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

from Eastern and Central Europe to the West went on. By dint of deep-seated cultural and social differences, estrangement between Western and Eastern Jews grew in both directions. For Eastern Jews the Westerners lacked Yiddishkeit (Jewishness), while for the Westerners, some idealization of an “authentic” Jewish life notwithstanding, the Eastern European Jews appeared “backward,” “primitive,” and increasingly a source of embarrassment and shame. 15
    The migration from Eastern Europe in the 1930s was compounded, mainly for the French, British, or Dutch communities, by the arrival of Jewish refugees from Central Europe following Hitler’s rise to power, first from Germany, then from Austria, and finally, after 1938, from the so-called German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Cultural antagonism was reinforced by the stark difference in economic status: The new immigrants and the refugees were usually bereft of financial means and economically marginalized in countries that had not yet recovered from the Depression. Native Jews, on the other hand, belonged, for the most part, to the middle class and even, not insignificantly, to the haute bourgeoisie; furthermore, increasingly frequent intermarriage had brought them closer to complete assimilation. As a result, throughout Western Europe many native Jews were ready to defend their own position in the face of growing anti-Semitism by sacrificing the interests of their newly arrived “brethren.” The widespread urge was to send the immigrants on their way to some other country.
    Whatever the degree of estrangement between Western and Eastern Jews on the eve of the war, there is little doubt that the stream of Jewish immigrants and refugees contributed to the surge of anti-Semitism in various Western European countries. But, as we shall see in the next chapters, Jewish immigration—those “hordes of Ashkenazim ,” as Jean Giraudoux, the well-known French playwright and minister of information at the outset of the war, dubbed the Jewish newcomers in his notorious Pleins Pouvoirs —was but one aspect of the darkening scene. In the most general terms the crisis of Jewry in the Western world was the direct outcome and expression of the crisis of liberal society as such and the rise of antidemocratic forces throughout the West. Needless to say, Nazi propaganda had found an ideal terrain for its anti-Semitic invective: The Jews were profiteers, plutocrats, and basically warmongers intent on dragging the European nations into another world conflict to further their own interests and eventually achieve world domination.

    Actually, at the very time it was accused of the most heinous plots and political maneuvers, European Jewry—Jews wherever they lived, in fact—whatever the political, economic, or cultural achievement of some individuals, was without any significant collective political influence. This powerlessness was not recognized by the environment, and individual success was often interpreted as symptomatic of a collective Jewish drive to undermine and dominate surrounding society.
    German Jewry, for example, financially significant, politically sophisticated, with some of its members wielding considerable influence on the mainstream liberal and the left-wing press, was effortlessly swept aside, together with its natural political allies—liberalism and social democracy—by the rise of Nazism. 16 In France, where a Jew, the Socialist Léon Blum, was elected prime minister in 1936, the anti-Semitic backlash had a far greater impact on the existence of the community than did Blum’s short-term presence at the national helm. In stable democracies such as Great Britain and the United States, some Jews had access to centers of power; however, aware of the rise of anti-Semitism in their own countries and of the very limited scope of what could be achieved, they became reluctant to intervene in favor of the threatened communities of continental Europe,