The Jews of Europe were not a single people in a single place. They were a network of distinct communities, each with its own dialect, dress, liturgy, food, politics and history. The Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland and the Pale of Settlement were a different world from the Sephardim of Salonika or the assimilated Reform Jews of Berlin. The Hasidim of Belz did not pray in the same building as the Bundists of Warsaw. A rabbi from Vilnius and a rabbi from Bordeaux would have shared a Bible and very little else.
Some of these communities were old beyond easy measure. The Jews of Rome had been there since before the destruction of the Second Temple. The Jews of Cologne were on record in the fourth century. The Jews of Granada and Toledo had given medieval Spain its philosophers and physicians until the expulsion of 1492. The Jews of Salonika, descendants of those expelled Sephardim, made the city Greek-speaking Europe’s largest Jewish community by the seventeenth century. Around them, the Ashkenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe built a Yiddish civilisation that ran from Alsace to Odessa.
By 1939 there were around nine and a half million Jews living between the Atlantic and the Soviet frontier. Most lived in Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania and Hungary. Around half a million lived in Germany. Smaller communities existed in every European country. They were urban, on the whole, concentrated in capital cities and in the old market towns of central and eastern Europe. They worked as traders, craftsmen, doctors, lawyers, factory workers, journalists, teachers and labourers. They were rich and they were poor. They were religious and they were secular. They were Zionist, they were Bundist, they were communist, they were liberal, they were Orthodox. They quarrelled with each other constantly.
The pages that follow take nine of these communities and describe what was there before it was destroyed. The list is not exhaustive. Each city stands for a wider world. Berlin stands for the assimilated Jews of central Europe; Warsaw and Łódź for the great Yiddish centres of Poland; Vienna for the Habsburg legacy; Amsterdam for the Dutch Sephardic refuge; Rome for the longest continuous Jewish presence in Europe; Salonika for the Ladino-speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean; Budapest for the Magyar Jews; and the Sephardic communities collectively for the descendants of the 1492 expulsion who had spread across the Ottoman world and the Balkans.
What follows is not a memorial. It is a description of working life. The point is that these were not abstractions. They were neighbourhoods with names, streets with shops, school registers with the names of children who later died. To understand the catastrophe you have to know what was there before it.
What is here
- The Jews of Berlin
- The Jews of Amsterdam
- The Jews of Rome
- The Jews of Budapest
- The Jews of Salonika
- The Jews of Łódź
- The Jews of Vienna
- The Jews of Warsaw
- The Sephardic Communities
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