I know the Wandering Jew legend owes its existence to antisemitism. Does the Flying Dutchman owe its existence to anti-Dutch sentiment?
When I was younger, I actually had this theory, if you will indulge me for just a moment. The Dutch were always thought as being liberal and enlightened. The English Pilgrims in fact first went to Amsterdam for its religious freedom. (They only left when they feared their daughters were all being married off to Dutchmen–you know the story.) Even now, Amsterdam is the pinnacle of liberal thought. It is one of the few places in the world where prostitution is legal.
Could this all be no accident? Or am I just barking up the wrong tree?
Anyways, I am not posting this here to justify a position. I am posting it to ask a question: Why was the Flying Dutchman, Dutch? Was it just coincidence or something more? Inquiring minds want to know.
Basically, it all stems from a report in the late 1700s of a Dutch ship which founders in a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, part of a Dutch colony at the time. Nothing to do with opinions about the Dutch, per se.
There are many places in the world where prostitution is legal.
The Dutch were not always thought of as liberal and enlightened; until relatively recently they were a bye-word for stifling Calvinist bourgeois respectability. (In fact the word “bourgeois” was coined to describe them.)
The pilgrim fathers did not seek, and did not themselves establish, “religious freedom”; if they went to the Netherlands it was to find a religious establishment which would be favourable to them.
I don’t know that I would call the “Wandering Jew” anti-Semitic. There a passage in one of the gospels where Jesus says something like “What is it to you if I want him to remain alive until I return?” I think it’s in John, and he says it to Peter in reference to “the Beloved Disciple.” It’s some kind of foreshadowing of Peter’s martyrdom, I think, and also evidence that if this passage is authentic (that is, if it can be traced back to Jesus, or at least the year ~33CE, then it’s pretty good evidence not that Jesus intended to make someone essentially immortal, but that he expected to come back within the natural lifespan of an adult-- or that whomever put the words in his mouth had that expectation.
However, once it became obvious that Jesus was not coming back in anyone’s natural lifetime, the idea that Jesus was referring to someone anonymous, and that this anonymous person is still alive, albeit, ancient, became current. The story morphed more over the years, sort of the way that Mary Magdalene became a prostitute from a couple of lines in the gospels that definitely don’t mention her source of income, to a story about a guy cursed to remain alive until the second coming. I think this part of the legend developed in the late middle ages.
I suppose anything that owes its origin to the gospels isn’t going to be especially pro-Jew, but as far as medieval Christian anti-Semitism goes, this is very mild.
On further reading, I’m going to have to climb down a bit; the word was not originally coined for that purpose.
But I believe it’s pejorative sense of conventionally respectable, unimaginative, selfishly materialistic, conformist, dull does come from the Netherlands, where French speakers and (mostly lower class, rural) Catholic Flemings used bourgeois/burgerlijk to refer disparagingly to the tastes and habits to the largely Calvinist . . . well, the largely Calvinist bourgeoisie. So I think that where the pejorative sense of the word came from. In didn’t enter English in taht sense until the eighteenth century.
The converse term applied by the Calvinists to the Catholics, for the record, was “Burgundian” - meaning, possessed of the traits pejoratively attributed to the Burgundian rulers of the Netherlands in the fifteenth century - too much given to feasting and partying; valuing beauty, art, etc over commerce or efficiency; living for the day and not thinking about tomorrow; etc - fun but feckless. basically. Whereas to be burgerlijk was to be neither fun nor feckless.
It isn’t. It’s from the French, and it’s older (in French) than Calvin. On a parallel point, though, it should be noted that citizen (or cit) has a history in English of meaning “Roundhead”.
The pilgrim fathers did go to the Netherlands. It is established history. They went there to escape the stifling religious control in their native England. However, they did not go necessarily for freedom themselves. Rather, they found the freedom of the Netherlands to be too free. They wanted a theocracy, just one where they were the ones on top. I don’t know how much of a role the marrying off of their daughters was involved - that might have been one of the aspects of laxness that bothered them.
The Pilgrims were Calvinist Separatists, rather than the Calvinist Puritans of the Netherlands. The Calvinists of the Netherlands might have been uptight compared to other groups in Europe, but they were much more open to the Pilgrims than the English state church. There was a lot of “live and let live” going on in the Netherlands by then that wasn’t happening in England.
Whether that is from intermingling with Dutch, or whether it is the culture of the surrounding population “corrupting” the youth as they assimilated, is hard to tell. Probably both played a role.
