The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 Read Online Free PDF

you would not go to your grave without disgracing yourself, you old nitwit…. It is to be regretted that the gangsters in Germany did not put you into a concentration camp, that’s where you belong.” 10

    Some basic distinctions nonetheless structured the European Jewish scene between the two world wars. The main dividing line ran between Eastern European and Western Jewries; though geographic to a point, its manifest expression was cultural. Eastern European Jewry (excluding after 1918 the Jews of Soviet Russia, who were developing according to the rules and opportunities offered by the new regime) encompassed in principle the communities of the Baltic countries, Poland, the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, Hungary (except for the large cities), and the eastern provinces of post-1918 Romania. The largely “Spanish” (Sephardi) Jews of Bulgaria, Greece, and parts of Yugoslavia represented a distinct world of their own. East European Jewry was less integrated into surrounding society, more religiously observant—at times still strictly Orthodox—often Yiddish-speaking, occasionally fluent in Hebrew. In short, it was more traditionally “Jewish” than its Western counterpart (although many Jews in Vilna, Warsaw, Lodz, and Iasi were no less “Western” than the Jews of Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and Paris). Economically the majority of Eastern Jewry often hovered on the edge of poverty, but nonetheless it nurtured a distinct, vibrant, and multifaceted Jewish life. 11
    In spite of such specific aspects, the Jews of Eastern Europe also underwent an accelerated process of acculturation and secularization during the interwar period. Yet, as historian Ezra Mendelsohn noted, “The process of acculturation did not contribute to the improvement of Jewish-gentile relations, thus giving the lie to the old accusation that the cultural separateness of East European Jewry was largely responsible for anti-semitism…. Such prejudices were particularly strong in Hungary, whose Jewish community was the most acculturated in East Central Europe, and they were relatively weak in Lithuania, where the Jewish community was the most unacculturated.” 12 This perplexing situation may in fact be explained in a wider context.
    In Poland, Romania, and Hungary the Jews were numerically important minorities whose collective rights had been ensured, in principle, by the peace treaties following World War I and the “minority treaties” that, again in principle, had to be enforced by the League of Nations. International guarantees meant little to the exacerbated nationalism of the Poles, the Romanians, and the Hungarians, however: The Jews, like other minorities, were seen as obstacles to the full and unbridled national self-expression of the native population. Moreover, as the Jews represented a high percentage of the urban middle class, particularly in business and in the liberal professions but also among small artisans, the indigenous economic and social aspirations to middle-class status and professions forced a growing number of Jews out of these sectors of the economy, often with the help of various state measures. This trend, in turn, brought about a growing pauperization of these Jewish communities and created, mainly in Poland, a “surplus Jewish population” without any major outlets as the world economic crisis spread and most immigration doors closed. 13 Such negative evolution for the Jews as such and in terms of their relations with the environment was of course more intense in countries (or areas) of Eastern and East Central Europe undergoing rapid economic modernization (Poland, Romania, Hungary) than in those still deeply ensconced in a rural economy and traditional social structure (the Baltic countries, among others)—a distinction that may in fact explain the apparently paradoxical impact of acculturation on anti-Jewish feelings. 14
    Despite growing difficulties, however, mainly from the early 1930s onward, Jewish emigration