Dutch lawyer, writer and activist Jacob Israël de Haan was BOTD in 1881. Born in Smilde to an Orthodox Jewish family, he was one of eighteen children, and grew up in poverty, moving frequently as his father looked for work. He grew up in Zaandam, attending a teacher training college in Haarlem, where he broke away from his family’s Orthodox beliefs and joined the Dutch Socialist Party. He moved to Amsterdam in 1902, largely to explore his homosexuality, where he met and formed a relationship with Dutch doctor and writer Arnold Aletrino. Via Aletrino, he discovered the works of queer poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, inspiring his novel Pijpelijntjes (Lines from De Pijp), thought to be the first Dutch-language novel to portray a homosexual relationship. Published in 1904, it ignited a national scandal, resulting in de Haan being dismissed from his teaching position and shunned by his Socialist comrades. Undeterred, he published Pathologieën (Pathologies), an erotic novel about a gay sado-masochistic relationship, making him unemployable. In 1907, he married Johanna van Maarseveen, a doctor eight years his senior, in what appears to have been a union of convenience to improve his public reputation. Abandoning his Socialist principles, he embraced the life of a bourgeois married man, retraining as a lawyer and becoming a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. In 1912, he visited prisons in Russia, publishing a book about his findings, and began a campaign to encourage European governments to exert pressure on Russia to improve prison conditions. In 1910, inspired by the burgeoning Zionist movement, he returned to Judaism and began learning Hebrew. After World War One, he moved to Jerusalem, shortly before the formation of the British-controlled territory of Palestine in 2020. Initially an enthusiastic advocate for Zionism, he later aligned himself with the Haredi Orthodox Jewish community in Palestine, protesting what he viewed as the “tyranny” of Zionism and arguing for a Jewish-Arab confederation. By night, he pursued sexual liaisons with a series of young Arab men, eventually forming a relationship with Adil Effendi, a boy 20 years his junior. Their relationship inspired de Haan to write a series of erotic love poems, Kwatrijnen (Quatrains), which remained unpublished in his lifetime. In 1924, he planned to travel to London, as part of an anti-Zionist confederation to protest the establishment of a Jewish state. Shortly before his departure, he was assassinated by the Haganah, a Zionist paramilitary organisation. He was 42. His murder prompted outrage from British and European governments, with widespread confusion around the identity of his assassin. The revelation of de Haan’s homosexuality (and the publication of theQuatrains) prompted further speculation that he had been killed by “an Arab lover” or even by the Haradi as punishment for his sins. His legacy remains controversial, hailed as both a martyr and a traitor, while the details of his assassination have inspired numerous biographies, critical studies and documentaries. In 1987, a line from de Haan’s poem Aan eenen jongen visscher (To a Young Fisherman), “Naar vriendschap zulk een mateloos verlangen” (“Such an immeasurable longing for friendship”), was inscribed on one side of the Homomonument in Amsterdam, the world’s first public memorial to the victims of LGBTQ violence.