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Introduction
The "von Leers incident" at Leiden University in 1933 was a tiny event in a time of dramatic political and social upheaval. It is best considered not as postmodern microhistory but as a traditional exemplary story that encapsulates significant features of a larger historical moment. In particular, it focuses attention on the point of connection between a professional ethic (adherence to the basic requirement of truthfulness without which there can be no scholarship or science) and a broader individual and political morality.
The incident created a stir at the time and is still remembered in Holland. Outside Holland, however, few people now know of Huizinga's decision, as rector of Leiden University, to refuse the university's hospitality to a Nazi scholar attending an international conference there, on the grounds that he had published an anti-Semitic pamphlet in which he knowingly presented completely discredited popular legends about Jews as though they were historical fact.
I myself learned of the incident from Huizinga's correspondence with his Swiss colleague and admirer Werner Kaegi, the translator of several of Huizinga's works into German and the author of the definitive six-volume biography of Burckhardt. As I began to read the letters that passed between Huizinga and Kaegi, between Huizinga and his colleagues at Leiden and elsewhere in Europe (Henri See, Henri Hauser, and Paul Mantoux in France, Henri Pirenne in Belgium, and Pieter Geyl and Fritz Saxl in London), between Huizinga and the university Board of Governors, between Huizinga and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and between Huizinga and various German colleagues, I was more and more struck by the way the incident seemed to concentrate the most critical moral questions of the scholarly life. I felt that anybody who takes the scholarly or scientific vocation seriously would be interested in the way Huizinga handled himself in this affair, and I resolved to write an account of it.
At that point I learned from a Dutch colleague, J. Th. Leerssen, Director of the Erasmus Institute in Amsterdam, that a full account of the affair had been published in Dutch over a decade ago.l I wrote to the author, Willem Otterspeer, who kindly granted me permission to translate his essay. In making the translation, I had the indispensable assistance...