me to and the beguine hoff the beautiful kind of courtyard yeah with the almshouses yeah because it's basically we're going to turn a blind you know the thing about turning a blind eye to to ensure civic unity yeah i mean you would think that the Begainhof, a place devoted to, you know, charity and sexual continence and a sex palace, there could be no greater contrast. But actually, I think they are expressions of something that is a kind of continuity in the

civic culture. But I do think it is specifically a kind of determination to repudiate the legacy of Nazism okay so you see this very clearly in the kind of the radical approach to gay rights which emerges almost immediately after the war so in 1946 um it's in amsterdam that you get the world's first organization to advance gay rights um 1964 the chairman of that organization goes on national tv and is the first kind of openly gay person to appear on dutch tv right and you know the 60s across the world there's a kind of cascade effect of of liberalization but in the netherlands it's very very radical to the degree that in 2000 the netherlands becomes the first country in the world to legalize same-sex yeah which i can

remember i mean remember at the time when that happened there was a sense in the reporting in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. Yeah, which I can remember. I mean, I remember at the time when that happened, there was a sense in the reporting in the international press that this was a sort of outlandish Dutch anomaly. But of course, the Dutch, as in so many of these post-war things, blazing a trail. So as in the 17th century, so in the 20th and 21st century, Amsterdam remains a city that is kind of setting the beat for the rest of the world. So I think you can also see very clearly a reaction to the horrors of Nazism in the kind of very liberal attitude to immigration. Right. So again, from the seventies onwards, increasing immigration to Amsterdam as indeed across the Netherlands, the notorious coffee, well, notorious or famous, depending on your

attitude, the coffee shops marijuana kind of like catholic chapels in 17th century um amsterdam yeah marijuana isn't legal but it's not banned if it's sold in private establishments so in other words you can't sell it on the streets but you can sell it in coffee shops coffee shops as they call them yeah yeah so this is your beguine half parallel again right yes behind closed doors yes so the dutch who pioneered the idea of privacy yeah so there's a distinct a continuing distinction between private behavior and kind of public morality yes yes and i guess the kind of the the ultimate parody perhaps of that is the women who advertise themselves behind glass windows it's a kind of absolute parody of that kind of that is the women who advertise themselves behind glass windows. It's a kind of

absolute parody of that kind of idea of the Dutch house, the privacy of the house and the kind of interface between the privacy and the public. And the other thing that I think is again, very kind of Dutch, very Amsterdam about the way that, um, sex work is organized in Amsterdam is that the women here are casting themselves not just as feminists, so hence they would call themselves sex workers rather than prostitutes, but they are also very proud of themselves as members of unions.

So in the 80s, there was a kind of an organization called the Red Thread that was an advocacy group. Lots belong to trade unions. Condoms are tax deductible. All this kind of, I mean, it's very, very Amsterdam. I don't know if you saw Harry and Paul, the Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, and they have a brilliant kind of evocation of this. I think this idea of what Amsterdam is like abroad.

It's Captain Stefan van der Hathgracht of the amsterdam police and it's a poor white house and it's you know it's they have handcuffs purely for sex games and uh right we're in danger of you doing the entire sketch now tom but i think it kind of sums up an idea of amsterdam as anything goes kind of place which is the perception certainly in britain i mean it's obviously just a short hop from britain and that's why it's such a massive stag do destination is people go because they think of amsterdam ironically a calvinist place the place of privacy and gentility well not gentility i suppose but modesty and decorum and and self-discipline and all these things but in britain today it is perceived as this hedonistic paradise absolutely and i i think

i mean i think again there is the these kind of tensions that we've been exploring throughout the history of amsterdam that you have uh you know women behind glass windows advertising themselves naked and they will you know if you're smoking in public where you shouldn't they'll come out and scold you um right so have you put that to the test tom i haven't but but the you know the laws are there to be obeyed and you know if you get if you jaywalk in amsterdam you get in trouble it's that kind of it's that kind of the laws are still there it's not a kind of hedonist anything anything goes place and i think the other thing so expressive of this desire on the part of the dutch authorities to to rein back on tourists coming here, snag parties and things, is the sense that liberalism

in Amsterdam has been pushed to limits that even the most liberal city in the world doesn't actually like the end point. Because one of the things about legalizing prostitution and drugs in a world where generally they haven't been legalized is that it enables say the coffee shops or the um the red light district to become the front for criminal cartels i was about to say i mean there's a definite sense of uh of seediness frank of sleaziness about this area to be completely well i mean you know and a sense in which there's always a a gray area where you're sliding into the world of organized crime i mean i think it's more than seediness i think that you know it's foreign criminal gangs have used the

netherlands and certainly amsterdam as centers for kind of mass trafficking of women, mass import of drugs. And that's why the authorities here are trying to kind of rein back on the kind of the giddy liberalism of an earlier age. So there you have the perfect example of the 21st century tensions when you push liberalism to its ultimate extreme. Yes. And I think the most sensitive expression of that is in the dimension of immigration and on the relationship of Dutch liberalism to Islam, because many of the immigrants who've come to Amsterdam are Muslim, and that is obviously part of a tradition that goes right the way back to the Reformation. It's a hen do, Tom. I think some party has turned up. So in the wake of the Holocaust, there was obviously an absolute determination not to in any way imply that there might be a tension between the frameworks of Dutch

liberalism and Islam. And then suddenly, maybe in the wake of 9-11, that flipped because another expression of Dutch culture is the tradition of free speech. And so you have, long before it happened in neighboring countries, you had very outspoken people talking from a kind of liberal perspective. So Pim van Tuijn, who was a gay rights campaigner, said, I'm not anti-Muslim. I sleep with lots of Muslims. I just don't like Islam.

And he got assassinated, not by a Muslim, by, I think it was by an animal rights protester. But then here in Amsterdam, notoriously, another leading liberal figure who was hostile to Islam was murdered and indeed almost decapitated. And that was Theo van Gogh, who was a descendant of Vincent van Gogh. And he made a film called Submission

with a woman called Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was a Somali who'd come here and in a way become a young Muslim woman praying, dressed head to toe in Muslim robes, except that the middle of her body is exposed and it's covered with verses from the Quran. And as she prays, voiceovers are heard of various Muslim women talking about how they say that the Quran and Quranic law has facilitated their oppression. And this was landed as an explosion. So I think that that kind of tension between the dictates of liberalism and Islam,

the anxieties about racism and anti-racism, that kind of knot, which has been one that people in other countries, including Britain, including America, including France, including Germany, have been trying to unpick over the past couple of decades it was in amsterdam that that was kind of first really stressed and there's a sense in amsterdam generally correct me if i'm wrong but that the the city authorities have slightly turned away from the ultra liberalism from the 1960s onwards i think so there's much more anxiety now in 2023 than at probably any point since the 1960s about you know the red light district about drugs about

immigration about all these kind of things and amsterdam again is you could argue a paradigm for what's happening in the western world more generally a turn against what people see as the extremes of kind of hyper liberalism yeah and. And I think that the traditions of liberalism, of tolerance, of globalization, of hyper-capitalism that have been manifest in this city since at least the 17th century are still completely living traditions. And that is why what happens in Amsterdam reverberates across the world. It's full of canals and it's incredibly beautiful, but it's not Venice. It's not a museum piece. This is a city that is still massively influential in the way that Europe and indeed the world thinks. And I think that that is what makes

it such an incredible place to visit. You know, you really are not visiting a museum when you come here. So thank you, Tom. That was, dare I say, a panoramic tour de force. Oh, you're too kind. A real sense of place, sense of the city, and sense of the way in which it has served as this kind of microcosm of so many developments in European and indeed world history. Now, the good news for our listeners, Tom,

is that WISE have created a travel guide to amsterdam that includes many of the locations that you've talked about in today's episode although possibly not the uh the sex palace that we're not the sex palace they'll be they'll be very relieved to hear so to learn more about how you can travel like a historian you can travel like historian tom holland and yet still spend like a local you can spend spend like a Dutchman or Dutch woman. Visit wise.com slash restishistory or click the link in today's description. And on that note, Tom, we say thank you very much. Tom, you're free to go and enjoy the delights of Amsterdam. Thank you very much.

I'm going home. And on that bombshell goodbye goodbye