Een schandaal van onuitspreekbare schenderij Het scandaleuze als taalfiguur bij Jacob Israël de Haan

The life and work of Dutch author Jacob Israël de Haan (1881-1924) have frequently been labelled ‘scandalous’ – a qualification that reflects both public reaction to his actions and a central motif within his writings. As a gay writer in the early twentieth century, De Haan authored provocative novels exploring homosexual relationships and transgressive intimacy. As a journalist, he repeatedly exposed instances of social injustice and abuse of power. Later, as a vocal critic of the Zionist movement and a defender of ultra-Orthodox Jewish interests in Palestine, he became a polarizing figure in international Jewish politics, which ultimately resulted in his assassination in 1924. Yet beyond these biographical controversies, this article argues that the notion of the ‘scandalous’ functions as a structuring principle in De Haan’s literary and journalistic output. Drawing on theoretical approaches to scandal from literary studies, media theory, and sociology, I argue that scandal should be understood not merely as an effect of De Haan’s work, but as a linguistic figure. Scandal, in his writing, operates not solely at the level of content – through depictions or exposing of taboo, injustice, and social deviance – but, more importantly, at the level of language as a mode of communication that seeks to provoke, challenge, and disrupt dominant conventions and power relations. By tracing how scandal operates as a figure of language across De Haan’s diverse oeuvre, I show that it provides a conceptual thread that binds together his seemingly disparate activities as novelist, polemicist and public intellectual. This interpretive lens offers a deeper understanding of his unorthodox oeuvre, his deeply-felt commitment to the inalienable right to individual freedom, and De Haan’s enduring relevance to questions of identity, dissent and the politics of transgression.