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"1.1 A short biography

Willem Frederik Wertheim was born in 1907 in St. Petersberg (sic) in a Jewish-Dutch family. His father worked there as the director of a local branch of of a Dutch insurance company. After the Russian revolution the company was nationalized and the family returned to the Netherlands.

After secondary school, Wertheim started his law studies in Leiden. The choice for law was motivated by the short duration of its study, taking into account the dire financial straits of the Wertheim family. Wertheim indicated that he was not really interested in the study of law, because it failed to present the law in its social context. He was much more interested in economics, and took an elective course in it after having been fascinated by the lectures of Van Blom, a professor of economics. After graduation in 1929, Wertheim decided to write a dissertation under the supervision of Professor E.M. Meijers, one of the most respected lawyers in The Netherlands. In that time, law dissertations were of a limited size and could be written in a relatively short time. Wertheim’s 183 page long work was certainly no exception to this rule and it was already defended in 1930. Thereafter, Wertheim moved to the Dutch East Indies, where he first worked as a civil servant and was appointed as a professor of law in 1936. After the Second World War an effort of Meijers to provide Wertheim with a chair for civil law on a sociological foundation at Leiden University failed. He therefore accepted a professorship in History and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam, specialising in the study of Asia.