Introduction

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the diamond industry in the Netherlands grew explosively. Even so, the wages of the workers remained low, and working days long, which caused budding social unrest among workers. Eventually, this unrest culminated in the November strike of 1894, when many labourers of the industry put down their tools. Moreover, this strike resulted in the founding of the Algemene Nederlandse Diamantbewerkersbond (ANDB, General Union of Diamond Workers). Following the strike, the ANDB booked several successes, such as changes to the working hours of the labourers, among other things.

While many labourers in the Dutch diamond industry had a Jewish background – around 1890, some fifty percent of Jewish families in Amsterdam were dependent on the diamond industry (Snyder, 2017) – the members of the ANDB were nevertheless diverse: both men and women; people from higher and lower paid and/or educated professions; and Jews and non-Jews joined the ANDB. The data of the ANDB can thus lend us a unique insight into the lives of ordinary, and even subaltern people, such as employed women, labourers in general, and on the history of the Jewish population in Amsterdam.

In 2019, the membership cards of both the ANDB and ADB (Antwerpse Diamantbewerkersbond – the Diamond Workers Union of Antwerp) were digitized by volunteers via the ‘Vele Handen’ project. Diamond workers could obtain such a membership card from their respective unions after completion of their education. The amount of socio-economic and demographic data these cards contained on the members of the unions is extensive: the cards contained information about the names, birthplace, birth date, education, addresses, migration, parents, spouse, and offspring of the worker. Therefore, the database of the ANDB and ADB comprises a unique source to track down the social history of the diamond workers at the end of the nineteenth, and beginning of the twentieth century.

In this data story, our ‘main character’ is Elizabeth Kuit: as we track down a part of her life story using the ANDB-ADB data set, we aim to along the way learn what information the database contains, what this shows about the differing circumstances diamond workers found themselves in, and how such information could be interesting for doing research on people working in the Amsterdam diamond industry at the end of the nineteenth, and beginning of the twentieth century.

For coherence, and in order to trace a ‘consistent’ line through the population in the data set, this data story will focus mainly on those labourers for whom some form of education is registered in the data set. The data set contains information on nine types of education, ranging from sawing (‘zagen’) to brilliant cutting (‘brillantsnijden’) – the latter the education that Elizabeth pursued.

The query below shows some basic personal information about the individuals in the data set. Searching for ‘Elizabeth Kuit’, you will find that she was born in 1908 in Amsterdam and, as mentioned, was educated as a brilliant cutter. Elizabeth had two siblings: a brother (Ephraim – not independently visible because no education was registered) and a sister (Theresia), both of whom also worked in the diamond industry, something that was not unusual.

Birthplace

As seen above, Elizabeth was born in Amsterdam. The people finder above shows that people from various local backgrounds worked in the Amsterdam diamond industry: Jacobus Zeelander, for instance, was born in Borgerhout, while Leonard Smit, like Elizabeth, was born in Amsterdam. There was an abundance of labourers working in Amsterdam that had also been born there: as the query below shows, a large majority of those working in Amsterdam were from there. However, the data also shows that many others were born outside of Amsterdam, and sometimes even outside of the Netherlands, which made the working environment one consisting of people from a wide array of geographical backgrounds.

Gender (division)

Let us go back to our main person of interest: Elizabeth. She was a female working in the diamond industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. The majority of the people in the data set have information about their gender. The graph shows that only 12.3 percent of those individuals were however female, while 70.4 percent was male. There is also a group of individuals for whom no gender is known. However, in future research, it might be possible to assign their gender based on their name (if it is present in this or other data). As the graph shows, Elizabeth was wholly in the minority, with the diamond industry in Amsterdam dominated by male workers. Nevertheless, still around one in six of them were female.

Migration

During their career, labourers sometimes moved abroad, be it for shorter or longer periods of time. Elizabeth, for instance, migrated to Antwerp on the 15th of August in 1930, returning to Amsterdam some three months later, on the 24th of November. People moved to a broad variety of places. If you search the query below you will find that for example Jacob Frankfort went to South Africa, Mozes Finsi to Paris, while Simon Israel Ancona went to America. Further research into their personal lives could examine their motivations to move: did they migrate for work or personal reasons? How much time was generally spent abroad? What happened to those that stayed?

Residencies

The data of the ANDB contains, moreover, information on the addresses of members, if this was available. Because the data is stored in the Linked Data format, it is possible to bind these addresses to a visual map. For now, linkage is only possible for the city of Amsterdam, yet future research could link the addresses of people outside Amsterdam to map out where they lived, in order to closely study the geographical situatedness of these workers. The two queries below show all labourers with one (or more) registered address(es) in Amsterdam: in total, more than 10,000 addresses of people are stored in the database.

If you search for 'our' Elizabeth you will see that she lived on several different addresses: in the Christiaan de Wetstraat, the Diamantstraat, and Rapenburg. Moreover, you can search for her name in the map further below, to see where these addresses were (and still are) located in Amsterdam. The map contains all addresses of individuals on whom address information is available. The red dots represent females, the blue represent males and the black ones represent people of whom the gender is unknown. Searching for Elizabeth’s sister Theresia, you see that she too lived at Rapenburg, meaning that this perhaps was their childhood home.

Education

As mentioned before, Elizabeth was trained as a brilliant cutter. The graph below shows the frequency of the number of years that students took to complete the different forms of education. It shows that the majority of the students studying 'brillantsnijden' needed around two to three years to learn their profession, but there were also outliers, with some labourers taking either longer or shorter. Theresia, the sister of Elizabeth, was trained as a 'roosjessnijder'. The graph for this specific education shows that the majority of the students took around one year less to complete that type of education compared to 'brillantsnijden'.

Nb: the numbers presented represent a range of N+1, meaning that a 0-value of duration stands for the education being completed somewhere between 0 and 1 years (this also goes for the average duration presented in the graph further below, as well as for the values in the people finder even further below).

The figure below contains a comparison (minimum duration – average duration – maximum duration) of all types of education present in the data set. As you can see, the average time that education took ranged from around 1.9 years for ‘roosjessnijden’ to an average of 4.4 years for ‘klooven’. As such, Elizabeth would have taken on average around 2.9 years to complete her education, while her sister would, as mentioned above, have taken roughly a year less on average.

In the query below, you can search for other people for whom information on education is provided by the data. While not for everyone (including Elizabeth and Theresia – with their brother Ephraim sadly having no listed education whatsoever), for many labourers the start and end date of their education is given by the data set.

(Gendered) locality of education

As we know the addresses and education of many labourers, it is possible to map out where persons with different types of education lived in Amsterdam, which we have done below. In this map, you can filter both by gender and by the type of education: it shows, for instance, that female brilliant cutters – like Elizabeth – lived widespread throughout the city. Men educated in 'Klooven', however, for example lived mainly in the south-eastern part of the city. On the other hand, those educated in ‘roosjessnijden’ such as Theresia, were again evenly spread out. The map too shows how some of the particular types of education perhaps had a gendered aspect to them: there are for example very few men educated in ‘roosjessnijden’, while sawing (‘zagen’) is, on the contrary, clearly a male-dominated educational group. Further research might for example focus on the differences between these types of education, and ask questions concerning their contents, setup, or gendered context.

Conclusion

As we hope to have shown, the ANDB-ADB database provides a unique source of information for tracing the social history of diamond workers in Amsterdam at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The digitization of the membership cards in 2019 via the ‘Vele Handen’ project and the Linked Data format has made this information moreover much more accessible for researchers. By focusing on a specific diamond worker, Elizabeth Kuit, and using the extensive socio-economic and demographic data available, we have been able to gain insights into her life, as well as the lives of other diamond workers of the time. The data shows the diverse educational backgrounds of the workers, their migration patterns, and gender distribution. among other things. This information could perhaps be used to further explore the motivations of workers for migration, the role of women in the diamond industry, or the social and economic circumstances of the workers in the Amsterdam diamond industry during this time period, not to mention the large number of people of Jewish descent that resided in this industry. Overall, the ANDB-ADB database is a valuable source of information for understanding the lives of ordinary people, including several subaltern groups, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As for Elizabeth, diamonds were sadly unable to outshine the dark cloud that washed over Europe in the Second World War. Both Elizabeth and her sister Theresia were taken by the German occupiers to the Westerbork concentration camp, after which they were sent to the east – to Auschwitz – where both were murdered on the 21st of September, 1942. Only Ephraim managed to survive the war, eventually living to the age of 84, dying in 1997. Not only are the stories present in this data set stories of social and gender history, and of glittering stones, they are also stories of Jewishness and of genocide. Future research could do well focussing on both - as many more stories are ripe for the telling.