Jews lived in Europe for nearly two thousand years. They came in with the Roman armies, settled in the cities of the empire, and stayed when Rome fell. They were in Cologne, Speyer and Mainz by the early Middle Ages, in Spain and Portugal until the expulsions of 1492 and 1497, in Poland and Lithuania from the eleventh century onwards, in Italy from before there was an Italy. By the nineteenth century there were Jewish communities in every European country.
The contribution to European life was wide. Jewish bankers helped finance the kings of medieval Europe. Jewish doctors served at the Spanish, Portuguese and Polish courts when no Christian doctor of equal standing was available. The translators of Toledo, working between Arabic, Hebrew and Latin in the twelfth century, brought Greek philosophy back into the European canon by way of Jewish scholars. Maimonides, born in Cordoba in 1138, was court physician to Saladin and the most influential Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages. Spinoza, in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, broke ground that the European Enlightenment would later build on.
The age of emancipation
From the late eighteenth century, European Jews were finally allowed into the wider civic life of the countries they lived in. France gave its Jews full citizenship in 1791. Britain followed gradually through the nineteenth century. The German states emancipated their Jews piecemeal in the same period and Germany itself completed the process in 1871. Austria-Hungary did the same. Russia did not, and held its Jews in the Pale of Settlement until 1917.
Once allowed in, Jews entered the universities, the professions, the arts and the sciences in numbers far above their share of the population. The list is long. In music: Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Yehudi Menuhin, Vladimir Horowitz. In philosophy: Marx, Bergson, Cassirer, Wittgenstein, Buber, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt. In medicine: Ehrlich, Freud, Salk. In physics: Einstein, Bohr, Born, Pauli, Bethe. In economics: Ricardo (whose Sephardic family had converted), Marx again, von Mises, Hayek. In writing: Heine, Kafka, Proust (half-Jewish), Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth.
What was lost
The destruction of European Jewry was also the destruction of the European stream that had produced these contributions. The German universities lost a generation of scholars. The Polish-Jewish intellectual life that had been one of the richest in Europe was wiped out almost completely. The Yiddish-language culture of the East was killed with its speakers. Some of the survivors, and most of the children of the survivors, lived and worked in Israel, the United States, Britain and France, and the centre of Jewish creative life moved with them. The European world that had produced Mendelssohn and Freud and Einstein and Kafka was finished.
See also
- Sigmund Freud Albert Einstein and Jewish Intellectuals in Exile
- Italy
- Hannah Arendt
- Jewish Nobel Prize Winners Before the War
- The Hasidic Movement
- Yiddish Culture and Language
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards