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From a foreign perspective, Dutch are quite homogeneous. The only people that are different are people from the colonies, my neighbour is a Dutch woman from Surinam?. The rest are fairly homogeneous (from a foreign perspective). My aunt married a Dutch person that asserted that he was Jewish, but there Dutch govt. had doubts, finally they gave him a pension and my aunt lived thanks to that money until she died, she knew Dutch and became Dutch. Dutch adapt very well, are far more adaptable that Germans, Swedes or English. They are people used to deal with foreigners, far more open. In Bellum Galicum, Caesar praises the Batavians as traders, friendly people, counterposing them with the Churubuscs.
What about the appr. 1 million Muslims that are living here? Relatively speaking, we have just as many - if not more - Muslims as Germany or France. Most come from Turkey or Morocco.
I didn't know the government automatically gave you a pension if you're Jewish? Sounds improbable to me. The Netherlands had quite a significant Jewish population before WW2 and most of them lived in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam dialect is heavily influenced by Yiddish (in fact, the local name for Amsterdam, "Mokum", means "city" in Yiddish). Back in the 16th century, the Netherlands was one of the few countries in Europe that granted relative religious freedom and this attracted Jewish immigrants from all over Europe, especially Spain and Portugal (Sephardic Jews) and Northern Europe/Germany (Ashkenazim). They mostly settled in Amsterdam. Unfortunately, the fact that so many Jews were concentrated in one city made them an easy target for the Nazis in WW2. Around 75% of Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust.
This person, the one married to my aunt, claimed that he was in a KL and that he was tortured, that he lost fingers, a long ordeal....but I remember that Dutch authorities did not believed him...partly because he was a flim flam artists (that's why he was in Spain)...but finally they gave him a pension/compensation that passed to my aunt when he died. Yes, many Sephardim ended in Holland, Spinoza for example. That's the history of Spain, everybody with brains is expelled and morons stay behind and procreate morons.
As to muslims, Turks, Morrocans, I guess that we don't tag them as Dutch, but they don't seem to travel as tourists. Maybe Dutch Morrocans travel to Tarifa to take the Ferry to Morroco.
Seeing some of those pictures alone is enough to make me want to travel to The Netherlands. However, I've always imagined riding a bicycle across The Netherlands.
Acknowledging the distinctive richness (in the European context of course) of the Dutch society, and taking for granted that the Dutch are, broadly speaking, already particularly "German/Germanic," are the Dutch then OTHERWISE closer culturally to Danes, Brits, or the French? (If, for some reasons which you'll make clear, you'd prefer to challenge the German assumption, that might be constructive too.)
Also, one might phrase it this way: Are the Dutch, culturally, more Nordic, Continental or Anglo-Saxon --holding aside the fact that they're obviously quite physically already on the Continent proper (howsoever tenuously!).
They are Germanic. Their politics and culture mostly align with their germanic neighbours. You'll often find the Dutch comparing themselves with other Germanic countries, often excessively.
They are more continental than anglosaxon, but continental itself is an odd term to use considering how diverse Europe is.
Yes they are culturally much more similar to Continental Germanics of Western Europe, but they also share similarities with Insular Germanics (Anglo-Saxon) and Nordics of North-West and Northern Europe.
dutch = germanic like their brothers the flemish in belgium or the neighboring germans (which the dutch don't like too much)
Or their cousins across the North Sea, the English. Northern Dutch people, the Frisians are kin to English. Due to the fact that Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians or the North Sea Germanic group were the people who created the English nation.
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