Introduction
This war over the Jewish Question could continue forever for while both sides are correct concerning details, they have both relied in their arguments on sophistry, both have emphasized quid pro quo both have missed the larger truth. How will it come to an end? When will the fate of the Jews and of the Slavs be joined together in peace? When will each side acknowledge the other’s humanity and join hands for the ascent to human perfection?
AARON LIEBERMANN, 1877, Vienna1
The concept of a “Jewish Question” in Europe, namely, the vague notion that something had to be done with them, was not a new concept—as demonstrated by Aaron Liebermann’s plea. In many ways, this idea sprung from the simple geographical fact that, from a nation state perspective, Jews had no homeland. They lived vibrant and varied lives in all countries in Europe but due to antisemitism, xenophobia, political differences, and racism, they often were not viewed as belonging to any country.2 While many Jews saw themselves as French, German, or Polish, local populations often rejected such self-identification.
Jews in Europe generally and in Eastern Europe specifically historically navigated a complicated path between assimilation and individual identity. Any discussion of the Holocaust must, therefore, begin not with Nazis, but with the Jewish history that predated their arrival and was lost or irrevocably damaged. This chapter, therefore, provides an overview of Jewish life and culture before the Holocaust. We will examine how and why so many Jews came to live in Eastern Europe, explore the diversity of their daily lives and become familiar with the various forms antisemitism took in this part of the world.
In the end, all suffered: some by the sword and some by captivity and some by disease, until but a few remained of the many . . . I, too, chose the way of the sea, and I arrived in the famed Naples, a city whose kings are merciful.
Spanish Jew ISAAC ABRAVANEL3
For most Europeans (and Americans), 1492 represents the year in which a middle-class Italian explorer set sail in search of a shortcut to India. However, this year had a darker significance; it also marked the approximate end of a series of massive expulsions of Jews from Western Europe, which had begun in the twelfth century in England. King Ferdinand and Isabella, who sent Columbus on his history-making journey, declared that the Jewish population had “resulted in great damage and detriment of our holy Catholic faith.” They “resolved that all Jews and Jewesses be ordered to leave our kingdoms, and that they never be allowed to return.” Finally, they decreed that any Jew who remained in Spain after July of 1492 would “incur punishment by death and confiscation of all their belongings.” Among those Jews fleeing for their lives was Ferdinand and Isabella’s adviser and banker, the above Isaac Abravanel, who coincidentally had helped them finance Columbus’ voyage.4 By 1500, most Jews had emigrated or had fled to Eastern Europe.5 A combination of antisemitism and political/economic developments drove this migration.
Jews from Spain, known as Sephardic Jews, settled throughout the Mediterranean (and Romania/Bulgaria) while the remainder, known as the Ashkenazi, moved to Central and Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe at this time lagged behind Western Europe in technology and governance, but many rulers in the East had already been receptive to Jews even before the expulsions from the West. In Poland, for example, Jews received some liberties, and the Statute of Kalisz gave them protective rights in 1264.6 Here, Jews often found rulers willing to take advantage of their business acumen and mastery of languages. For some, this meant managing estates for large landowners. This relatively small number of Jews acquired a not insignificant amount of power, both legally and economically. An agreement from Poland between a landowner and a Jewish manager illustrates this well. The landowners wrote:
We do hereby lease to the worthy Master Abraham, son of Samuel, our estates, villages, and towns, and the monetary payments that come from the tax on grain, beehives, fishponds, lakes, and places of beaver hunting, on meadows, on forests, and on threshing floors. We also give him the authority to judge and sentence all our subjects, to punish by monetary fines or by sentence of death those who are guilty or who disobey.7
Landowners were often willing to delegate the unpopular tasks of both collecting taxes and adjudicating minor legal disputes to their Jewish managers. Naturally, these occupations did not ingratiate Jews with the local populace.
One of the major problems of Eastern European rulers and landowners was cash management. As a result, the nobility employed an even smaller number of Jews to assist in raising and managing the capital necessary for expansion and for increasingly complex governments that relied on large sums of ready cash. With personal connections across Europe, based, ironically, in no small part to the expulsions that dispersed them, Jews were often in a particularly good position to secure loans and cash across state boundaries. These so-called “Court Jews” were, however, dependent upon regimes for support and protection. This placed them in a particularly vulnerable position should the ruler decide to default on his debts and leave his Jewish banker at the mercy of his debtors.
Life looked considerably different for the vast remainder of Jews who did not occupy such privileged positions. Eastern European states prohibited Jews from owning land in almost all cases. This pushed them into towns and cities where they occupied a variety of economic positions. The most well known and problematic of these were moneylending and early forms of banking. Christians (as well as Jews and Muslims), were prohibited, at least theoretically, from lending money to their coreligionists at interest, a practice known as usury. The clearest example of the prohibition against interest lending comes from the Christian Bible via the Gospel of Luke (6:34–5).
The workaround for all three Abrahamic religions became simply lending each other money through a member of another religion. In Europe, this generally meant Jews acting as intermediaries in executing loans between Christians at interest. This somewhat cynical relationship gave some Jews the advantage of wealth while simultaneously making it appear to the local populations that they owed money to Jews, rather than to the Christians who held the debt.
Yet, most Jews in Eastern Europe remained relatively poor and confined to certain occupations, which often varied between nations. In general, Jews lived in towns where they operated as an economic link between the rural Christian countryside and the larger cities. They worked as middlemen for agricultural goods, pawnbrokers, merchants, and craftsmen in the trades in which they were allowed to participate. In Lithuanian villages, for example, there “was almost an absolute correlation between ethnic identity and occupational profile. The vast majority of the Lithuanians were farmers, while most Jews were occupied with the entire range of ‘supporting’ professions.”
handicrafts
petty trade,
supplying of raw material,
machinery for the agricultural needs,
burning woods for heating,
credit,
medical and pharmaceutical services,
selling livestock and horses
small scale industry,
running mills, inns, distilleries, food and alcoholic beverages businesses8
Humble beginnings in the trades continued into modern times. In the larger cities of the East, Jews became involved in large industry, banking, and the professions as gradual emancipation allowed. Their relatively high levels of education allowed them to gain solid footholds in these areas once they opened for them. In Russia, the 1897 census reported that 80 percent of Jews were living in towns and villages and engaged in commerce, industry, and various trades.9 By 1939, for example, in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (which contained parts of Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine) Jews were 6.7 percent of the population. However, they accounted for 57 percent of directors of medical institutions; 51.3 percent of physicians; 49 percent of managers and directors of stores; and 24 percent of directors of agricultural and industrial concerns.10
Most Eastern European Jews lived in what was known as the Pale of Settlement—a massive swath of land stretching from the Baltic to the Crimea. Jews had been confined to this territory from 1791, when Russian Empress Catherine the Great forced all Jews refusing conversion to Christianity into this region. She was also motivated by a desire to prevent economic competition that engendered political conflict in Russian society. Only exceptional Jews (usually those with money and connections) could move to cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. The establishment of the Pale would be decisive for the experience of the Holocaust in the East, as it concentrated the vast majority of Europe’s Jews there. While the boundaries of the Russian Empire eventually changed, Jewish populations remained by and large within the shadow of the Pale. Intense overcrowding and limited economic opportunities in the Pale meant that most Jews there were quite poor and scraped by economically in predominantly Jewish towns, called shtetls. Even in the larger cities in the Pale, Jews often represented sizeable percentages of the population. By 1933, an estimated 7,097,500 Jews lived in Eastern Europe, representing 75 percent of Europe’s Jewish population and 46 percent of the world’s Jewish population.11
TABLE 1Jewish population of Europe, 1933.
|
Eastern Europe |
Central Europe |
Western Europe | |||
|
Poland |
3,000,000 |
Germany |
525,000 |
Britain |
300,000 |
|
Soviet Union |
2,525,000 |
Czechoslovakia |
357,000 |
France |
250,000 |
|
Romania |
756,000 |
Austria |
191,000 |
Netherlands |
156,000 |
|
Latvia |
95,600 |
Belgium |
60,000 | ||
|
Lithuania |
155,000 |
Spain |
4,000 | ||
|
Estonia |
4,560 |
Sweden |
6,700 | ||
|
Hungary |
44,500 |
Denmark |
5,700 | ||
|
Bulgaria |
48,500 |
Finland |
1,800 | ||
|
Norway |
1,400 | ||||
|
Italy |
48,000 | ||||
|
TOTAL |
6,691,260 |
TOTAL |
1,073,000 |
TOTAL |
606,600 |
|
Percentage of Jewish Population |
80.5 |
Percentage of Jewish Population |
13 |
Percentage of Jewish Population |
6.5 |
Source: USHMM, “Holocaust Encylopedia: Jewish Population of Europe in 1933: Population Data by Country,” http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005161.
Note: This excerpt does not include the Balkans.
Jewish Life in Eastern Europe
At Father’s place the rejoicing was in true hasidic fashion. Throughout the Sukkot holiday, the very house was carried aloft on the wings of songs and dances lasting entire days and nights. After the hasidim finished praying in the shtibl and snatched a hurried meal at their homes, they at once made for Father’s place, and then the singing and dancing began.
YEKHEZKEL KOTIK, Memoirs, 191312
Contrary to some popular belief, Jewish life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, while often hard, was also filled with joy and community as Kotik describes above in his memoir. The shtetl represented a vital link between non-Jewish farmers and landowners and the larger markets of the outside world. This resulted in the concentration of Jews in towns and the shtetl and even, to a lesser extent, in the voluntary “ghettoization” of Jews in cities. Religion also encouraged Jews to live together. Orthodox Judaism required ritual bathing at a special bath or mikvah, and it also required a kosher butcher to prepare the meat consumed. In addition, there was a great deal of religious diversity in the choice of synagogues, shuls, and prayer houses that Jews could attend. It only made sense that all these things be colocated. Indeed, in many shtetls Jews constituted the majority, and not the minority group, as we often think of them.
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Life in Eastern European towns was economically difficult due, in particular, to the prohibition of land owning by Jews. But this did not mean that Jewish life lacked happiness or meaning. Indeed, these communities were tight-knit, many having existed for centuries. Their inhabitants typically spoke, at a minimum, Yiddish, Hebrew, and the local language, making them exceptionally literate for most time periods. Men worked, while women stayed home preparing meals and raising the children. Jewish children would often attend secular national schools and then attend Hebrew schools that focused on teaching the language as well as providing a religious education. The Sabbath (or Shabbat) began on Friday evenings with a ritual meal prepared by the women of the household while the men and boys attended services at the synagogue. The Torah prohibited all work on the Sabbath so Saturdays were most often spent at religious services in the synagogue, where men and women worshipped separately. The strict observance of the Sabbath often differed greatly from its observance in the West.
Indeed, as a rule, Eastern European Jews tended to be more religious than Western European Jews and practiced Judaism differently. Eastern Europe, for example, was home to the Hasidic branch of Judaism. Beginning in the eighteenth century, this new form swept across Eastern Europe, centered around ecstatic prophecy and energetic prayer led by disciples of famous Hasidic rabbis. This form of worship contrasted sharply with the textual rabbinic Judaism that preceded it based on intensive study of the Torah and other Jewish texts as the key to understanding God’s design. If nothing else, Hasidism provided hope and respite for Jews suffering from economic difficulty and violent pogroms. A group known as the Mitnagadim, which viewed Hasidism as heretical and advocated a return to traditional forms of Judaism, countered the rise of Hasidism—which was most popular in Poland and Ukraine. The Mitnagadim had their base in Lithuania, particularly in Vilna—which held a large number of prominent schools for Torah and Talmud study—reinforcing the scriptural basis of Judaism. The ideals of the European Enlightenment chiseled away at all religious belief including Judaism. The Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, advocated greater assimilation into the non-Jewish population and the integration of secular studies into a Jewish education that it saw as useless in preparing Jews to live and work in the modern era. This movement found the most adherents in cities, which tended to be more cosmopolitan. Towns and shtetls remained relatively unaffected.
Politically, Jews in Eastern Europe lived under two systems. The first was the political system of the nation state in which they lived. Political influence and participation varied greatly from country to country, into the modern era. Jews began receiving various forms of emancipation in the 18th and 19th centuries. In general, emancipation lagged significantly behind in Eastern Europe. The Austro-Hungarian Empire granted Jews full political rights in 1867. In Poland, emancipation became official only in 1935. In Russia, the rise of Bolshevism ushered in Jewish equality in 1917. After World War I, the Minority Treaties guaranteeing protection for national minority groups and attached to the Versailles Treaty were prerequisites to joining the League of Nations in 1922. It must be said, however, that the extent to which emancipation was real or recognized varied from place to place, and at different scales of government, both positively and negatively. Regardless, by the twentieth century, Jews participated in a variety of political organizations. Many of these tended to be left leaning such as socialism or communism, for several important reasons. First, solidly Christian, agrarian, antisemitic, conservative parties often opposed Jewish emancipation in the first place —and would not admit Jews in any case. Second, leftist parties were more likely to support the kinds of institutional equality that many Jews sought, though the anti-religious stance of communism and socialism was unappealing to observant Jews. For all its many faults, the Soviet Union officially outlawed antisemitism. For this, and other reasons, many Jews chose to vote with the Left; paradoxically, many of the strongest Jewish supporters of communism, like Leon Trotsky (originally Lev Bronshtein), would never consider themselves Jewish, but rather Communists as communism recognized neither religious nor national identity. Jews even created their own socialist labor party in Eastern Europe known as the General Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland and Russia or simply as “the Bund.” However, the association between Jews and parties on the Left would become problematic as we will see.
Second, alongside the state political system resided a traditional Jewish form of self-government known as the kahal or kehilla. Historically, the kahal represented the Jewish community to the state and administered a wide range of public activities and services. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it had been mostly abolished in Eastern Europe as national governments tightened their control. Yet, its powerful tradition remained alive and well in the many Jewish voluntary and charitable organizations, or hevras, that continued to function. These organizations provided social support to the Jewish community, running orphanages, hospitals, soup kitchens, burial services, and a host of other institutions. They operated under the concept of tzedekah, or obligation. They were not charities, but instead opportunities for Jews to demonstrate their piety and commitment to their fellow Jews. These organizations, too, would become essential in helping Jewish communities survive under the conditions later imposed by the Nazis.
A third political development of a particularly Jewish nature appeared as well: Zionism. At the end of the nineteenth century, one man came to embody an idea that been percolating throughout Jewish history: the concept of a Jewish homeland. He was a Viennese Jew named Theodore Herzl. His simple yet controversial argument was that Jews required their own homeland. In an 1896 publication titled “The Jewish State,” he enumerated why: “The idea which I developed in this pamphlet is a very old one. It is the restoration of the Jewish state. The world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened the slumbering idea.”13 Herzl believed that Jews would never be accepted in Europe and required their own nation to escape the evils of antisemitism. Zionism gained traction with Jews across the religious and political spectrum and but was violently condemned by those who thought of themselves as assimilated and as citizens of the countries in which they lived, particularly in Western Europe. Zionist organizations sprung up to advocate for the creation of a Jewish state and to prepare Jews to move there. Many of these were youth groups that taught Jewish children and teenagers agricultural skills and provided a source of communal bonding. Such groups frequently provided a core of young leaders for resistance movements later during the Holocaust.
Jews participated actively in both Jewish and non-Jewish cultural spheres. In the realm of high culture, Jewish musicians, composers, and conductors—such as pianist Anton Rubinstein—were prominently represented in the musical life of Eastern Europe, including as professors in some of the best conservatories. Likewise, Jewish artists such as Marc Chagall and Szmul Hirszenberg and writers like I.L. Peretz achieved great acclaim. Alongside these forms of “higher” culture, a particularly Jewish form of cultural and creative life thrived based around the Yiddish language and the klezmer musical form. For example, the Yiddish Theater in Warsaw became a Jewish cultural icon before being destroyed during the Nazi bombardment of the city.14
At what would become the epicenter of the Holocaust, Jews had lived more or less peacefully for hundreds of years. Many lived in poverty in the shtetl, but in the larger towns and cities, Jews achieved some degree of economic prominence. Likewise, most Jews were very observant and lived vibrant and diverse religious lives. As they received more and more equal rights, Eastern European Jews became active in those political parties that would accept them and address their concerns, primarily parties to the Left, such as the liberals, socialists, and communists. All the while, Jews contributed to the artistic life of the region in all its forms.
The Long Shadow of Antisemitism
The prejudice of antisemitism in Eastern Europe impacted Jewish-Gentile relations from the very beginning of the Jewish presence there. One cannot understand the experience of Jews in the East during the Holocaust, or the behavior of the Nazis and their allies, without a grounding in the history of antisemitism. The simplest definition of antisemitism is “hostility and prejudice directed against Jewish people.”15 The term itself was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, a nineteenth-century German nationalist, but the concept had existed for over a thousand years. Antisemitism can take many forms, but for ease of discussion, it can be broken down into four: religious, economic, political, and racial.
In addition, antisemitism can be further categorized by the origin or “reality” of the particular trope or stereotype. Scholar Gavin Langmuir gives us a helpful framework here by introducing the concepts of realistic, xenophobic, and chimeric “assertions” that build the framework for different forms of antisemitism. “Realistic” antisemitism is based on an objective analysis of observable difference. For example, a cloth merchant in a particular town could hate Jews because he competes with them and they actually do control the market in which he operates. “Xenophobic” antisemitism takes an observation of a small minority of a group and holds it to be true for all. In our example, then, that same merchant would say that rich Jews control the entire cloth trade because they are all clever and cheating businessmen. Here, the antisemite has taken an observation that may be true for a small number of Jews and applied it to the entire class of people, ignoring poor Jews and not recognizing that they do not control the entire market everywhere. Finally, “chimeric” antisemitism is based on pure fantasies that have no basis in fact or observable evidence. Here, our merchant may claim that all Jews are part of a worldwide economic conspiracy to overthrow the Christian state and that they secretly meet to manage this conspiracy.16 These levels of antisemitism inform how we look at the phenomenon of antisemitism over the centuries.
Naturally, the oldest form of antisemitism stems from the origins of Christianity and can be called religious antisemitism or anti-Judaism. According to Christian doctrine until as late as 1965 for the Catholic Church, the Jews were directly responsible for the murder of Jesus; not the Roman official, Pontius Pilate. Multiple verses in the New Testament are openly antisemitic or were interpreted that way. For example, in the Gospel of John, Jesus is quoted as telling Jews “ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him . . . He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.”17 Moreover, according to the Church, all Jews were responsible and would remain guilty for eternity. These and other similar verses provided a scriptural basis for hatred and discrimination against Jews, particularly when Christianity in its earliest form competed against a much more established Judaism. In the year 313 CE, Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, which until then had been intermittently persecuted by the Roman government. With this institutional legitimacy and the support of the Roman Empire, Christianity gained the upper hand over its rival, Judaism.
Thus, for Christians throughout much of history, Jews became “Christ-killers.” This charge had particular power as Christians tended to be far more devout in earlier times than they are today. The belief that Jews had killed the son of God greatly angered many Christians. The only reason Jews were still allowed to exist, according to Christian doctrine as expressed by St. Augustine, was as a humiliated reminder of the results of rejecting the truth of God.18 Thus, in what became a self-fulfilling prophecy, the frequent poverty, discrimination, and victimization of Jews proved their great sin which then justified the behaviors that victimized them. Most Europeans were illiterate and all they knew of Christianity came from the priests who told them what to believe, including what to believe about the Jews. Indeed, even the stained glass and architecture of cathedrals visually depicted antisemitic beliefs for the masses who could not read Latin or access the Bible themselves.
Even the coming of the Reformation and the weakening of the Catholic Church that followed did little to ease the plight of Jews or reduce religious antisemitism. The great leader of the Reformation, Martin Luther, initially a supporter of Jews, focused on learning Hebrew and on the Bible as the basis of Christianity, but mistakenly believed that Jews failed to convert to Christianity due to the same flaws he identified in Catholicism and sought to remedy with Protestantism. When Jews still refused to convert, Luther turned on them, unleashing a torrent of antisemitic literature such as On the Jews and their Lies (1543), in which he tells Christians that “you have no more bitter, venomous, and vehement a foe than a real Jew.”19 Thus, Christian antisemitism transcended doctrinal differences.
Given the depth of religious belief in earlier periods of history, antisemitic religious doctrine had very real, physical consequences. In 1144, a young boy went missing in Norwich, England. When the boy’s body was found, a Benedictine monk named Thomas of Monmouth blamed the Jews for the child’s murder. According to Monmouth, Jews murdered Christian children as part of their religious rituals. This charge led to pogroms and the murder of Jews throughout England. It bears noting that that some leaders in the Catholic Church almost immediately rejected the Blood Libel. Indeed, the victim, William of Norwich, was never officially sainted, despite a strong popular cult following. Pope Gregory X (1271–76) wrote a Papal Bull on the blood libel, saying:
And most falsely do these Christians claim that the Jews have secretly and furtively carried away these children and killed them, and that the Jews offer sacrifice from the heart and blood of these children, since their law in this matter precisely and expressly forbids Jews to sacrifice, eat, or drink the blood, or to eat the flesh of animals having claws.20
Popes who opposed victimization of Jews were motivated at least in part by a desire to convert them, a task made impossible if they were killed. However, other popes repeated antisemitic charges and the official position of the Church must be characterized as apathetic at best to anti-Jewish violence, with other popes actively fomenting antisemitic animosity.
Worse still, this chimeric belief spread throughout Europe, where it became widely accepted as true. Christian communities frequently accused Jews of murdering children to obtain their blood as well as defiling the communion host by stabbing it to make it bleed. Ironically, these accusations and the murders that followed may have had more to do with Christianity’s insecurity in its own beliefs: by validating religious doctrine regarding transubstantiation and communion. Attacks on Jews also often accompanied societal upheavals such as the plague, economic hardship, or political unrest—where Jews became scapegoats for the real culprits, who remained out of reach. Priests frequently whipped Christian communities into anti-Jewish fervor around religious holidays, particularly Easter. Their parishioners then attacked local Jews. As ridiculous as the blood libel may seem today, it was taken very seriously and persisted for a very long time. In Eastern Europe, which experienced the Enlightenment and the rise of more secular and rational thought later than Western Europe, charges of blood libel and pogroms persisted into the twentieth century.
In 1913, the New York Times reported on the trial of Mendel Beilis, a Russian Jew charged with the ritual murder of a Christian boy in Kiev. He was accused of “having killed a boy to get his blood for alleged use in the rites of the Jewish religion.” Yet, the Times editorial writer noted correctly even at the time that “there was no evidence against Beilis” and, indeed, that a gang of criminals had likely murdered the boy. The reporter called the blood libel “a foolish, blind superstition bred of prejudice upon ignorance” and accused Russia of being “2000 years behind the times.”21 It may be shocking to some readers that such chimeric antisemitism could persist into “modernity.” Beilis was eventually cleared after two years in prison and two trials, but the fact that he could be convicted of “ritual murder” by a modern court system in 1913 demonstrates the power that Christian antisemitism possessed in the East. More importantly, across Europe—not just in the East—Christian antisemitism remained a lasting division between Jews and non-Jews—one that could pave the way for other forms of antisemitism.
Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Economic antisemitism stems from the intersection of stereotype and anti-Jewish fantasy. The basic form of this bias alleges that Jews are naturally ruthless, dishonest, and efficient businessmen and that they seek to use this business acumen to control national and international affairs. The origins of this stereotype likely lie in the Middle Ages or earlier. Economic antisemitism is based, in part, on a self-fulfilling prophecy created by the economic limitations placed on Jews by non-Jews. The most prominent version of economic antisemitism was the view of Jews as economic parasites, taking money from non-Jews via moneylending or banking. This stems from the Christian prohibition on usury, the lending of money at interest.
Usury is mentioned in both the New and Old Testament. One of the clearest prohibitions comes from Ezekiel: “thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbours by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord GOD. Behold, therefore I have smitten mine hand at thy dishonest gain which thou hast made, and at thy blood which hath been in the midst of thee.”22 The message was that Christians should not take advantage of fellow Christians in financial need by profiting via interest. One should note that both the Torah and the Koran also prohibit usury by Jews and Muslims as well. While certainly not all Jews were moneylenders and not all moneylenders were Jews, this became one of the most prominent negative economic stereotypes.
The most extreme and least common form of Jewish banking took the form of the “Court Jew.” In the early modern period, as armies and government became larger and required more money, very successful Jewish bankers were called upon to manage the finances of important nobles and kings and to supply loans to finance their wars. Some of these Court Jews became very influential and powerful, though they were always at the mercy of the whims of their Gentile patrons. Compared to the overall Jewish population, however, these men were a tiny minority. As mentioned earlier, as Jews were expelled from Western Europe, some found employment as managers for noble estates. This led many into the unpopular occupation of tax farming, where Jews collected the nobility’s taxes from the population in return for a percentage of proceeds.
However, throughout much of Eastern Europe, most Jews were not extraordinarily wealthy and, indeed, were often impoverished. They functioned frequently as wholesale buyers of crops and livestock, a trade that often engendered suspicion by non-Jewish peasants that deceitful Jewish traders took advantage of them. The same was true of Jews who acted as merchants and small shop owners.
As the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, Jews were again the targets of economic antisemitism for several reasons. The first was due to their relationships with capitalism and communism, which will be treated in more detail below. The second was that some Jews—particularly in Western Europe, but also in the cities of Eastern Europe—were specially poised to take advantage of the changing economic climate. By not owning land, wealthy Jews had immediate access to cash and could invest quickly in the new factory and mass retail economic landscape. As a result, they were often successful in the industrial and large-scale retail spheres. This engendered anger, envy, and frustration among the predominantly non-Jewish small business owners and craftsmen, who could no longer compete with more modern business models. The Nazis would be very popular among German small business owners who viewed the Jews as responsible for their inability to compete. Local populations viewed Jews as being dishonest and as taking advantage of them in their greedy quest for wealth. (And again, most Jews, particularly in Eastern Europe, were not wealthy industrialists or retailers, but the stereotype gained a strong following.)
In short, many non-Jews disliked Jews due to a combination of very real debts owed to them, economic hardship attributed to them, and the fantasy that Jews were part of a world conspiracy to monopolize wealth. This was further connected to the belief that the Jews, as a people without a nation, functioned as economic parasites in the countries in which they lived. These beliefs melded well with political forms of antisemitism.
One of the most central components to political antisemitism was the belief in a “Jewish Question” in Europe beginning in the eighteenth century. This question presupposed that something had to be done with the Jews. Why? According to antisemites (as well as some who were not), the Jews were a problematic group of people because they lacked their own nation state. They were a nationality/ethnicity dispersed throughout Europe, but remained a minority in every country that they inhabited. For many nationalists, this was a problem—in an era when creating states based on shared beliefs and histories was paramount. The Jews represented an obstacle to this in the minds of these theorists because they remained a (relatively) cohesive group that lived in many ways separately from the majority population, particularly in Eastern Europe. The question then, politically, was how to solve this division. Some advocated the expulsion of the Jews and others suggested that the only path to full inclusion was assimilation and conversion to Christianity. This was not a conversation for Gentiles only. In Jewish communities, thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn also suggested that Jews do more to assimilate—speaking the local language, abandoning special forms of dress, and interacting more with their non-Jewish neighbors. Of course, other Jews pushed back against this, particularly in the East, though urban Jews usually tended to be more liberal than the townspeople. Zionists entered into this discussion, advocating that Jews should leave Europe anyway for a homeland in Palestine.
Regardless, the “Jewish question” centered on the modern concept of the nation state; it was here, in politics, that battles for its answer would take place. These battles varied based on local conditions, but political antisemitism became part of national politics throughout Eastern Europe as Jews received more rights and the ability to participate in the political process. Most political antisemitism centered on that fundamental antisemitic belief that Jews sought to control the world through a secret conspiracy and that Jews across national boundaries plotted with one another to accomplish this task. Again, the primacy of the nation state as political framework and the threat of these states being destroyed from the inside in the interests of an international Jewish conspiracy had purchase among some.
One of the best examples of this was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, excerpts of which first appeared in Russia in 1902. This short pamphlet published by Russian writer Sergei Nilus in 1905 purported to be the record of a meeting of a secret organization of powerful Jews, which demonstrated their goals and intent to control the world. Nilus has been described by one scholar as “half prophet and half scoundrel.”23 The preface to the 1921 English edition mirrored the content of the Protocols by invoking World War I and saying “it was plotted by Jews, and was waged by Jewry on the Stock Exchanges of the world. The generals and the admirals were all controlled by Jewry.” It claimed to explain “how they [the Jews] obtained controlling power for Jewry over all the combatants.”24 The text itself contained such “evidence” of an apocalyptic conspiracy as this quote from an “Elder”:
We will select administrators from among the public, who will be possessed of servile tendencies. They will not be experienced in the art of government and therefore will be easily turned into pawns in our game in the hands of our learned and wise counsellors, who have been, especially trained from early childhood for governing the world.25
The Protocols were rather quickly proven to be a collection of forgeries, falsehoods, and plagiarism of other existing texts. Indeed, in 1921, the Times of London published an article presenting “conclusive proof that the document is in the main a clumsy plagiarism.”26 Despite their exposure as a hoax, however, the Protocols held a prominent place in antisemitic propaganda and were accepted by many as legitimate. The Dearborn Independent newspaper—owned and published by famed American industrialist and antisemite, Henry Ford—frequently published antisemitic articles that echoed the Protocols. On July 20, 1920, an article titled “Does a Definite Jewish World Program Exist?” claimed that “the finances of the world are in control of Jews.”27 The Nazis published twenty-three editions of the Protocols from 1919 to 1939.28 Hitler himself often included concepts from the document in his speeches.
We have already seen that, as Jews gained emancipation and became more politically active, they gravitated toward parties of the moderate to extreme left. This is not to say that there were no Jews who supported other political parties. Regardless, even before the rise of the Soviet Union in 1917, Jews were tarred with the accusation that they supported socialism and communism. The antisemitic logic behind this generalization was that both ideologies espoused the redistribution of wealth and that the world Jewish conspiracy was behind this distribution to its own benefit.
This led to the Judeo-Bolshevist myth in which Jews created Bolshevism to advance their agenda. Part of this myth was founded on the specious argument that Jews were prominent among the first leaders of Communism. It is true that many of the early adherents to Communism (Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky) had Jewish backgrounds, but they would never have claimed to be Jews. In any case, after Stalin’s Great Purge (1936–40), few Jews were left in any prominent positions. Regardless, after what Europe saw as the horrors of Communism—which threatened institutions many Europeans held dear—the connection of Jews and Bolsheviks generated a great deal of animosity. For example, around sixty pogroms took place in Ukraine in November and December 1917, and culminated with the mass killing of Jews in the town of Proskurov in 1919—where 1,200 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by Ukrainian soldiers for allegedly supporting the communists.29
Ironically, despite the Judeo-Bolshevik slander, Jews were also blamed as the driving force behind capitalism, which also sought to accumulate the world’s wealth under the control of the “World Jewish conspiracy.” A Nazi propaganda book for children, published in 1935, shows an image of a caricatured Jew sitting on a sack of money in front of a stock exchange with the caption “Money is the god of the Jews. He commits the greatest crimes to earn money. He won’t rest until he can sit on a great sack of money, until he has become king of money.”30 Hitler, too, saw Jews as behind the economics which, in his view, had lost the First World War and was driving the destruction of the German way of life by extracting Germany’s wealth. His 1933 boycott of Jewish businesses was an assault on Jewish economic life in Germany and revealed his “belief” in the economic power of Jews. One of the chief Nazi theorists, Alfred Rosenberg, claimed in 1941 (regarding World War I) that “Now, on Wilson’s order, all of the major Jewish and non-Jewish banks and businesses are now being joined in one conglomerate group of Jewish bosses under the kingpin Bernard Baruch. He was in control of the entire industrial infrastructure of the United States.”31 This formulation blended economic antisemitism with political antisemitism by accusing Jews of controlling liberal democratic movements that supported capitalism.
In short, the underlying chimeric belief that there was a Jewish conspiracy to control the world drove politically antisemitic sentiments that blamed Jews in liberal democratic and in communist parties equally for a litany of supposed ills of society. This antisemitism was used to minimize and combat Jewish political mobilization and inclusion in the political process. Politically active Jews and Jewish political organizations were always subject to deep-seated hatred and antisemitic charges.
The most dangerous and ultimately deadly form of antisemitism arose in the nineteenth century: racial antisemitism. When Charles Darwin published his famous treatise On the Origin of Species in 1859, he could not know the ways in which his theory of the evolution of individual species could be harnessed to racist ideologies. Other theorists quickly applied Darwin’s work to humanity. Surely, they argued, if natural selection (often misidentified as “survival of the fittest”) applied to animals it also applied to humans. Thus, the scientific community began to assign characteristics to ethnic groups and to identify their origins as genetic. In this way, scientists constructed races among humans and began to rank them. They argued that, just as in the animal kingdom, there must be groups within the human species that were superior and destined to prosper while others were doomed to eventual extinction. Whites stood at the top of this racial hierarchy. Jews, blacks, Slavs, native peoples, and others fell beneath white Europeans. Wilhelm Marr, who popularized the term “antisemitism,” expressed the urgency of racial politics in his 1879 treatise, The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism, where he argued that Jews and Germans were locked in a racial death struggle which could only result in the victory of one and the defeat of the other (in a warped comparison to the way natural selection functioned among animal species).
Among racial antisemites, Jews were biological contaminants in countries in where they lived. Most importantly, genetics, not religious practice or cultural tradition, now defined Jews. This made someone a Jew for life, made conversion irrelevant, and assimilation impossible; Jewishness became a matter of blood. Earlier negative stereotypes about Jews (greed, dishonesty, sexual deviance, etc.) now became written into their genetic code. Hitler made clear his views in a 1919 letter viewed by many scholars as the first evidence of his antisemitism. He said, “First, Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association.”32 According to Hitler’s racial view of Jews, “ small doses of German blood could dominate other sorts of blood—except in the case of the Jews, where the opposite was the case. Hitler imagined that even tiny amounts of Jewish blood could assert themselves after many generations.”33
At about the same time, the pseudo-science of eugenics or racial hygiene gained popularity throughout Europe. Eugenics rested on the concept of social Darwinism: the idea that the “survival of the fittest” required that societies and entire racial groups be in constant competition. Eugenics treated societies and races as one might treat an individual in an attempt to ensure the health of the entire race. Respected institutions such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany and the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor, NY, funded by the Carnegies and Rockefellers, began researching and publishing on hereditary dangers facing society. These included legitimate genetic conditions, but also social ills such as promiscuity, alcoholism, criminality, and other undesirable, but not inherited, behaviors. The eugenics movement advocated selective breeding in the same way livestock were bred for better traits. Forced sterilization would prevent undesirable groups from reproducing. In Germany, legal scholar Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published a book in 1920 in which they argued for the killing of those individuals who were genetically inferior. Binding wrote, “Again, I find, either from the legal, social, ethical, or religious standpoint absolutely no reason not to permit the killing of these people, who embody the terrible countertype of a true human and awaken horror in nearly everyone.”34 The eugenics movement, its racialization of populations, and advocacy of extreme measures, greatly affected the later development of Nazi anti-Jewish policies. The Nuremburg Laws of 1935 preventing sexual relationships between Jews and non-Jews are but one example. The Nazis drew deeply on racialized views of Jews, where the mixing of races was a threat to the “Aryan” race and where “the Jews constituted a counter-race, the parasitic instincts of which were out to undermine Aryan blood, character, and mind.”35 Indeed, a 1936 SS publication called the Jew “a parasite, the bloodsucker of the world.” It simultaneously connected multiple antisemitisms, proclaiming that “three figures are characteristic of the Jews: Ahasver, who has no roots, Shylock the soulless, and Judas the traitor.”36
This short discussion of Eastern European Jewish history and antisemitism is vital to understanding the Holocaust in the East. Jews in the East had longstanding connections to their countries, and thriving cultures of their own; they were not simply victims of genocide. The complex history of their interactions with other religions and ethnicities formed the experiences from which they approached and attempted to weather the Holocaust. Indeed, Jewish responses to Nazi persecution were often based upon centuries of experience with other forms of antisemitic oppression. However, they had never faced an enemy such as the Nazis, intent on their physical removal from Europe.
In addition, understanding antisemitism is vital as, in many cases, it formed the foundations of relationships between Jews and non-Jews with critical repercussions for the Jewish population. One of the most pernicious characteristics of antisemitism was the many forms it could take, which could reach a wide variety of audiences with wildly different interests. On the other hand, we must be careful not to ascribe all the motivations for the Holocaust to antisemitism. Indeed, there were antisemites who saved Jews and otherwise moral people who murdered them. Antisemitism was one powerful undercurrent that, along with individual motivations and situational factors, provided the energy for the Holocaust. At different times and places, it could be more important, but any search for understanding the Holocaust cannot end with a monocausal explanation based on antisemitism. Indeed, as we will see in the chapter to follow, antisemitism and larger constructs of race theory combined with much older mythical views of the East to directly influence Nazi policy in Eastern Europe and its attitudes toward conquered populations.
Selected Readings
Goldstein, Phyllis. A Convenient Hatred the History of Antisemitism. Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves, 2012.
Langmuir, Gavin I. Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Mendelsohn, Ezra. The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
Petersen, Hans Christian, and Samuel Salzborn, eds. Antisemitism in Eastern Europe. edited by Samuel Salzborn. Vol. 5, Politische Kulturforschung. Peter Lang GmbH: Frankfurt am Main, 2010.