The Oak of the Scheveningseweg Jewish Cemetery

This oak was planted in a burial ground that had already been in use for a century and a half. The Jewish cemeteries on the Scheveningseweg date from the 1690s, opened outside the built up city because that was where the Jewish community of The Hague was permitted to bury its dead, on ground either side of the straight road Constantijn Huygens had laid out three decades earlier to link the city with the sea. The register dates the oak to the 1840s, which puts it a little under two centuries old. Jewish burial custom leaves a cemetery undisturbed once the graves are in place, so ground like this is often the least altered land in an old European city, and trees on it grow up without the pruning, digging and replanting that shapes a park. What came later is not the tree's story, but it is the ground's. The Jewish population of The Hague numbered around seventeen thousand before the war and most of them did not come back. The cemeteries survived. The oak stands inside the wall, in a quiet place that is not open every day, so check the hours before you make the trip.