Abel Jacob Herzberg (17 September 1893 – 19 May 1989) was a Dutch Jewish lawyer and writer, whose parents were Russian Jews who had come to the Netherlands from Lithuania.

Herzberg's father, a Zionist who traded in diamonds, was active in aiding Jewish migrants on their travels to the United States; the history of the Jews as well as the contemporaneous diaspora were frequently discussed in the family.

He was sensitive to misery, and subject to bouts of world-weariness; his religiosity, though, became mostly rationalised and abstract, especially since, contrary to his childhood expectations, the Messiah had not come: in 1915 he wrote Victor E. van Vriesland, "God is dead".

[3] In 1918, Herzberg obtained his doctoral degree in law from the University of Amsterdam, and in his dissertation posited that the Jewish people should have a homeland in Palestine.

He settled in Amsterdam to practice law, became president of the local chapter of the Zionist union, and in 1922 became a Dutch citizen, giving up his Russian citizenship.

[4] In Germany, Wilhelm Spiegel, the husband of his wife's sister, was shot by Nazis on 12 March 1933, which confirmed Herzberg's forebodings of the growing danger to European Jewry.

In the play Vaderland (1934), he alludes to the murder of his brother in law and warns of violent Nazi antisemitism and the state of denial felt by many German Jews.

[2] By 1940 he was in charge of a youth institution in Wieringen, where Jewish youngsters, mostly from Germany, were prepared for migration to Palestine, but the Germans closed this in 1941.

Herzberg moved back to Amsterdam to run a newly-opened school for his pupils from Wieringen, but was filled with pessimism about the future.

The Herzbergs moved to Blaricum, and he contemplated going into hiding but soon realized he could not tolerate the psychological burden; nor could he stomach the thought of endangering others.

Because by now, belatedly and almost miraculously, Herzberg and his wife had received a permit to enter Palestine because of his work in the Zionist movement, he was allowed to choose emigration.

By the end of April, Herzberg and his wife were notified they would leave soon, but for unknown reasons they were left off the final list; as he said later this was his nadir, the greatest disappointment of his life.

[5] His daughter Judith later said that they were lucky to be reunited, but that her father spoke of nothing but the war, Palestine, and Zionism; for him, the question was how to cope with how humanity had become so debased, and how to continue to live meaningfully after mankind proved how deep it could sink: the problem was not so much guilt but rather the source of this evil.

[2] He agreed with the verdict, though he was not happy with it, and proposed that the Israelis drop Eichmann with a parachute from a plane over Bavaria, to hand him back over to the Germans: "you can have him".

[6] He returned to Israel for De Volkskrant during the Six-Day War in 1967, but by the turn of the decade had become more critical of the country; he positively loathed the government of Menachem Begin that followed the Likud victory of the 1977 Israeli legislative election.

[2] Amor fati, a collection of essays on the war and the Germans, first published in De Groene Amsterdammer, won the Dr. Wijnaendts Francken-prijs in 1949.

Since 1990, an annual lecture (organized by Trouw and the discussion center De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam) commemorates Herzberg and his legacy of Jewish humanism.