The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars

by Ezra Mendelsohn

" . . . a carefully crafted and important book . . . a first-class contribution to the literature on modern Europe." ―American Historical Review

" . . . valuable . . . the first historical work to attempt a 'synthetic sketch' of the problems indicated in the title." ―Journal of Polish Jewish Studies

An illuminating study of the demographic, cultural, and socioeconomic condition of East Central European Jewry, the book focuses on the internal life of Jewish communities in the region and on the relationships between Jews and gentiles in a nationalist environment.

Genres: History, Jewish, Nonfiction, Judaism

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read the 75 page chapter on Poland, which provided extensive detail on the problems faced by Jews and Poles in the brief period of independent Poland (1919-1939).

HERE ARE SOME OF THE MAJOR POINTS COVERED ...

* central issues of Polish post-WWI politics ... is Poland a multinational state or a Polish nation-state? should nationalities (Germans, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews) within Poland receive special rights? should the country be polonized?

* there were radical differences among Polish Jews ... should our problems be solved "here" (in Poland) or "there" (in Palestine or some other place)? ... should we seek a secular life of a religious one? ... can there be a Jewish identity without strict religious observance? ... should Jews join with the Polish working class and support new social structures (socialism, communism)? ... should Jews speak Yiddish or Hebrew or Polish?

* the 3,000,000 Jews in Poland had no strong allies within Polish society and no powerful allies abroad

* most Polish leaders and the mass of Poles came to favor a policy of "Poland for the Poles" which meant that Jews would have to emigrate or become fully assimilated.

* HOWEVER ... the feeling was widespread that the Jews could not be assimilated ... they are a consciously alien nation within Poland ... the Jews must leave Poland and emigrate to Palestine

* BUT ... Great Britain closed the gates of Palestine ... The U.S. and other countires likewise restricted emigration from Poland ... there was no place for Jews to go

* After 1935 ... Polish Jews lived in an environment of increasingly systematic discrimination and widespread anti-semitic violence

* Nazi anti-semitism struck a highly responsive chord among large sections of the Polish population even before the 1939 invasion of Poland

[Charles Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good overview of Jewish life in East Central Europe (defined by the author as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia), with a particular emphasis on internal Jewish politics in the region. One thing that sets this book apart from what you typically hear about this topic is the emphasis on Jewish agency. The book spends a lot of time discussing rivalries between progressive, national Jewish forces (Zionists, Folkists, and the Bund) and conservative, Orthodox-oriented political forces (Agudes Yisroel and similar parties) along with rivalries within these groupings. This book does not just tell what happened to the Jewish communities of the region; it also emphasizes the reaction of the Jewries of these countries and discusses the effectiveness of the political strategies of the different Jewish political groupings.

Reading this history will give you a feeling of bitter irony: the constant in-fighting of different Jewish political orientations was happening just at the time when internal Jewish unity would be most important. The Bundist stance, for instance, which refused cooperation with bourgeois Jewish political parties in Poland, seems ludicrous to the outside observer considering that 90% of Polish Jewry (3 million out of 3.3 million) were murdered in the Holocaust, whether they were rich or poor, Orthodox or secular, Zionist or not.

[Rob Prince · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have immersed myself in Polish-Jewish history, these past COVID-19 months. 

This has included two works by Norman Davies, - his two volume "God's Playground" - indispensible for understanding the historical context of why my ancesters left the Pale for the United States in the first decade of the 20th century, White Eagle Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War: 1919-11920 and the Miracle on the Vistula. And now Ezra Mendelsohn's The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars. All these books are worth reading - they are well researched, carefully written and whatever controversies they have triggered - I am convinced that all three have weathered "the test of time." Unable to gleen more than the barest details as to their personal histories - there is some, but it is sketchy, anecdotal and in some cases contradictory - I decided it would be more worthwhile to probe the historical context of their immigration to the United States.

This has been an enriching experience.

One needs to keep in mind the rather extraordinary instability of these central European political entities beginning with the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (as it was called) which totally collapsed in 1795. Sliced up and gobbled up by three European powers (Prussia, Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire) Poland ceased to exist until it re-emerged, phoenix like at the end of World War One. The fighting on the Eastern Front of that war as Russia and Germany (mostly) vied for control saw power in many of Jewish districts change hands fifteen, twenty times or more. That instability continued in the post war period in which regional players - the budding USSR, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus - found themselves trying to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of three empires (German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian) by wars of territorial expansion pretty much on the part of all the players. The main post WW 1 war in this region, thr Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920 only added to the ultimate franticness of the world war, and left the Jews of the region - as well as all the other ethnic and religious minorities - in a state of profound instability and anxiety.

It was a whole mid-continent at sea, only to settle down around 1924,5 for about a decade when, with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, the regional situation would once again deteriorate into unspeakable horror and chaos which made the earlier tragedies appearing mild in comparison. We all know what followed - Hitler's program to exterminate the Jews, to "decapitate" - the term they used - the intellectual and political leadership of Poland and reduce all slavic peoples to unskilled forced labor (before exterminating them as well)... the horrors of WW2 that are well known and should not be ever forgotten, not by Jews, Poles, (what were) Soviets and many more.

After the partitions of 1795 (actually there were three - 1772, 1793, 1795) Jews who lived through that sprawling region that was broadly known as the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth found themselves in three quite different political and social living situations that effected the world views of the varying communities in different ways. My - our - grandparents all found themselves in that part of old Poland-Lithuania that came under control of Russia. Vilnius, Bialystok, Grodno from whence they hailed were all administered by the Russian Czars. That would remain the case until the end of WW 1 when the political unity of the region - after the postwar wars cited above had ended - collapsed and these three centers of Jewish life would find themselves located now in three different countries: after what is referred to as "the Battle of Bialystok, that city/region returned to Polish control; After two other post WW1 battles - the Battle of Grodno, Battle of the Neiman, Grodno, some fifty miles to the northeast also came under Polish control while Vilnius, with hardly a Lithuania-ethnic population at the time reverted to the newly independent nation of Lithuania.

Ezra Mendelsohn's careful study of post WW1 Jewish life in East Central Europe navigates through period of breaktaking transition with care and precision. The fractured - and constantly shifting political boundaries resulted in a consequental fracturing of Jewish life throughout the region, religiously, linguistically, and in the sense of Jewish identity. His work probes the Jewish interwar experience in seven countries (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia). Ultimately caught up and crushed by the Nazi juggernaut, there is a shallow tendency to view Jewish life in this region as far more homogenous that it was in fact. I found his analysis of that world to be objective, fair, ie, history as good as it gets and while the book is now nearly forty years old, it has held up well.

I'm sitting here mourning the tragedy of what was the Polish-Jewish interwar Jewish cultural renaissance. After detailing the richness and complexity of Polish Jewish life 1918-1939 he comments "Never before had conditions been so favorable for the flourishing of national Jewish politics and culture in the diaspora and it is safe to say that they will never be again." A period of turmoil and as the 1930s moved on - one of increasingly ugly and bitter anti-Semitism (throughout the region, but especially in Poland). And this is before Sept 1, 1939 when Hitler first and then Stalin a few days later, unleashed what might be called the forth partition of Poland. Yet under duress, and the Jewish Community itself divided - nay fractured - along diverse lines, among them Zionist and anti-Zionist tendencies - Jewish life in Poland flourished, a kind of Indian summer of central European Jewish culture before it was extinguished by Nazi einsatsgruppen mobile killing units, Lithuanian fascists who outdid even the Nazis in their zeal to kill Jews, and of course places with names like Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

The crisis that led to the tragedy that was WW2 for the Jews of Eastern Europe, the instability, the rising anti-semitism in the "borderlands", the western frontier of the Russian Empire from where Abraham Prensky, Molly Jackson, Jude Magaziner and Sarah Wyschinsky emigrated began in the Ukraine from 1881-1884. All four of them were born sometime just prior to or just after 1880 from what we can tell. Bialystok, Grodno and Vilnius, where they originated, is a distance from Kiev where the worst of those mass killing - the systemic hunting down of Jews - took place, but the echos of that slaughter which continued in the Ukraine throughout the decade reached these more northernly regions of the Pale. From this point on the Jews of East Central Europe found themselves in permanent crisis - socio-economic, political - that would not end until May 1, 1945.

The situation for Jews throughout the Pale had already deteriorated they left for the United States, all within a period of five years of one another but that situation was about to deteriorate. The anecdotal information passed on (from our "Aunt Mal") is that most the extended family did not survive even the horrors of WW1! Concerning those who did - their letters in Yiddish - stopped abruptly after September 1, 1939. From then on,... silence. 

To follow: Political, Cultural Cleavages: What Choices for Central Eastern European Jews: Assimilation, Zionism, Socialism... 

[Adam Glantz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clearly this book is going to have an unhappy ending, given the utter annihilation of the Holocaust, followed by oppression under Stalin. And indeed, the author confirms that Jews in this time and place had no power over events to better their dismal and worsening situation. Some countries were (or had become) highly antisemitic (e.g., Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia), often giving rise to radical right movements and inducing more center-right governments to persecute their Jews in response. Others were more hospitable (e.g., in the Baltics), but their governments' endeavor to curry favor with the majority ethnic group led to Jews being pushed out of their habitual economic sectors. The outlier is Czechoslovakia (or rather, Czech Bohemia and Moravia), where relatively high social development and the commitment of Masaryk to tolerance nurtured the Jews until the Nazis dismembered the state. Perversely, though Jewish communities couldn't make their situation any better, they could make it worse, through prominence in communist movements or siding with one side in a struggle between other ethnic groups.

The most interesting facet of the book was its investigation into the character and history of individual Jewish communities within each state. With the exception of ethnically homogeneous Hungary, communities of varying degrees of acculturation and assimilation were thrown together as the post-war successor states were cobbled together. Jews who emerged from the more advanced cultures of the region were more open to assimilation than those in backward areas or where different host cultures were in competition: in the latter cases, cognitive space opened for a specifically Jewish identity, with Zionists and ultra-Orthodox movements in a lead role. But in all the countries, the trend was toward greater cultural interaction with the dominant ethnic group and its language. Between policies that favored that ethnic group and the onset of a worldwide depression, another trend was the pauperization of many Jews.

The only positive elements in the author's account are the advancements made in education and the facilitation of emigration to the Palestine Mandate before Britain severely limited that safety valve. Perhaps the author might have expanded upon this by discussing the huge Jewish accomplishments in science and letters during the interwar period, but it's otherwise an uphill battle to make the case that this was a happy epoch in Jewish history.

[Ben Vos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comprehensive, coherent and persuasive survey in sequential form, of most of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. With handy potted histories of the period before that being dealt with, and building its arguments on well-sourced statistics on education and demographics and politics, the book makes really solid arguments about what was possible and likely to happen in every case.

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is wayy too focused on political/linguistic factors and says little about the social or cultural or religious or internal developments of Jewish communities in these places.

[Jacob Wolinsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very harsh on Poland seriously worse than Romania and ussr?!! But overall great read on topic mostly ignored by historians

[Kirsten Dyck · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ramifications of Mendelsohn's data are important and compelling. His actual writing, however, is quite dry. (I wish he believed a bit more in paragraph breaks.) Still, the book covers an important period in Jewish history, and it explains a lot about how the Holocaust played out in the years immediately following.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book shows with details the situation of Jews between the World War in Poland, Hungary, Romania and other Central East Europe countries. Compares different places of Jews in different countries, cause in Poland there was no ultra right/fascist military organisations similiar to Hungarian Arrow Cross Party or Romanian Iron Guard.