The Jewish life of pre-war Europe was the life of communities that had been continuously inhabited for between five hundred and two thousand years. The communities had built their own institutions, their own intellectual and religious traditions, their own languages, their own political movements, their own contributions to the wider European cultures in which they sat. The Holocaust destroyed most of them. The pages in this cluster address what was there before the destruction, on the principle that the loss is intelligible only against the record of what was lost.
The shape of what was there
The European Jewish population in 1939 was around 9.5 million people. It was not a single community. It was at least four distinct ones, with different languages, different religious traditions, different political commitments, and different relationships to the surrounding non-Jewish societies.
The Yiddish-speaking communities of central and eastern Europe were the largest. Around 5 to 6 million Jews lived in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia and the Romanian-speaking Jewish communities of Bessarabia and Moldavia. The communities had built, over four centuries since the post-Iberian eastward migration of European Jewry, a distinctive Yiddish culture, a substantial body of Yiddish literature (Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz), a Yiddish daily press in dozens of cities, the great religious centres of Lithuanian misnagdic learning and Hasidic Galicia, and a network of political movements from the Bund to the various Zionist streams.
The German-speaking Jewish communities of central Europe (Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, parts of the former Habsburg empire) were the second-largest concentration. They had built, particularly during the long nineteenth century after emancipation, an integrated bourgeoisie whose contribution to German-language culture was central rather than peripheral. The pages on the Jews of Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Prague and the smaller cities of the German-speaking world address these communities in detail.
The Sephardic communities of southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, descended from the Iberian expulsions of the late fifteenth century, were the third stream. They spoke Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), maintained their own liturgical and intellectual traditions, and had built distinctive port cultures in Salonika, Sarajevo, Sofia, Rhodes and elsewhere. The dedicated pages on the Sephardic communities address these in detail.
The Western European communities of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain and Italy were the fourth, smaller in absolute numbers but substantially integrated into the surrounding national bourgeoisies. They had produced the Dreyfus affair and its aftermath, the substantial French-Jewish intellectual life of the inter-war period, the Dutch Jewish diamond and intellectual cultures, and the long-established Anglo-Jewish bourgeoisie of London and the British provincial cities.
What this cluster addresses
The pages below address the cultural, religious and intellectual life of these communities before the destruction. The Hasidic movement, the Yiddish-speaking culture, the political movements (the Bund, the Zionist streams, the Jewish socialist parties), the contribution to European intellectual and scientific life through Freud, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Husserl and the long roll-call of Jewish names in the Nobel sciences, and the photographic record of Roman Vishniac’s pre-war journey through the Polish and Romanian Jewish communities are each treated on their own pages.
The cluster is not nostalgic. The pre-war communities were not utopias. They had their own internal tensions (between the Orthodox and the secular, between the Yiddishists and the Hebraists, between the Bundists and the Zionists, between the assimilated and the traditional). They had been subjected to substantial antisemitic pressure in the inter-war period, particularly in Poland, Romania and Hungary. The cluster addresses what they were, including what was difficult about what they were, on the principle that the loss is the loss of a real and complex world rather than of a sentimental one.