Jews felt at home in most of the great cities of continental Europe but there were a few with which they had a special relationship. These were places that, without necessarily abandoning faith in the heavenly Jerusalem (Yerushalayim shel ma’lah), they transmuted in their imagination into an earthly one (Yerushalayim shel matah) that might serve as a place of sojourn, pending their return to the true Zion—for the irreligious among them it might even be a replacement for that.
“Amsterdam is the city of the Jews and cyclists,” wrote the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch.1 Like the cyclists, the Jews were totally at home in the Dutch capital. Siegfried van Praag called it the “Jerusalem of the west” in a book of that title published in 1961 but the phrase was in common use long before.2 Both Jews and non-Jews called the city by the affectionate slang name Mokum, allegedly derived from the Yiddish/Hebrew word for “place.”
Jews had first arrived in the late sixteenth century, many as Marranos (converts to Christianity who secretly preserved the old faith) from Spain and Portugal. Later the Sephardim were joined and eventually greatly outnumbered by Ashkenazi immigrants from central and eastern Europe. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Amsterdam flourished as a major Jewish cultural center, the home of Hebrew printers, scholars, poets, and thinkers (though the greatest, Baruch Spinoza, had been expelled from the community). Jews in Amsterdam had long played a significant role in Dutch cultural, economic, and political life and probably encountered less hostility from their fellow citizens than in any other major city in Europe.
In 1939 about seventy-nine thousand Jews lived in Amsterdam, constituting more than half the Jews in the Netherlands. But here as elsewhere the Jewish birthrate was declining, the population was aging, and, recent historians have concluded, “the demographic prospects for the Jewish population … looked sombre. Had the trends apparent in the 1930s continued, then this population group would have been doomed to extinction.”3
Most Dutch Jews were still nominally orthodox, though secularism was making steady progress among Jews, particularly on the left. Although many Jews were nonpracticing, the community’s institutions were orthodox-dominated and traditional Judaism had a stronger hold than in most west European cities. The small Liberal congregations in The Hague and Amsterdam, founded in the 1930s, drew support mainly from refugees from Germany and remained on the periphery of the community.
The substantial Dutch-Jewish middle class “was characterized by a kind of dry, stolidly bureaucratic mindset”—the judgment of Benno Gitter, who grew up in Amsterdam in the interwar period.4 Most of the Jews in the city, however, belonged to the working class and were poorer than the rest of the city’s population. In 1930, whereas 18.5 percent of taxpayers in the city paid tax on income higher than three thousand florins, for Jews the proportion was only 8.9 percent. In 1932, although they formed less than a tenth of the population, they were a quarter of all those receiving poor relief.5
As in most European cities, Jews were heavily concentrated in retail trade. At least a third worked in this sector, compared with 21 percent of the general population. This statistic, however, concealed a huge range of economic power and social standing, from the gilded patriciate, such as the owners of the fashionable de Bijenkorf department store, founded by the Goudsmit family, to the mass of petty street traders and itinerant hawkers.
The Jewish proletariat, in the strict sense of the term, was concentrated, here as elsewhere, in the garment manufacturing industry, in which 20 percent of Jews worked, compared with just 5 percent of the general population. At the lowest levels of skill and pay, women, in particular, often worked very long hours in small workshops.
The aristocracy of labor in Amsterdam was to be found in another part of the skilled working class, the diamond industry, in which Jews had played an important role since the seventeenth century. As in tailoring, they predominated in the industry both as employers and workers. Jews had founded both the diamond employers’ organization, the Algemeene Juweliers-Vereeniging, and the Diamond Workers’ Union, established in 1894. This was the first Dutch labor union and Henri Polak and others among its leaders became working-class heroes and played an important role in the Social Democrat Party. The union built an imposing headquarters on the Franschelaan in the affluent Plantage district.
Before the First World War, more than half of all the diamond workers in the world had been Dutch. In the 1920s, however, the Amsterdam diamond industry suffered a severe downturn. The city ceded its preeminence in the industry to Antwerp, where labor was cheaper. Unlike Amsterdam, where stones were cut in large factories, Antwerp developed a system of cottage outworkers who cut and polished at home. The Great Depression diminished diamond production and trade everywhere. In consequence, employment in Amsterdam declined even further. Many unemployed diamond workers were driven to setting up market stalls on the Waterlooplein, the large square near the old Jewish quarter, or miserable, small shops elsewhere. By the 1930s, just 6 percent of the Jewish labor force worked in the industry.
What survived of diamond production in Amsterdam remained mostly Jewish: at least 80 percent of the employers and 60 percent of the workers were Jews. The diamond bourse still closed on Saturdays, as it had since its inception in 1890. Members could attend mincha (afternoon) services in a special prayer room set aside for the purpose. A kosher restaurant in the building offered Amsterdam-Jewish delicacies like ginger cakes and marzipan tarts. At Passover matzot were served, spread with thick butter and brown sugar.6 Diamond merchants there, as throughout the world, still used the Yiddish phrase a mazel un a brokhe (“luck and a blessing”) when they closed a deal.
With the exception of this phrase, plus a few others that had been absorbed into the local Jewish working-class dialect, Yiddish in Amsterdam, a branch of the Western variant of the language, had been dead since the end of the nineteenth century. In the interwar period, however, some recent eastern European immigrants reintroduced it, now in its Polish-Russian form. Most of the immigrants were leftists—Communists, Bundists, or Labor Zionists—and they established the An-sky East European Jewish Workers’ Cultural Society, with its own library.
These Jewish immigrants, like those to most European cities, congregated initially in the center of the city. The heart of Jewish Amsterdam was in and around the Waterlooplein flea market, a large proportion of whose traders were Jewish. Heet iis te gèèf (“I’m giving it away!”) was a characteristic stallkeeper’s cry. Jews were conspicuous among the sellers of old clothes, bric-a-brac, fruit, fish, flowers, vegetables, and ice. From here ragpickers, itinerant barrow-men, and pedlars radiated out to the rest of the city.
The area is remembered nostalgically in picturesque sepia photographs, but the reality of life there was harsh:
Waterlooplein. A battlefield. A struggle for existence. Never an armistice. There is nothing more cruel. From early morning to late in the evening, eternally. … Everyone fights for himself. Need dictates the onslaught. … Hear those cries—one continuous sound all day long. The stench of garbage and the reek of decomposition; moldly dregs and the color of decay. … On the battlefield of Waterloo one learns the value of the worthless. Shoes you would not even hurl at a mangy cat are fought over. Rags you wouldn’t dare give a beggar cause quarrels.
And yet, with it all, sparks of the human spirit burst forth: “Laughter, laughter! The struggle for existence does, after all, have its own humor.”7
In the Jodenbuurt, the old Jewish quarter nearby, were located the main communal institutions and places of worship, including the great Portuguese Esnoga, completed in 1675. In the surrounding streets one could buy traditional delicacies: fried roe, ginger buns, and smoked fish. In 1930 the city had eighty kosher food stores, including thirty-two butchers and twenty-four bakeries and cake shops. The volksrebbe (people’s rabbi), Meijer de Hond, part old-style magid (popular preacher), part populist controversialist, part modern social worker, became a tribune of the working class in the district, or at any rate of those among the poor with some sentimental attachment to Jewish tradition.
The German-Jewish social worker Gertrude Cohn (later van Tijn), who settled in Amsterdam in 1915, was fascinated by the Jodenbuurt:
The streets there were rabbit-warrens; the houses incredibly old. I learned later how much poverty, inter-marriage [she meant marriage between close relatives] and sickness there was in the ghetto; but it did not hit the eye as it did in London. There seemed to be no slums. I was fascinated by the Jewish markets, which were held in front of the two beautiful old synagogues. Everything was sold there from old rusty nails to silk underwear.8
Housing conditions in the Jewish quarter in the 1930s remained overcrowded and unsanitary. The area was rife with social problems, including drunkenness and prostitution.9
By then, however, only a remnant, consisting of the very poorest Jews, still lived in the district. Most of the rest had moved to eastern parts of the city: better-off elements of the working class to the Transvaalbuurt, the affluent middle class to the Plantage.
Jonathan Israel has pointed out that the so-called pillarization of Dutch society facilitated “both acceptance of a separate Jewish identity within Dutch national life and, simultaneously, a remarkably smooth quasi-segregation of Jewish existence from the mainstream of Dutch politics and public affairs.”10 Not having their own “pillar,” Jews tended to identify politically with the Liberals or Social Democrats. By the early twentieth century the “quasi-segregation” had diminished and Jews were playing a full part in Dutch public life, particularly in the socialist movement. Four out of six aldermen in Amsterdam (one Liberal and three Social Democrats) in the early 1930s were Jewish.
At the same time, Dutch Jewry had its own internal divisions, in this case into three groups: Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and, after 1933, immigrants from the Third Reich. The Sephardim looked down on the Dutch Ashkenazim and both adopted a patronizing attitude toward the refugees from Germany.
Tempering condescension was a sense of responsibility. The community boasted an impressive set of educational and social welfare institutions. In most cases, however, these were divided not only according to function but also between Sephardim and Ashkenazim.
The “Portuguese” population of no more than 4,500 persons had its own hospital in the Plantage, two orphanages (one for boys and another for girls), three old-age homes (one for men, one for women, and one for couples, provided they had been married at least twenty years), as well as a society for giving fifteen winter coats a year (to men only), and another for giving blouses to women above the age of fifty. Two Portuguese-Jewish societies gave help to women after childbirth, one after the birth of a son, the other after that of a daughter. These bodies “withstood any attempt at fusion and [kept] vigorously to their independence.”11
Two other Jewish hospitals were primarily for Ashkenazim. The main one, on the Nieuwe Keizersgracht, had three hundred beds. The Joodsche Invalide, a home for elderly, blind, or otherwise disabled people, founded on the initiative of Maijer de Hond, earned a worldwide reputation and in 1937 opened a fine modern building, known as the Glass Palace, on the Weesperplein. Largely supported by private donations, it was unusual among Jewish institutions in securing donations from non-Jews as well as Jews. It raised money by means of collection boxes, the sale of calendars, social events, free advertising in De Telegraaf, several popular touring revues with dancing girls, specially recorded gramophone records, and films. It also ran lotteries on the AVRO radio station, endorsed by well-known personalities, including the Dutch prime minister, Hendrikus Colijn.12 As such non-Jewish backing indicated, Amsterdam Jewry’s links with its neighbors were generally harmonious and unmarked by the hostility that prevailed in much of the rest of Europe.
But the arrival in or passage through the Netherlands between 1933 and 1940 of about thirty-five thousand Jewish fugitives from the Third Reich tested this relationship and revealed its limitations. As J. C. H. Blom puts it, the refugees “were as unwelcome in the Netherlands as in most other countries.”13 The minister of social affairs noted that the refugees exhibited “a totally different mentality from the Jews here.”14 The government offered little material help to the uninvited guests.
By 1935 the pressure on the Amsterdam committee for Jewish refugees was almost unbearable. It had dealt with 5,400 arrivals in the Netherlands since 1933. Of these, 2,200 were dispatched to overseas destinations, principally Palestine. About a thousand were sent back to Germany, supposedly on the basis that they would no longer be in danger there.15 In April 1935 the committee’s secretary, Gertrude van Tijn, wrote to James G. McDonald, the League of Nations high commissioner for refugees: “We shall have to close down within a couple of months as it is quite impossible to get the funds required for this work either locally or internationally.”16
Most of the refugees who remained in Holland lived in Amsterdam. Among them was Otto Frank, his wife, Edith, and daughters Margot and Anne. His business in Frankfurt was already in serious trouble in 1933 when he decided to settle in Amsterdam, which he already knew from a brief earlier sojourn. He set up a small company there for the “production and sale of fruit products, especially pectin” (a natural gelling agent derived from fruit and used in the manufacture of jam and jellies).17 Later he also sold spices used in the making of sausages. This enterprise was a comedown for a man who had been a reasonably prosperous private banker in the 1920s. The Franks settled in the Rivieren district of south Amsterdam, where many other German-Jewish refugees lived.
Like refugees the world over, those who arrived in Amsterdam clustered together, socialized in their own language, and set up shops, clubs, and places of worship. By 1939 a third of the population of the Rivieren district was Jewish. The nearby Beethoven-straat, a focus for German-Jewish shops and cafés, became known as Brede Jodenstraat (a play on the Jodenbreestraat near the Water-looplein), and tram number 24, which traveled down it, was dubbed the “Berlin express.”
Dutch-Jewish historians have vigorously debated the degree of integration of Jews in Dutch society in the interwar period. Viewed in contemporary comparative context, the Amsterdam community seemed more firmly anchored than almost any other European Jewish community. No doubt, as some have alleged, there were elements of self-deception in the general Dutch-Jewish feeling of security and acceptance in the Netherlands. Henri Polak declared in 1930: “Anti-Semitism is in our country of no political significance; it doesn’t exist as a political slogan; it doesn’t figure in any party program and few people will admit that they have anti-Semitic feelings.”18 But by 1933 he was sufficiently concerned to publish a lengthy refutation of “scientific” anti-Semitism, advocating the establishment of a detention center for anti-Semites.19 The birth of a small Dutch Nazi movement, the NSB, which garnered 8 percent of the vote in provincial elections in 1935, seemed cause for concern, but not for alarm. At first not anti-Semitic, it adopted an anti-Jewish policy in 1938, calling for the removal of Jews to a colony such as Surinam.
As pressure from events in the Third Reich intensified, the outlook for Amsterdam Jewry began to darken.
The “Jerusalem of the North,” or Yerusholoyim d’Lite (Jerusalem of Lithuania), was said to have derived its handle from Napoleon’s remark when he passed through Vilna on his way to Moscow in 1812: “Gentlemen, I think we are in Jerusalem!” Probably he was alluding not to the physical aspect of Vilna but rather to its intensely Jewish character (its population at that time was more heavily Jewish than that of Jerusalem).
Like Amsterdam, Vilna (the Russian name; the city was known to Poles as Wilno, to Lithuanians as Vilnius, and to Yiddish speakers as Vilne) had a proud Jewish heritage. In the 1930s it remained a center of religious and secular scholarship but, again like Amsterdam, the community was living in large measure on accumulated cultural capital of the past.
Jewish settlement in Vilna dated back to the fifteenth century and by the early sixteenth a quarter of the population was Jewish. The city’s fame in the Jewish world arose chiefly from its association with the revered rabbinic figure of the Vilna Gaon, who countered the ecstatic populism of the Hasidic movement with a more rationalistic, scholarly sobriety. In the nineteenth century Vilna was a center of the haskalah (Hebrew Enlightenment). It was also a hub of Hebrew publishing: the so-called Vilna Shas, the edition of the Talmud published by the Rom family house and completed in 1886, became a prized possession in orthodox homes throughout the world. By 1914 Jews constituted close to half the city’s population. Vilna’s prestige among Jews was not limited to the religious sphere. Alluding to the city’s role in the early history of Russian socialism, Semen Dimanshteyn, the leading Soviet party official responsible for Jewish affairs, declared in 1919, “For us Jewish revolutionaries, Communists, Vilna long ago became a historic centre, the heart of the Jewish spiritual liberation.”20 The Jews here felt, said one of their number, “not a trace of the well-known innermost feeling of Jewish inferiority” so common elsewhere.21
During and after the First World War, Vilna and its Jews underwent a series of disastrous vicissitudes, successive occupations, civil strife, and waves of refugees flowing in and out. Lithuania proclaimed the city its capital but in 1920 it was captured by Polish forces. The Poles remained in control until 1939. They claimed to be the largest ethnic group in the city: in 1916 50 percent of the population had reported Polish as their first language, 42 percent gave Yiddish, and only 2.5 percent Lithuanian. The Lithuanians refused to accept the Polish coup de main and relations between the two states were poisoned. The frontier between them was closed for most of the interwar period, with severe effects on the economy of Vilna, particularly on the large Jewish mercantile class. The closure also affected Jewish cultural life: not only people but books and newspapers were prohibited from crossing directly between Vilna and Kovno or other places in Lithuania.
Forced wartime evacuations to the Russian interior had led to a reduction of nearly half in the number of Jews in Vilna to just 47,000 in 1920. Eight thousand emigrated between 1926 and 1937, mainly to South America, South Africa, and the United States (in that order of magnitude). The Jewish population nevertheless recovered somewhat, reaching 60,000 in 1939, but by then Jews were little more than a quarter of all residents.
Vilna Jews were heavily concentrated in certain occupations: they were tailors, bookbinders, tinsmiths, hatters, and carters. They also held an important place in the professions: three-quarters of the doctors in the city were Jews. In many lines of work, Jews formed their own unions or professional associations, among them the barbers, shoe stitchers, waiters, and construction and woodworkers’ unions.
Interwar Vilna remained a city of five nationalities: Poles, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Russians, and Jews. It evoked in its inhabitants a special affection and, in some, an unusual breadth of mind. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who lived there, recalled in his mind’s eye
Wilno of the Enlightenment or Romanticism. Those stinking piles of garbage, the sewage streaming down the center of the roadways, the dust or mud that one had to wade through. … [T]he narrow lanes of the Jewish quarter … preserving the memory of Walentyn Potocki, a righteous man, who had converted to Judaism in Amsterdam and was burned at the stake in Wilno; and also, sha sha, talk about Officer Gradé, who had been hidden in a pious Jewish household, and about how he had already recovered from his wounds and decided to become a Jew, had himself circumcised, and intended to marry the daughter of the house. This was the man whose descendant would be a poet in the Yiddish language, Chaim Grade, a member of the Yung Vilne poets’ group, which was parallel to our Polish language group “Żagary.”22
Actually, the story about the Polish nobleman Potocki is certainly false and the supposed ancestry of Grade is probably no less legendary. No matter: people believed it. Such myths clustered about Vilna. More pertinently, Miłosz wrote that the city’s different communities in his youth lived “within the same walls yet as if on separate planets.”23
Between the wars, Vilna’s Jews endured commercial boycotts supported by the Roman Catholic Church, defacement of Jewish signs, and anti-Semitic student riots. In one such disturbance, in 1931, a Polish youth was killed by a Jewish student, Samuel Wolfin, acting in self-defense. Wolfin was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment by the county court for “participation in stoning to death the Polish student.”24
The leading Jewish political figure, until his death in 1935, was Dr. Tsemakh Szabad, who served on the city council and from 1928 as a senator in the Polish parliament. A man of broad cultural horizons, Szabad enjoyed a personal following that transcended his association with the Folkists.
For the most part, however, political loyalties here, as elsewhere in Poland, were mainly party-based. The Agudists, the Zionists, and the left all enjoyed support in the city. Vilna was, in particular, a stronghold of the Bund, which had been founded there in 1897 and was popular among the poverty-stricken working class.
The old Vilna ghetto was picturesque in the eyes of some (and in the sentimental folk memory of later years) but to contemporary visitors it often seemed “disgusting and unhealthy, the antithesis of modernity and of progress.”25 Its decrepit buildings, general aura of decay, its slum and cave dwellers, and its jostling street population of pedlars, vagrants, crazies, organ-grinders, and deformed beggars shocked rather than charmed tourists. Many Jewish institutions, including several synagogues and yeshivot and the famous Strashun Library, were located in or near the Alte Kloyz (old courtyard). The Hebrew and Yiddish teachers’ colleges, the Leyzer Gurvitch Yiddish primary school, a museum, and the offices of the kehillah all occupied another yard at 7 Azheshkove Gas (gas meaning passage).
With its innumerable synagogues, the city remained a citadel of non-Hasidic orthodoxy. There were separate congregations of chimney sweeps, printers, and gravediggers. Vilna’s Vaad Hayeshivot (committee of yeshivot) presided over orthodox Jewish education in a wide area of northern Poland and Lithuania. The influence of its leading rabbis extended throughout orthodox Jewry. But the power of the orthodox even in Vilna was declining. In 1928 a coalition of Zionists and leftists, who already controlled the kehillah, captured the tsedoko gedoylo, the main Jewish charitable body, hitherto under orthodox direction, and appropriated it for general communal use.
Until the collapse of the Russian Empire, modernized, educated Jews in Vilna tended to speak Russian rather than Yiddish. With the end of imperial rule, Russian gradually lost its attraction. Vilna Jews did not, however, adopt Polish, which they tended to use only on formal or official occasions.
Instead Vilna became the capital of yidishkayt, what the journalist Hirsz Abramowicz called “the city of the most intimate Jewishness in the world” and “the most Yiddishist city in the world.”26 According to the census of 1931, 86 percent of Jews there claimed Yiddish as their mother tongue. Bank checks and doctors’ prescriptions were issued in the language. The Yiddish gymnasium (academic high school) competed with a Hebrew one. The Yiddish scout organization Bin (Bee) held summer camps, sporting jamborees, and soirées, and issued its own songbook. The VILBIG (Vilner Yidishe Bildungs Gezelshaft) “people’s university” organized lecture series in Yiddish on history, languages and literature, geography, physics, chemistry, and sociology. It also organized a choir (of both sexes) and a mandolin orchestra.
YIVO, the Jewish Scientific [in the European sense of scholarly] Institute, was conceived by Yiddish-speaking intellectuals in Berlin in the early 1920s but established in Vilna in 1925. Its primary purpose was research but it had the ambition of serving as a national academy of the Yiddish language and as a teaching institution. Its supporters saw it as “the crown of the building of Yiddish secular culture,” a modern “Sanhedrin of scholars.”27 Ambitious to construct an intellectual engine for the collective self-understanding of east European Jewry, YIVO set up departments of philology, history, economics and statistics, and psychology and pedagogy. Its ethnographic commission, with a network of several hundred volunteer zamlers (collectors), gathered material on Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, building on the work before the First World War of S. An-sky. YIVO also created a major library and archive. Determinedly secularist, the institution’s leaders were nevertheless inspired by what has been described as a “mixture of latent religious inspiration and overt secular content.”28 As Joshua Karlip has written, the Yiddish revivalists of the early twentieth century “sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously … borrowed their belief in the redemptive role of culture from the traditional emphasis on the study of Torah and the performance of mitzvoth [commandments/good deeds].”29
The spiritus rector of YIVO was Max Weinreich, “a short man with a highly expressive face that was marred by the loss of one eye, the souvenir of a pogrom.”30 He married the daughter of Tsemakh Szabad. A cosmopolitan, progressive, and wide-ranging scholar, Wein-reich studied at the universities of St. Petersburg and Berlin, earned a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Marburg, lived for a short time in Vienna, and also spent a year as a visitor at Yale. Under Weinreich’s guidance, YIVO moved beyond “a salvage effort towards inter-disciplinary social research, [shifting] its research focus from the past to a concern with the present and the future.”31
Although YIVO was nominally nonpartisan, most of its leading figures were close in their outlook to the Bund (Weinreich), the Folkists (Pryłucki) or the Left Poalei Zion (Ringelblum). As a result, YIVO was viewed with suspicion by Communists, Agudists, and Zionists. The institute’s work, while reflecting the leftist outlook of its leadership, tried to steer clear of direct political involvement.
YIVO—and Yiddish secular culture in general—lived in a state of chronic financial crisis. In 1929 a Yiddish journalist deplored the trouble YIVO encountered in raising the $3,500 needed to erect its building in Vilna, noting that orthodox Jews had been able to raise much larger sums in Poland and, in addition, $53,000 overseas, for the new Lublin yeshiva. “Where,” he asked plaintively, is the pride in the building of Jewish secular culture?” In Lublin itself, the writer added, a secular Yiddish school building could not be completed for lack of a paltry sum of money.32 Such funds as YIVO did manage, with great difficulty, to scrape together came mainly from small contributors in eastern Europe rather than the relatively affluent Jewish communities of North America.
Against the odds YIVO succeeded by 1933 in raising the $10,000 required to renovate a modern, spacious building on a hilltop beyond the crowded streets of the old Jewish quarter. A young American visiting scholar, Libe Schildkret, who arrived to spend a year working at YIVO in 1938, later described it: “Everything about the YIVO—its location, its landscaped setting, its modern design, the gleaming immaculateness of the place—delivered a message. I interpreted it to mean that the YIVO had class, was no moldering institution, but a place from which distinction and excellence would issue. Even more: The YIVO was no seedy relic of the past; it belonged to the future.”33
From its modernistic headquarters, YIVO sought to establish itself as the flagship of a forward-looking Yiddish culture. Yet while it enjoyed considerable prestige and respect among intellectuals, YIVO’s reach into broader society was limited. It succeeded in the 1930s in opening branches in Paris and New York and support groups elsewhere. But as Simon Dubnow sadly concluded after a visit in 1934, YIVO in Vilna remained “a small island of culture in a sea of beggary.”34
Several Yiddish newspapers were published in Vilna, notably the “non-partisan, democratic” (in fact, leftist, fiercely anti-Zionist) Vilner tog (1919–39, with short gaps), edited by the philologist and literary scholar Zalmen Reyzen, and the nonparty, Zionist, and anti-Yiddishist Di tsayt (1924–39, also with occasional intervals). Most popular was the sensational Ovent-kuryer, which, like many Yiddish papers, held readers in tantalized suspense with its serialized cliffhanger novels. Some of these were translated from the American yellow press. When the importation of foreign papers was suddenly banned midstory, the paper found a solution: the entire cast of characters embarked on a ship that foundered in a storm with no survivors.
The group of writers and artists known as Yung Vilne would meet at the Café Velekh, at the corner of Yidishe Gas and Daytshe Gas, welcomed by the proprietor, Wolfie Wolf. A special page in the Vilner tog on October 11, 1929, announced the araynmarsh (festive entry) of the group into Yiddish literature. Although non-Communist, the Yung Vilne writers inclined to the left. They were inspired by the personality and works of Moshe Kulbak, whose poem “Vilna” (1927) was a hymn of praise to the spiritual qualities of the city from a modernist, secular writer: “Du bist a tehilim oysgeleygt fun leym un ayzn …” (“You are a psalm, spelled in clay and iron …”)35
Yung Vilne included several poets and writers who became prominent figures of the last phase of Yiddish literary creativity, among them Chaim Grade and Avrom Sutzkever. Unlike other Yiddish literary groups, Yung Vilne adopted no uniform programmatic stance or style. One of its members, Leyzer Volf, claimed a world record in 1930 for writing 1,001 poems in a month. Between 1934 and 1936 Yung Vilne produced three issues of a literary annual (the second was confiscated by the censor and had to be issued in a revised form). In the late 1930s Volf helped a number of aspiring teenage writers, among them Hirsh Glik (later to become well-known for his “Song of the Partisans”), form another group, Yungvald (Young Forest). They began issuing their own magazine, of which just four numbers appeared (January to April 1939).
By the mid-1930s Jewish Vilna collectively shared in Polish Jewry’s general sense of gloom and foreboding. Borekh “Vladek” Charney, a leading Yiddish writer in New York, who had lived in Vilna in his youth, wrote in 1934:
Since the world war the name of Vilna has acquired a doleful tone. When someone says “Vilna” that generally means trouble [tsores]. And even the small amount of satisfaction [nakhes] that we can derive from Vilna, like the Yiddish schools or YIVO, is merely spiritual satisfaction. It smacks of an effort to preserve, conserve, and defend what little remains against the attacks of hostile surroundings.36
Vladek had long left the old country behind and his impression was no doubt colored by the emigrant’s nostalgia for past glories. But his comment reflected the pervasive sense of depression that was descending over the Jewish population of the city.
Minsk, a hundred miles southeast of Vilna, was another old center of Jewish religious scholarship, a former stronghold of haskalah and later of political radicalism. Although founded in Vilna, the Bund had set up its first headquarters in Minsk and the first congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party had convened there in 1898. At that time Jews constituted over half the population of the city. Zionism was also strong there. In the elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly in December 1917, to the Minsk Soviet, and to the kehillah in 1918 and 1920, Zionists and their allies secured decisive majorities of Jewish votes.
In the final stages of the First World War and during the Russian civil and Russo-Polish wars, Minsk, like Vilna, was occupied and re-occupied several times by Bolsheviks, Germans, and Poles. Although ideologically little attracted to Bolshevism, Jews in Minsk generally sided with the Soviets during the civil war, seeing them as a lesser danger than the anti-Semitic “Whites” or the Poles, both of whom were credited with responsibility for pogroms in territories that they captured. A minority of Jewish activists—Bundists, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks (the latter at first few in number)—played a significant role in revolutionary activity in Minsk in 1917. In the early 1920s Jews were well represented in the leadership and membership of the Communist Party in the city. Thereafter many were purged as lishentsy, Zionists, Bundists, or Trotskyists.
Under Bolshevik rule, Minsk became the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Byelorussia. The kehillah was dissolved. Most synagogues, yeshivot, and hadorim (elementary Hebrew schools) were closed. The last congress of the Bund on Soviet soil took place in Minsk in March 1921 and resolved on a merger with the Communist Party. Some Zionist groups remained active in Minsk until the mid-1920s, when they were penetrated by the GPU (Soviet secret police) and nineteen activists were arrested and sentenced to expulsion from the Soviet Union. An underground cell of Poalei Zion, with eight members, was, however, still operating in Minsk in 1935.37
In the 1920s and 1930s Jews moved to the city from surrounding shtetlakh. But many moved out of the former Pale altogether, especially to Moscow and Leningrad. The Jewish population of Minsk (fifty-four thousand in 1926), as a result, grew more slowly than the Byelorussian, and by the end of the 1920s Jews were no longer the largest ethnic group.
The traditional Jewish quarter, located in the heart of the old city, remained heavily Jewish until the Second World War, though because it lacked many institutions of the kind that existed in Vilna, its Jewish character became less visible.
In Minsk, as elsewhere in the USSR, Jews, who were concentrated in mercantile occupations, suffered disproportionately after the end of the New Economic Policy in the late 1920s. More than a fifth of adult Jews in Byelorussia in 1930 were classified as lishentsy. Most businesses in Minsk had been Jewish and were forced to close. In her study of the city’s Jews between the wars, Elissa Bemporad reports that of 482 people listed on the city council’s “black board” of lishentsy in 1930, “nearly all had Jewish names.”38 By the mid-1930s there were, at any rate officially, no Jewish traders left in Minsk. The Jewish working class of the city was heavily represented in the skilled and semiskilled sectors of the garment, leather, printing, and woodworking industries. Meanwhile, Jews were entering in large numbers into professions such as medicine and law.
In spite of a decree, issued in 1922, banning Jewish religious instruction to minors, save in the home, some clandestine Hebrew schools and a secret yeshiva continued to exist until the early 1930s, with financial support from the Joint. But by the late 1930s only a handful of the 120 synagogues in the city were still open for prayer and just five rabbis remained.
Cut off from its traditional links with the vital heartbeat of Jewish life in the new states of Poland and Lithuania, interwar Jewish Minsk fell back on its own resources and became a proving ground for the definition and creation of new forms of Jewish culture, Soviet-style. Under the policy of korenizatsiia (literally “rooting,” that is, indigenization or nativization), pursued in non-Russian regions of the USSR between 1921 and 1933, local languages and cultures were promoted. The policy did not give free rein to non-Russian cultures. Rather, the official hope was, by working through other languages, to implant Communism more effectively in the non-Russian-speaking segments of Soviet society.
As in Vilna, the Jewish bourgeoisie had by the turn of the century embraced Russian as their main language of cultural discourse. Yiddish, however, remained the day-to-day tongue of the Jewish working class. Until 1938 it was recognized as one of the four official languages of Byelorussia. A large sign at the main railway station in Minsk displayed the name of the city in Byelorussian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish. Citizens had—and exercised—the right to use Yiddish in courts and in official business. Schools, trade unions, and party cells all used the language. The local radio station broadcast regularly in Yiddish. The title cards of silent films shown in cinemas appeared in Yiddish. And we are told that Byelorussia was “the only area in Eastern Europe throughout which letters could be addressed in Yiddish.”39
As a result, Minsk developed into the USSR’s main center of Yiddish culture in the 1920s. A Yiddish theater in the former Choral Synagogue on Volodarskaia Street, a college to train teachers for Yiddish schools (in a former talmud torah), a “Jewish Workers’ University” (an evening school), and a Jewish Central Party School for the training of cadres were all established in the 1920s. So too was a Jewish section of the Byelorussian Institute for Culture, later upgraded into an Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture of the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences. A chair in Yiddish, the first anywhere in the world, was inaugurated at the new Byelorussian State University. A Jewish section of the university for a time taught courses in science and mathematics—probably the only instance in history of university teaching through the medium of Yiddish.40 Lack of suitable textbooks and the preference of many Jewish students for study in Russian, however, prevented the innovation from lasting long.
A number of Yiddish writers and intellectuals, some from other countries, moved to the city and established the Yiddish journal Tsaytshrift in 1926. It printed contributions from some non-Communist, non-Soviet scholars. The fifth volume, which appeared in 1931, contained standard Soviet subject matter such as “Style and Genre in Proletarian Literature.” But it also published texts of letters by the founding figure of modern Yiddish literature, Mendele Moykher Sforim (S. Y. Abramovitsh, 1835–1917). Mendele is also regarded as a father of modern Hebrew literature and the letters included some written in Hebrew. This was a very rare instance of modern Hebrew publication in the Soviet Union—perhaps the last. It was certainly the last in Tsaytshrift, which henceforth ceased publication.
The end of NEP in the late 1920s produced crude, anti-Semitic attacks on alleged Jewish speculators.41 The campaigns against Bundism and Trotskyism from 1926 onward, partly a reflection of national rivalries between Byelorussians and Jews in the local power structure, also degenerated in Minsk into a coded form of antiSemitism.42 Bundism and Trotskyism indeed commanded significant support among Jewish workers and party members in the city. Jews were heavily represented both among those accused of these heresies and those who dared to defend them, for example by speaking up in defense of the Bund or by voting against the expulsion of Trotsky from the Communist Party.43
In the 1930s, however, as they were offered opportunities for integrating into Russian, as distinct from Byelorussian, culture, Minsk Jews increasingly internalized the values of Soviet society—a trend depicted in the novel Di zelmenyaner (1931–35), by Moshe Kulbak, who had moved there from Vilna in 1928.
For the Sephardic Jews of Salonica, their city too was a Jerusalem, a “holy city, where the traditions and language carried from Spain were tenaciously perpetuated across the centuries, seducing by their intact purity,” as a former resident wrote nostalgically in the 1950s.44 Visitors gained a similar impression. An Italian journalist wrote in 1914 that the city “gives the impression of being a strange Jerusalem, very modern, very Macedonian, a little international, but Jerusalem to be sure, because of the great quantity of Jews who inundate her, so much so that they make all the other nationalities of secondary importance.”45
In 1913 the Jewish population of Salonica was estimated as 61,000 out of a total of 158,000. Only 37,000 residents were Greeks, and the Jews were the largest single group in the population. Jewish merchant princes, owners of banks, and textile entrepreneurs did not need to seek entry into the city’s social elite: they were the elite. Most of the Jews, however, were petty traders, artisans, or laborers. A survey in 1918 found that the “occupational pyramid” of Salonica Jews contained 750 professionals, 1,900 businessmen, 6,100 small shopkeepers, 7,450 office and shop clerks, 7,750 craftsmen and workers, and 9,000 porters, dockers, boatmen, and fishermen, the latter divided between moros (deep-sea fishermen) and gripari (who fished in shallow waters).46 The large number of manual laborers was unusual for a Jewish community. A majority of workers in the port were Jews and Saturday rather than Sunday was observed there as the day of rest.
The main language of the community was Judeo-Espagnol, though from the 1870s onward, as a result of education in the French-language schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, many of the younger generation, especially those from more affluent backgrounds, were turning to French. Over the centuries the community had tenaciously and lovingly preserved its distinctive customs. Different synagogues existed for families whose ancestors originated in various regions of Spain, such as Aragon and Catalonia. Popular local songs, known as cantigas, were sung at events known as caffé aman or caffé chantant. During Passover women would serve aromatic galettes d’azyme (round matzot).
Cultural life was less intense than in comparably sized Ashkenazi communities. The Jewish press displayed little of the intellectualism of the more serious Jewish papers in Poland. There was no professional Judeo-Espagnol theater, though plays were occasionally performed in the language, including Los Maranos by T. Yaliz (a pseudonym for Alberto Barzilay), the French playwright Henry Bernstein’s adaptation of S. An-sky’s Yiddish play Der dybbuk, and, in 1938, “a sensational event—the first Greek-Jewish artistic performance,” Racine’s Esther, adapted into Judeo-Espagnol as a musical.
In Salonica, as in other communities, Jewish institutions proliferated. The nineteen (in 1938) concerned with some form of social welfare included: the hospital, founded with a gift from Baroness Clara de Hirsch in 1898, which had twelve doctors (presumably part-time, since they all gave their services free of charge) and ninety-seven beds, of which fifty-five were for nonpaying patients; the Asilo de Locos (mental asylum), with eighty inmates, fifty of them women, supported in large part by Salonicans in New York; the Matanoth-Laévionim, providing free meals to 675 children and old people; and the Tora Oumlaha, which distributed schoolbooks to poor children.
With little help from the municipality and against increasing odds, the community also somehow supported the Allatini orphanage and the Aboav girls’ home (holding fifty guerfanos and forty-five guerfanas respectively), the Bené Berit fraternal order (which provided bursaries to ninety-five protégéados studying at high schools and universities), the Asilo de Viejos (old-age home, with thirty-five protégéados), the Benosiglio maternity home (which looked after 311 mujeres povres that year), and the Bikour Holim (society for medical visitation of the sick and poor and a free dispensary, founded in the sixteenth century).47 The secular associational life of the community also included women’s groups, Zionist societies, several libraries, and youth clubs.
Salonican Jews had been comfortable with Ottoman Turkish rule. The conquest of the city by Greece in 1912, however, deprived them of the imperial protection they had enjoyed for 482 years. That was merely the first in a series of calamities that befell them over the next generation. In 1917 a terrible fire destroyed much of the central area of the city, including the densely populated Jewish neighborhoods. The conflagration rendered half the population of the city, including fifty-two thousand Jews, homeless. Many institutions, including thirty-two synagogues (with 450 Torah scrolls), ten rabbinical libraries, eight schools, and five yeshivot, were destroyed and others badly damaged. The Jews were not allowed to return to their former districts in the heart of the city. Instead, most were left to rot in “cheerless, barrack or tin-shack places” on the periphery.48
The succession of blows led to large-scale Jewish emigration to France, Italy, the Americas, and Palestine. In Paris the more affluent among the immigrants congregated in the IXth arrondissement, where they formed the Association Amicale des Israélites Saloniciens and in 1932 opened their own synagogue. Many of the emigrants prospered in their new homes. Among them was the family of the young Daniel Carasso, who brought to France in 1929 a small yogurt manufacturing company, Danone, that by the time of his death at the age of 103 in 2009 had grown to be the world’s number one seller of fresh dairy products.49
The demographic composition of Salonica was revolutionized in the 1920s by the so-called exchange of populations, in reality mutual expulsions, between Greece and Turkey. Nearly all Muslims, including all the Dönmeh (descendants of Jewish converts to Islam in the seventeenth century who had retained a distinctive identity), were expelled to Turkey. In their place, 150,000 Greeks from Turkey arrived in the city, imposing huge pressure on housing and resources and damaging relations between residents and newcomers. Suddenly the Jews found themselves the largest and most conspicuous minority in Salonica. In an atmosphere of heightened nationalistic feeling, they became a target for xenophobic attack.
Like all the national states of eastern Europe, Greece was determined to break what was seen as alien dominance over its commerce and culture. Although most Jews acquired Greek citizenship, they were not fully accepted as Greek nationals. Commercial enterprises were no longer permitted to keep account books in languages of their own choosing. Greek-owned ships arriving at the harbor sought out Greek stevedores in preference to Jews, who were confined to working with foreign-owned vessels. A law was passed in 1924, specifically aimed at Salonican Jews, requiring Sunday rest by shops, offices, and factories and forbidding any exception for Jews. The port too was compelled to switch from Saturday to Sunday as its rest day. Compulsory hellenization entailed compulsory secularization. “Everybody says you cannot live on five days work a week,” reported one observer. “The stevedores and porters in the port, the carriage-drivers and tobacco-factory workers, and the shopkeepers: and even members of families of dayanim [judges in the religious court] and rabbis—all open their businesses or go to work on Saturdays.”50
In 1928, in an act of legislative ghettoization at that time unique in Europe, Jewish citizens of Greece were placed in a separate electoral college. In December 1928, an Association of Jewish Assimilationists was formed. This sought to repeal the electoral law and to harmonize relations between Jews and Christians by opposing Zionism and encouraging Jewish children to attend Greek schools. The local Zionist press called the association “the work of the devil” and an unholy alliance of “faubourgistes and je m’en fichistes.”51
Following the fall in 1933 of the Liberal prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, who had backed the electoral college, it was abolished. An angry Venizelos declared, “The Greeks do not want the Jews to influence Hellenic politics. … The Jews of Thessaloniki [Salonica] follow a national Jewish policy. They are not Greeks and do not feel as such. Hence they ought not to involve themselves in Greek affairs.”52
All Jewish schools were required to appoint teachers of Greek to ensure that the student body acquired full proficiency in the national language. This gave rise to tension. About half of Jewish children attended communal schools, most of the remainder the Francophone schools of the Alliance. When a public school inspector visited the Talmud Torah school in 1929, he told the fourth-form Greek teacher that he found the class feeble in the language. The teacher, presumably a Greek non-Jew, replied: “We can’t get better results because these Jews only like French and won’t apply themselves to learning Greek.” The Jewish community’s school inspector was furious and complained (in French) of the teacher’s “odious calumny.” The main problem, he said, was not the pupils but the Greek teachers, many of whom did not take their job seriously and were frequently absent from class. He added that, with few exceptions, they took absolutely no interest in school activities apart from their own lessons and all disciplinary measures had to be handled entirely by the Jewish teachers.53 In 1937 the headmaster of a Jewish communal school demanded the dismissal of a Greek teacher who, he said, was lazy, sought to undermine the authority of the teachers of French and Hebrew, and “lacked all professional conscientiousness.” His pupils were learning nothing from him “and have even unlearned what they knew.” Moreover, the complaint continued, “Mr. Economides, I must tell you, does not like us” (“ne nous aime pas”).54
In the early 1930s Greek became the compulsory medium of instruction. Schools maintained by foreign governments were proscribed, save for non-Greek citizens, who constituted only about 10 percent of the Jewish population, and for a time the teaching of Hebrew as a living language was forbidden. Twelve hours a week were permitted to be reserved for Jewish subjects. The Alliance schools were handed over to the direction of the Jewish community and the teaching of Judeo-Espagnol and French was prohibited. From 1935 a government-designated curriculum was imposed. Some Jewish children started attending Greek government schools rather than Jewish ones: from 140 pupils in 1934–35, the number climbed to 836 by 1938–39.55 The suggestion was raised in 1939 that the community schools should be handed over altogether to governmental control.56
Anti-Semitic agitation by Greek ultranationalists erupted in 1931 in a violent anti-Jewish riot in the working-class Campbell district. In a subsequent trial of alleged rioters, the court found that they had committed arson but ruled that they had been motivated by patriotism and therefore acquitted them.57 This latest in the succession of disasters plunged a large part of the Jewish population into despair.
Meanwhile their economic position deteriorated further. In 1933, 70 percent of the Jews in Salonica were on relief rolls. Pauperization and violence led a further ten thousand Jews to emigrate between 1931 and 1934.
Under Ottoman rule Zionism had not been very strong in Salonica. When the future Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion lived there in 1911, as a student of law, he was severely critical of what he saw as the Salonican Jews’ absence of national spirit.58 But the series of blows that rained down on the community from 1912 onward fed the rise of Zionism. Zionist publications in Judeo-Espagnol painted idyllic pictures of the Holy Land: “Yerushalayim! Que attraccion majica!” (“Jerusalem! What magical allure!”)59
The community council became the arena for fierce conflict among Zionists, “moderates” (assimilationists), and Communists. In 1928 the Zionists won an absolute majority of votes (61 percent). The Zionist-dominated council actively encouraged emigration to Palestine, hoping thereby to alleviate unemployment in the city. When the new port of Tel Aviv opened in 1936, Jewish stevedores from Salonica moved there to enable the port to function. But the limitation of Jewish immigration to Palestine after 1936 reduced the flow from the city.
Salonican Zionism, however, was focused as much on straightening the backs of Jews in their deepening predicament in the diaspora as on promoting emigration to Palestine. Deprived of the safety valve of emigration, the community leadership in Salonica, as elsewhere, tried to steer Jews toward what were held to be productive occupations. The program of the newly elected council in 1934, in which the Zionists, with twenty-one seats, were the largest party but depended on support from others for a majority, provided for the “encouragement of the Jewish population towards productive careers: agricultural and artisanal work etc. in order to arrest the tendency towards commercial occupations.”60
Unlike most of the authoritarian regimes of eastern Europe, the military dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, who seized power in Greece in August 1936, was relatively friendly toward Jews, who, except for the Communists, generally reciprocated, at least in public, with cordiality. But behind a veneer of amity, the government undermined the community’s democratic structures, abolishing internal elections and imposing a new administrative council composed of yes-men.
Culturally and ideologically the Jews were tugged in several directions: by the Alliance school system toward French; by Communists and assimilationists toward Greek; and by the Zionists toward Hebrew. Unlike Vilna with its Yiddishist movement, there was no powerful cultural force working to maintain and revive Judeo-Espagnol. In the 1930s assimilationism seemed to be gaining ground. One sign of this could be seen in local birth announcements as non-Jewish names, such as Alberto and Sarina, began to replace Jewish ones, such as Avram and Sara.
By the 1930s there was not a single rabbinical seminary left in Salonica. When the last Sephardi chief rabbi of the city, Ben-Zion Uziel, left for Palestine in 1923 to take up the position of Rishon le-Zion, or Sephardi chief rabbi of the Holy Land, Salonica, like Sephardi communities elsewhere in Europe, found it necessary to turn to Poland for spiritual leadership. After an interregnum of several years, the Polish-born Zvi Koretz was appointed chief rabbi in 1932. A graduate of the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, he held a doctorate from the University of Vienna. A proud, autocratic figure, Koretz cultivated good relations with Metaxas and with the royal family, but his relations with his flock were tempestuous.
Ashkenazim were only a tiny minority of the Jewish population of the city—dubbed Mashemehas (possibly, it has been surmised, because when they arrived they asked in Hebrew for the names of local Jews: ma shimcha? means “What is your name?”)—and Koretz’s appointment stirred controversy. A harbinger of future trouble was the objection by some in the community to his beardlessness (modernized German rabbis, unlike east European and Sephardi ones, often went clean-shaven). He had to promise, as a condition of his appointment, to grow a beard. Soon after his arrival in 1933, a whispering campaign began against him, followed by denunciations in the Jewish press. He was accused of arrogance, ostentation, ignorance, assimilationism, and cowardice.61 Koretz incurred the wrath, in particular, of the secular Zionist leadership of the community because of his readiness to cooperate with the government’s program of hellenization. Arguments over the disposal of communal real estate in the area that had been destroyed during the great fire further envenomed relations between Koretz and the lay leadership. Disputes between rabbis and their communities were frequent throughout the Jewish world but the fact that Koretz was an Ashkenazi outsider did not help. “It is common knowledge,” the newspaper El Tiempo declared, “that these people [Ashkenazim] have a difficult, autocratic, and inflexible character, while we Sephardim are of a sweet, flexible, and good-natured disposition.”62
The desperate financial position of the community led it to appeal each year to the municipal council for support for its medical and social work, but the reduced political weight of Jews in the city weakened their persuasive power. In 1939 the city government granted a subvention of 612,000 drachmas (at contemporary exchange rates, amounting to about $5,000).63 The community had requested 750,000 but even that sum covered only a fraction of total costs of maintaining these institutions.64
The Jews of Salonica struggled ever harder to prove their loyalty to Greece. When Metaxas visited Salonica shortly after his name day in January 1939, the local Jewish newspapers vied to publish the most fawning expressions of loyalty and admiration.65 In May the Bené Berit opened a new library in the city. The lodge president emphasized that it contained a special section devoted to works in ancient and modern Greek. He also “took care to demonstrate that there could exist no incompatibility between the assimilation of Greek culture by the Jews and the conservation of their ethnic personality.”66 In July that year, a prizegiving ceremony was held at the Aboav orphanage. The president gave a speech in Greek in which he expressed thanks to the Ministry of Hygiene for its annual subvention. Stela Masarano, a graduating student, then spoke for those pupils who were leaving.67
A local Jewish journalist wrote: “Our assimilation to Hellenism is to be noted not only in the thousand and one manifestations of our public and private life. One sees it in our language as well: even when we speak Judesmo [Judeo-Espagnol], one still sees we are Hellenes. Judeo-Spanish which once overflowed with Turkish words … today shows clear signs of Greek influences.”68
At a lecture in January 1939, Chief Rabbi Koretz laid out his philosophy of Judeo-Greek symbiosis. L’Indépendant reported that he “took the opportunity to speak in lyrical terms of the possibilities for cooperation in the cultural domain that were offered … by a happy synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Jewish spirit following the example of what had been achieved in antiquity by our coreligionists in Alexandria.”69 The rabbi’s wife, who did not take to Salonica, begged him to accept the offer of the chief rabbinate of Alexandria, but as Europe descended toward war, Koretz made the fateful decision to remain in Greece.
The Jews in each of these new Jerusalems felt a deep sense of rootedness. Their ancestors had, in large part, lived in each city for many centuries, had built solid institutions, and had played an energetic role in its social, economic, and political life. In each case the Jewish inhabitants attempted a different set of approaches to the challenge of reconciling collective survival with modernity. Each faced different conditions and adopted different expedients. But a glimpse of the trajectory on which each was embarked in the 1930s could—and in many cases did—lead only to one common and overwhelming conclusion: the future looked grim.
Against this background, how far could the Jews of Europe rely on traditional sources of spiritual inspiration for sustenance in this time of troubles?