Career
He has had a significant impact on Dutch law, and is also known for his battle for (legal) emancipation of the Dutch Jews. The Jonas Daniel Meijerplein, a square in Amsterdam (where Meijer died), was named after him. Bordering the square are the Esnoga and four former synagogues, now together home of the Joods Historisch Museum (Jewish Historical Museum).
The Dokwerker monument on Jonas Daniel Meijerplein commemorates the February strike of 1941, a general strike by many (non-Jewish) people of Amsterdam and surrounding cities after the arrest and deportation of 425 Jewish men from Amsterdam to Mauthausen and Buchenwald following a clash between Nazi police and two Jewish men a couple of days earlier.
Jonas Daniel Meijer was born into a well-to-do Jewish family at Arnhem. Meijer"s father was a German Jew, who hailed from the city of Hamburg.
At a startling young age, Jonas learned to read and was taught French and English by a private teacher. Although he was brought up with Hebrew as the liturgical language of his religion, Jonas also managed to learn Latin at the age of 5.
On 15 November 1796, at the age of just 16, Jonas Daniel Meijer took the lawyer"s oath, becoming the first Jewish lawyer and one of the youngest lawyers in the history of the Netherlands.
The small practice however gave Meijer ample chance of increasing his law expertise, specifically by studying the law of many countries, earning him fame across the European continent.
