FOR FIFTY YEARS after 1870 the Netherlands underwent a process of accelerated change, expansion, and prosperity which held good for almost all sections of society. Economic growth and industrialization led to increasing affluence, in which even the lowest strata of the population shared. In the wake of modern capitalism, the social structure assumed many of the characteristics of a class society without losing its traditional features. On the political scene, a process of democratization extended the influence that the middle classes, followed by the working population, were able to exert through mass organizations. Nationalism and strong feelings of national identity went hand in hand with further forms of social segmentation (which later became known as verzuiling or pillarization), as well as with an enhanced international outlook in various spheres. This was also a period of remarkable achievement in the arts and sciences.

When Europe was thrown by the First World War into a deep crisis, which in fact dragged on in many ways until after 1945, this dynamism also slackened in the Netherlands. However, that did not initiate a period of complete Stagnation. Precisely because the Netherlands had remained out of the First World War, the two decades after 1918 can best be characterized as years of consolidation and the gradual development of past achievements along what were by then more or less beaten paths. In the bourgeois and pillarized Netherlands, most Symptoms of the European crisis (the economic depression of the 1930s being an important exception) made themselves felt in no more than moderate form. Partly as a result, and despite the many portents, the invasion by National Sodalist Germany in May 1940 was something few Netherlanders had been expecting, and in any case came as a great shock.

The dynamic course of events after 1870 naturally affected all sections of Dutch Jewry as well. In 1870, following long deliberations, a new religious organization of the Portuguese Israelite and the Dutch Israelite congregations was brought about, reflecting the complete Separation of Church and State promulgated in 1848. Joseph Hirsch Dünner, appointed chief rabbi of the province of North Holland in 1874, was together with the parnasim from the well-to-do ranks of the bourgeoisie, to set a stamp on Jewish religious life that was long to prevail.