In 1913, the Czech-Jewish writer Jeri Langer set out on a spiritual journey that took him away from his acculturated roots in Prague and brought him to the Hasidic world of Belz, Poland. Many years later, a 19-year-old Isaac Deutscher moved in the opposite direction. Raised in an ultra-orthodox Hasidic home in Cracow, Deutscher joined the Polish Communist Party and began stretching the boundaries of Jewish identity with the belief that even heretical Jews remain Jews. Langer and Deutscher represented two shades of the rich complexion of Jewishness in Europe before the Holocaust, a spectrum of identity that ran the gamut from students of the Talmud to followers of Karl Marx. European Jewry numbered some nine million by 1933, approximately 60 percent of the world Jewish population, but less than two percent of Europe’s total population; in a few short years, six million Jews would die as a direct consequence of the murderous policies of the German government and its non-German allies. This chapter explores the shape and scope of the Jewish communities in Europe before the outbreak of World War II in 1939 in order to appreciate fully the diverse Jewish civilization which the Nazis destroyed.
For centuries, Europe had provided the physical space for Jews to live, but the extent to which this space was ever “home” for the Jews remained a contested issue into the twentieth century, and the events of World War II made further discussion moot. Jewish communities had existed in Greece since before the time of Alexander the Great; the earliest Jews in Rome date from 161 bc; and there were Jews in Germany (specifically Cologne) as early as the fourth century ad. Yet for the bulk of their time in Europe, Jews experienced a fragile dynamic—not an inevitably doomed one, but one that was tenuous and plagued by periods of physical assault which threatened annihilation. Segregated from and subjugated by the Christian world in which they lived, Jews constituted a second-class “corporation” utterly dependent on the whims of Christian authorities. By the beginning of the twentieth century, European Jewry still had not put to rest the central question: Would Europe’s Christian population, its leaders and ordinary citizens, ever accept Jews as equals? In the first three decades of what would be humanity’s most violent century, this question framed the existence of all Jews despite significant geographical variations and degrees of intensity.
Geography represented perhaps the most obvious marker of the diversity of the Jews, and there were quantitative and qualitative differences between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds of western, central, and eastern Europe. As table 1.1 demonstrates, on the eve of World War II, over six million of the eight million Jews in Europe lived in eastern Europe—three million in Poland, 2.5 million in the Soviet Union, 756,000 in Romania, 155,000 in Lithuania, 95,000 in Latvia, and 4,500 in Estonia. Germany had the largest Jewish population in central Europe (at 525,000), followed by Hungary (with 445,000 Jews), Czechoslovakia (357,000), and Austria (191,000). In western and southern Europe, the Jewish communities were noticeably smaller, in terms of both percentages and actual numbers (with Britain’s Jewish population of 300,000 and France’s 250,000 Jews as the notable exceptions).
By the 1920s, Jews had become an urban, if not metropolitan group with urban-oriented occupations. External factors more than anything else, specifically longstanding restrictions on Jewish landowning and guild membership that persisted in western and central Europe into the nineteenth century, helped to shape this unique socio-economic structure. In Germany in the 1920s, for example, over 60 percent of Jews engaged in commercial pursuits, with an additional 12.5 percent in public service or the free professions, as compared with 18 and eight percent, respectively, of the general population.1 The trend towards metropolitanization increased during the 1920s so that by the beginning of the next decade, 85 percent of the Jews in Germany were large city-dwellers, 80 percent in Hungary, and 70 percent in Romania. Almost all of Denmark’s Jews lived in Copenhagen, 92 percent of Austria’s Jews in Vienna, and some 65 percent of French Jews in Paris.2 In Greece, the principal center of Jewry was the northern port city of Thessaloniki or Salonika, controlled by the Turks until 1912. There, Jews had found refuge after their expulsion from Spain in 1492, and at 80,000 strong in the early 1900s, they accounted for half the city’s population and nearly three-quarters of its business owners. After 1912, and into the interwar period, when the city reverted to Greek control, a policy of increasing the ethnic Greek population, as well as a spike in antisemitism, resulted in a decline in the actual and relative numbers of Salonika’s Jews.3 In Russia–Poland, the majority of Jews lived in large towns, and some half million (almost one-tenth of the total Jewish population) lived in three cities—Warsaw, Odessa, and Łódź.4 As of 1931, over 40 percent of Polish Jews made their living in industry, while some 37 percent were engaged in commerce and retail trade.5
Poland’s particular place in European Jewish history began at the time of the first Crusade, at the beginning of the twelfth century, when King Boleslav III (1103–39) welcomed Jewish refugees from western Europe. For centuries to come, Poland served as a haven for Jews fleeing persecution, and one of the hallmark features of Jewish demography in the so-called “premodern” or “early modern” period in Europe was forced movement of Jews from the west to Poland in the east. By the eighteenth century, this scenario reversed itself, as the west cultivated a more tolerant space for Jews, and Poland became more unwelcoming. From Britain to the German-speaking regions of central Europe, Jews became one of the beneficiaries of a nascent market economy and an intellectual culture that sought to reorganize society away from superstition and irrationality towards reason and progress. Jews received civic and political rights in return for adopting the national citizenship of their Gentile countries. Jews were to become Germans, Frenchmen, British, and so on, drop their separate national identity and language (Yiddish), and transform themselves into productive citizens. On the surface, the change in rhetoric and legal status of Jews portended a brighter future for Jews, yet antisemitism did not disappear in any realm. Even many of the proponents of emancipating or bestowing rights upon Jews embraced language that belied the notion of Jewish equality, casting Jews as debased and in need of improvement. The often unspoken (often overt) assumption on the part of a good many Gentile leaders was that Jewish identity would ultimately disappear with the acquisition of a non-Jewish national, civic identification.6
For Jews, however, the new reality was not to be a process of group effacement, but rather a process of acculturation and limited structural integration, a process by which Jews could enter the social realm with non-Jews without converting to Christianity and abandoning any sense of their ethnic heritage. The results were new incarnations of Judaism and Jewish identity which imbued Jews with a sense of themselves as both citizens of their respective countries, and members of a faith that emphasized universal values of education and humanitarianism.7
In eastern Europe, with the dismantling of Poland altogether at the end of the eighteenth century, many Jews found themselves under the control of one of the most hostile regimes they had ever encountered, Tsarist Russia. The policies of the tsars confined Jews to a physical space (the so-called Pale of Settlement, which stretched from Lithuania through Poland and into Ukraine), and subjected them to forced conscription, Russification, and physical assault. Economically more backward than western Europe, and generally devoid of a discourse and policy of emancipation, eastern Europe molded a distinct transformation on the part of its Jews. The bulk of eastern European Jews remained more traditional in terms of religious observance, maintained Yiddish as their primary language, and preserved a greater sense of themselves as a separate Jewish nation. Yet change did occur. Hasidism challenged existing rabbinical authority with an emphasis on one’s own connection to God through ecstasy rather than Talmudic learning, and in the nineteenth century, Russian Jews engaged in political activism with a rhetoric of “autoemancipation,” which envisioned Jews, and not the Gentile state, as the agency of civil rights. Within this new framework came Zionism (which advocated a Jewish homeland in Palestine), Jewish folkism (which sought territorial autonomy for Jews in Europe), and Jewish socialism or Bundism (which looked to solve the dual problems of antisemitism and oppression of the working class).8
The shape of Jewish acculturation and the pace of social change among Jews in both eastern and western Europe changed dramatically in the wake of World War I. Testing the very premise of emancipation, Jews demonstrated their loyalty to their respective countries by fighting and dying alongside their non-Jewish countrymen. In Germany, 85,000 to 100,000 Jews mobilized for the war effort, and 12,000 died; 46,000 Jews fought in the French army, of whom 6,500 died; 41,500 British Jews served in the war, with 2,000 casualties; and even in Russia, an estimated 600,000 Jews risked their lives for the hated tsar.9 One revealing matrix into the level of acceptance of Jews in the postwar period was the rise in intermarriages, especially in western Europe. In places such as Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, nearly one-third of all marriages involving a Jewish partner in the 1920s were mixed couplings.10
Jewish participation in cultural forums of all manifestations was vibrant throughout Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century, and it intensified in many ways after the war. The Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah had paved the way for the development of the modern Hebrew language and an accompanying Hebrew and Yiddish literary culture,11 and scholars such as Simon Dubow, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Franz Rosenzweig put their considerable talents to developing new theories of Jewish h...
