Wasserstein - On the eve: the Jews of Europe before the Second World War

BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

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Britain and the Jews of Europe 19391945

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Divided Jerusalem

Israelis and Palestinians

Barbarism and Civilization

THE JEWS OF EUROPE BEFORE THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Bernard Wasserstein

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

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Copyright Bernard Wasserstein, 2012

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To Shirley

The historians essential creative act is the resurrection of the dead.

Simon Dubnow

Note on Transliterations and Place-names

In general, I have used the standard Encyclopaedia Judaica and YIVO systems for transliterations from Hebrew and Yiddish respectively. But I have not hesitated to diverge from these where it seemed sensible. Believing with T. E. Lawrence that scientific systems of transliteration are helpful mainly to those people who know enough not to need helping, but a washout for the world, I have tried in this sphere to do what will be most helpful to the English-speaking reader without worrying unduly about the hobgoblin of consistency.

badkhn (Yid.)/badkhan (Heb.) jester and master of entertainments at weddings

badkhones the repertoire and performance of the badkhn

besmedresh (Yid.)/bet hamidrash (Heb.) study hall

bris (Yid.)/brit (Heb.) circumcision

dybbuk an evil spirit

Evsektsiia Jewish sections of the Soviet Communist Party

get religious bill of divorce

gymnasium academic high school

hachsharah (pl. hachsharot) (lit. preparation), training farm

halachah Jewish law

halutz (pl. halutzim) (Zionist) pioneer (in the Land of Israel)

Hasidism popular religious movement, founded in the eighteenth century, with a large following in eastern Europe (hence Hasid, Hasidim)

haskalah Jewish Enlightenment

hazan cantor

heder (pl. hadorim) religious elementary school

humash Pentateuch

kaddish prayer for the dead

kapote long black, generally gaberdine coat

kehillah (pl. kehillot) community

korenizatsiia nativization/indigenization (policy in USSR in 1920s)

luftmensh (Yid.)/Luftmensch (Ger.) lit. man of air, impractical person with no definite occupation or visible source of income

magid wandering preacher

matzah (pl. matzot) unleavened bread (eaten at Passover)

melamed (pl. melamdim) teacher

mezuzah (pl. mezuzot) door amulet, encased parchment containing holy writ

mikveh (pl. mikvaot) ritual bath

minyan quorum of ten adult males required for Jewish prayer

misnagdim opponents (of Hasidism)

mitzvah (pl. mitzvot) commandment, good deed

mohel (pl. mohalim) ritual circumciser

nigun tune

rebbe leader of a Hasidic sect

seder festive Passover dinner

Sejm lower house of Polish parliament

semikhah rabbinic ordination

shames (Yid.)/shamash (Heb.) sexton of a synagogue

shechitah kosher meat slaughter

shochet kosher slaughterer

shtetl (pl. shtetlakh) small town

shtibl (pl. shtiblakh) Hasidic conventicle

shund trash (esp. literary or theatrical)

soyfer (Yid.)/sofer (Heb.) scribe

talmud torah religious school

tefillin phylacteries

tish table (esp. at the court of a Hasidic rebbe)

Torah Pentateuch, the Hebrew Bible, the body of Jewish law

tsedoko (Yid.) charity/tsedakah (Heb.)

yeshiva (pl. yeshivot) talmudical college

yeshiva bokheryeshiva student

A specter haunted Europe in the 1930sthe specter of the Jew. Simultaneously feared and despised as a Christ-killer, a devil with horns, subversive revolutionary and capitalist exploiter, obdurate upholder of an outmoded religion and devious exponent of cultural modernism, the Jew was widely regarded as an alien presence. Increasingly excluded from normal society and extruded from common human fellowship, the Jew was transmogrified from fellow citizen into bogey, a subhuman, at best an inconvenience, eventually almost everywhere a hunted beast. Even before the outbreak of the Second World War, this was true not just in those areas of Europe already directly ruled by the Nazis but over the greater part of the continent.

In the 1920s the European Jews had presented the appearance of a vibrant, dynamic, and flourishing people. For the first time in their history they were recognized as citizens in every country in which they lived. Especially in western Europe and the Soviet Union, an ambitious, meritocratic middle class was rapidly climbing the social ladder. The best-educated ethnic group in Europe, Jews shone in all fields of science, dazzled in the theater and literature, and constituted the beating heart of musical life. But this book does not rehearse what are often called the contributions of Jews to European culture and society in this period. That is a familiar story.

Within the short space of two decades a dramatic change transformed the Jewish position. By 1939, two years before the Nazi decision to commit genocide, European Jewry was close to terminal collapse. In much of the continent Jews had been deprived of civil rights and were in the process of being turned into outcasts. The demographic outlook was bleak, heading in a downward spiral toward what some contemporaries forecast would be race suicide. The great mass of Jews in east-central Europe were sunk in dire povertyand sinking further into total immiseration. A nation of shopkeepers, the Jews found themselves superfluous men, both in a Soviet Union that had abolished the marketplace and in militantly nationalistic states that complained of Jewish dominance of it. The USSR at least allowed the Jew to change from