Deviance and High Risk Mobilization: Religious Networks and the Rescue of Jews in the Netherlands

Why were some communities during the Holocaust able to help Jews evade deportation while others were not? This paper hypothesizes that other religious minority groups were important providers of support. Saving Jews required clandestine organizations that were vulnerable for betrayal and infiltration. Minority churches were able to reduce these risks because religious deviancy worked as a natural screening device that increased commitment of members. Combining registration lists with commemoration books, the author builds a unique geo-coded dataset of Jewish victimization in the Netherlands to test this hypothesis. Spatial regression models of 93 percent of all Dutch Jews demonstrate a robust and negative correlation between proximity to minority churches and deportation. While proximity to Catholic Churches increased evasion in overly Protestant Regions, Protestant Churches formed pockets of protection in parts of the country that were dominated by Catholics. Exploiting within municipality variation and the concentric dispersion of Catholicism in the protestant North from missionary hotbed Delft, enables the author to disentangle this effect of deviance from local level tolerance and other omitted variables for a subset of cases. Local case studies and post-war testimonies also illustrate the validity of the proposed mechanism. This study has important implications for Holocaust studies and the study of social movements in its suggestion that it was the structural position of Protestant or Catholic communities – and not something inherent to either religion – that produced collective networks of assistance to threatened Jewish neighbors.