On the Eve

The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War

Bernard Wasserstein

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781439101698
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

On the Eve is the portrait of a world on the brink of annihilation. In this provocative book, Bernard Wasserstein presents a new and disturbing interpretation of the collapse of European Jewish civilization even before the Nazi onslaught. In the 1930s, as Europe spiraled toward the Second World War, the continent's Jews faced an existential crisis. The harsh realities of the age—anti-Semitic persecution, economic discrimination, and an ominous climate of violence—devastated Jewish communities and shattered the lives of individuals. The Jewish crisis was as much the result of internal decay as of external attack. Demographic collapse, social disintegration, and cultural dissolution were all taking their toll. The problem was not just Nazism: In the summer of 1939 more Jews were behind barbed wire outside the Third Reich than within it, and not only in police states but even in the liberal democracies of the West. The greater part of Europe was being transformed into a giant concentration camp for Jews. Unlike most previous accounts, On the Eve focuses not on the anti-Semites but on the Jews. Wasserstein refutes the common misconception that they were unaware of the gathering forces of their enemies. He demonstrates that there was a growing and widespread recognition among Jews that they stood on the edge of an abyss. On the Eve recaptures the agonizing sorrows and the effervescent cultural glories of this last phase in the history of the European Jews. It explores their hopes, anxieties, and ambitions, their family ties, social relations, and intellectual creativity—everything that made life meaningful and bearable for them. Wasserstein introduces a diverse array of characters: holy men and hucksters, beggars and bankers, politicians and poets, housewives and harlots, and, in an especially poignant chapter, children without a future. The geographical range also is vast: from Vilna (the "Jerusalem of the North") to Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, and Paris, from the Judeo-Espagnol-speaking stevedores of Salonica to the Yiddish-language collective farms of Soviet Ukraine and Crimea. Wasserstein's aim is to "breathe life into dry bones." Based on comprehensive research, rendered with compassion and empathy, and brought alive by telling anecdotes and dry wit, On the Eve offers a vivid and enlightening picture of the European Jews in their final hour.

— 1 — THE MELTING GLACIER

Four Zones

Ten million Jews lived in Europe in the late 1930s. They were distributed among four zones, each with a different history, divergent conditions of life, and, on the face of things, varying prospects for the future. In the democracies of western Europe, Jews had been emancipated for several generations and enjoyed a civic equality that, in spite of the rising tide of anti-Semitism, protected them, for the time being, against any threat to their security. By contrast, in Germany and those parts of central Europe that had already been absorbed into the Third Reich, Jews were in the process of being stripped of citizenship, subjected to discriminatory laws, driven out of the professions, and deprived of the bulk of their possessions, and were under intense pressure to emigrate. In a third zone, comprising all the states of east-central Europe, anti-Semitism, often drawing on deep popular roots, formed a significant element in political discourse and in most countries had been integrated into public policy in the shape of explicitly or implicitly anti-Jewish laws. Finally, in the Soviet Union, where the Jews had been emancipated in 1917, later than anywhere else in Europe (save only Romania), they enjoyed dramatic upward social mobility in the interwar period. But collective Jewish life, whether religious, political, or cultural, was, like other aspects of existence under Stalin, subject to severe restrictions.

In German, the word Judentum means simultaneously “Judaism” and “Jewry.” But in the heart of the European Jew since the Enlightenment a schism had arisen between the conceptions of Judaism as a religion and as a Volksgemeinde, a community based on common ethnicity. In France, since their emancipation during the revolution, many Jews had come to regard it as a cardinal principle that Jewishness was a purely religious category and that in every respect they were as French as other Frenchmen. In Germany, where emancipation had come later and where social relations between Jews and gentiles, even in the liberal Weimar period between 1918 and 1933, were more fragile, matters were slightly different. There, writes George Mosse, a scion of the German-Jewish elite, “there was no either/or—either German or Jew.… Jewishness was not merely a religion but was primarily linked to pride of family, from which it could not be divorced.”¹ In eastern Europe, where boundaries of state and nation rarely ran together, and where most Jews still spoke Yiddish, lived in dense concentrations, and held more closely to their own cultural patterns, Jewishness tended to be seen by Jews themselves as well as by their neighbors as primarily an ethnic category. This was true also in the USSR, where “Jewish” was a legally recognized national distinction.

Like God in France

The democratic zone of interwar Europe was the most comfortable for Jews. But it held the smallest share of the continent’s Jewish population, under a million, or less than 10 percent of the total.

In western Europe, however, the security that Jews enjoyed was no longer quite so automatic or unquestioned as in the past. True, a Jew had been elected prime minister of France in 1936. But the socialist Léon Blum’s victory as head of the left-wing Popular Front was regarded as a mixed blessing by many French Jews. The government’s enemies on the right focused on Blum’s Jewishness and used it, to some effect, as a propaganda bludgeon against the left. Even in the Netherlands, with its long history of Christian-Jewish amity, stretching back to the friendly reception of “New Christians” (Marranos) from the Iberian peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a certain unease entered into the relationship in the 1930s following the arrival of large numbers of refugees from Nazi Germany.

The phrase heureux comme un juif en France (“happy like a Jew in France”) had come to have the proverbial meaning of very happy. But over the previous generation it had often been tinged with irony. At the turn of the century, the Dreyfus Affair had suggested that there were limits to the recognition of Jews as French. Since 1919, with the return by Germany of Alsace and Lorraine to France, French Jews, a majority of whom traced their origins to the two regained provinces, might again feel content to be fully part of the national patrimony. But their enemies now turned the phrase against them, suggesting that the Jews were too happy in France, in other words that they were doing too well, at the expense of others.

Mendelssohn’s Heirs

In its origin, the phrase was a play on the German/Yiddish leben wie Gott in Frankreich, which meant to live very well. Under the Weimar Republic in Germany, Jews looked forward to the consolidation of more than a century of progress toward legal equality and social acceptance in a country and culture in which they felt no less at home than French Jews did in France.

That sense of ease was manifested all over Germany in September 1929, when Jews and Christians alike celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Moses Mendelssohn, father of the Jewish enlightenment and progenitor of a dynasty of bankers, musicians, and scholars who remained a significant force in the culture, economy, and politics of the country. The minister of the interior, Carl Severing, and the leading Liberal rabbi in Berlin, Leo Baeck, were among those who delivered encomia to mark the occasion. At a Sunday matinée concert in Mendelssohn’s birthplace, Dessau, works by Bach and Beethoven were performed in his honor. A representative of the city of Berlin laid a wreath at the philosopher’s grave in memory of a “great fellow-citizen.” His descendants, all now Christians, reserved an entire luxury hotel for three days for a gathering of the clan. The series of events was a symbolic high point of the modern German-Jewish symbiosis.²

One month later, the Wall Street crash marked the start of the world’s descent into depression and war—and the toppling of German Jewry from its pedestal as the most proud, wealthy, creative, and forward-looking Jewish community in Europe.

Immediately upon attaining power in January 1933, the Nazis launched a campaign of terror and violence against Jews and leftists. Synagogue and shop windows were smashed. Jews were killed or beaten up in random street attacks. A nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, met with mixed success. It was followed, however, by the dismissal of almost all Jewish civil servants, including teachers and university professors. Jewish doctors and lawyers were restricted in their professions. State welfare support for Jews was limited. Quotas were introduced for Jewish university students. Such early anti-Jewish measures resulted in at least three hundred suicides.

As early as April 1933, just three months after Hitler’s capture of power, Baeck, who emerged as German Jewry’s leader and spokesman in its final decade, declared, “The thousand-year history of German Jewry has come to an end.”³ Of the half million “Jews by religion” in Germany, about forty thousand fled the country within a year.

The Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jews), with Baeck at its head, secured de facto recognition from the Nazi regime in September 1933 as the representative body of German Jews. For the next six years the Reichsvertretung formed a kind of internal self-government of German Jewry. On the one hand, Baeck and his colleagues sought to shield German Jews from the savage onslaught to which they were subjected. On the other, they found themselves compelled to act in compliance with Nazi orders and to facilitate the orderly execution of Nazi policies. These were, of course, ultimately incompatible functions; but for a time the Reichsvertretung succeeded to some extent in harmonizing them, through its efforts to organize social welfare, education, and cultural activities. While seeking to preserve desperately needed working relationships with the authorities, the Reichsvertretung did not, in the early years, shrink from remonstrance: in May 1934, for example, in response to scurrilous anti-Semitic statements, it dispatched a telegram to Hitler: “Before God and men, we raise our voices in protest against this unparalleled calumny against our faith.”⁴

“Content and Sap”

Eastern Europe had been the heartland of Jewish settlement since the early modern period and remained so until 1939. More than half the Jews of Europe lived in this third zone, comprising the states between Germany and the Soviet Union. While Romania and Hungary also boasted large Jewish populations, one country in this region held an undisputed preeminence in the Jewish world.

Numbering 3.2 million in 1939, Poland’s Jews formed the largest Jewish community on the continent. Although deeply attached to the country, which most of them regarded unquestioningly as their home, Polish Jews were to a considerable degree isolated from the rest of the population, religiously, socioeconomically, and politically. They had their own residential areas, political parties, newspapers, theaters, labor unions, and professional organizations, often operating in their own language, Yiddish. Together these formed the scaffolding of a largely self-contained world within which it was possible, if one chose, to live almost without venturing into broader society.

The Polish Jews formed, in a legal sense, a community, and were so regarded by the rest of society. But they were deeply divided among themselves. Ben-Zion Gold, who grew up in a strictly orthodox family in Poland in the 1930s, recollects that “religious Jews looked on assimilationists with a mixture of pity and contempt.”⁵ Theodore Hamerow, a child of professional actors on the Yiddish stage, records how, as a child in the small town of Otwock, near Warsaw, in the 1920s, he would peep through a chink in the fence on Friday night at the Sabbath celebration of neighboring Hasidim: “They appeared to me almost as strange, almost as exotic as the whirling dervishes of Turkey I had read about or the frenzied worshippers of Jagannath in India. I felt an invisible but insurmountable barrier separated me from them. They and I seemed to belong to two totally different social and cultural worlds.”⁶

The differences were as much matters of class as of ideology. The lawyer, parliamentarian, and Zionist leader Apolinary Hartglas confessed in his postwar memoirs the contempt with which he regarded many of his fellow Polish Jews: “I was offended by their lack of European culture, lack of social graces.… A sheet of glass separated me from them.”⁷

Poland was the main arena in which the conflicting ideological and cultural forces in European Jewry contended for supremacy. Warsaw, with its 381,000 Jews in 1939, the most in any city on the continent, came closest to the status of capital of the European diaspora. Here were the headquarters of the major Jewish political parties, charities, school systems, newspapers, and cultural organs. “Polish Jewry,” according to one of its best-informed contemporary observers, “gave content and sap to all our national, political, and cultural movements. Least affected by assimilation, it remained nationally the most conscious, politically the most militant, individually the proudest of the Jewish communities.”⁸

Advancing Toward Disappearance

The three million Jews in the Soviet Union ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• List of Maps
• Note on Transliterations and Place-names
• Glossary
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Melting Glacier
• Chapter 2: The Christian Problem
• Chapter 3: Grandees and Grandstanders
• Chapter 4: From ‘Shtetl’ to ‘Shtot’
• Chapter 5: New Jerusalems
• Chapter 6: Holy Men
• Chapter 7: Unholy Women
• Chapter 8: ‘Luftmenshn’
• Chapter 9: Non-Jewish Jews
• Chapter 10: The Linguistic Matrix
• Chapter 11: The Power of the Word
• Chapter 12: A People of Many Books
• Chapter 13: Masques of Modernity
• Chapter 14: Youth
• Chapter 15: Utopias
• Chapter 16: In the Cage, Trying to Get Out
• Chapter 17: Camping
• Chapter 18: On the Eve
• Chapter 19: Existential Crisis
• Epilogue: Fates Known and Unknown
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Sources
• Index
• Illustration Credits
• Copyright