Wijnkoop, David
WIJNKOOP, DAVID
WIJNKOOP, DAVID (1876–1941), Dutch Communist. Born in Amsterdam, Wijnkoop was the son of the Amsterdam rabbi Joseph David (1842–1910), who manifested himself as a "rebbe of the people," a position, which led to a serious break with the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, J.H. Dünner (1833–1911). This conflict was one of the factors which turned his son, David, into a rebel. David Wijnkoop, future first leader and talented propagandist of Dutch Communism, was attracted to Marxism as a student. At first he joined the Labor Party (sdap) and in 1905 he became a member of its executive. But as one of the founders of the radical-Marxist newspaper De Tribune he was expelled from the party. In 1909 Wijnkoop founded his own social democratic party, initially called the Social Democratic Party, which became the Communist Party of Holland (cph; later: cpn) in 1918. He was the cph's chairman and sat in the Second Chamber of parliament from 1918 to 1940 as a Communist representative. He was also a member of the Amsterdam municipal council and the North Holland provincial council. Between 1925 and 1930 Wijnkoop became involved in a heated party struggle and was dropped by Moscow. He then founded an independent Communist Party. In 1930 the two parties fused after Wijnkoop publicly confessed his guilt.
Though David Wijnkoop is said to have expressed his support for the Second Zionist World Congress, in 1898, this sympathy was short-lived. In 1903, in protest against the *Kishinev pogrom, the Dutch Zionist Movement and the Labor Party (sdap) each organized a protest. It was Wijnkoop who, on behalf of the sdap, gave a Marxist interpretation of the Russian anti-Jewish violence. According to him the pogrom was both an expression of the conflict between peasant and moneylender, and an instrument of the czarist regime to suppress the revolutionary tide.
After his comeback in 1930 Wijnkoops position within the cph was fairly weak. He died in May 1941, a few months after the February strike against the Nazis in Amsterdam, and was accompanied to his grave by hundreds of people.
bibliography:
A.J. Koejemans, David Wijnkoop. Een mens in de strijd voor het socialisme (1967); L. Giebels, De zionistische beweging in Nederland 1899 – 1941 (1975); S. de Wolff, Voor het land van belofte. Een terugblik op mijn leven (1978); A.F. Mellink, in: Biografisch Woordenboek van het Socialisme en de Arbeidersbeweging in Nederland, 1(1986) 155–59; H. de Liagre Böhl, Met al mijn bloed heb ik voor u geleefd. Herman Gorter 1864 – 1927 (1996); E. Gans, De kleine verschillen die het leven uitmaken. Een historische studie naar joodse sociaaldemocraten en socialistisch-zionisten in Nederland (1999); J.W. Stutje, De man die de weg wees. Leven en werk van Paul de Groot 1899 – 1986 (2000); Gt Voerman, De meridiaan van Moskou. De cpn en de Communistische Internationale, 1919 – 1930 (2001).
[Evelien Gans (2nd ed.)]