Anti-Semites accused the Jews in all countries of controlling the press. The accusation had little substance in France, where it had been loudly expressed at least since the time of the Panama Canal scandal in the 1880s. In central Europe, however, matters were different. Before the rise of the Third Reich, the German-language press in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, and other major cities of central Europe had indeed been to a considerable degree owned and produced by Jews—although not by the Jews, since the Jewish pressmen did not act in concert.
The foremost example of such a newspaper was the Neue Freie Presse, the leading daily newspaper of Vienna from the late nineteenth century until 1938. Moritz Benedikt, its editor-in-chief from 1881 until his death in 1920 (in his final years also its proprietor), developed it into the chief organ of the Viennese liberal bourgeoisie. Benedikt was said to be able to make or break Austrian ministries and in 1917 was appointed to the upper house of the Austrian parliament. The paper’s liberalism aroused the ire of Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party mayor of Vienna at the turn of the century: “The main creator of Austrian anti-Semitism,” he said, “was the Jewish-Liberal press with its depravity and terrorism.”1
The influence of the Neue Freie Presse was not restricted to politics. In the heyday of Viennese cultural efflorescence between the 1880s and 1914, it was also a legendary arbiter of taste in literature, opera, theater, music, and art. The founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, worked for the paper as a foreign correspondent and as editor of its much-admired feuilleton section. Stefan Zweig, who as an aspiring writer was thrilled to be invited by Herzl to contribute to the paper, called it “the oracle of my fathers and the temple of high priests.”2
The Neue Freie Presse, it was said, was written by Jews for Jews. Hitler, who had conceived a loathing for the paper during his time as a down-and-out in Vienna before the First World War, called it the “Judenblatt” (Jews’ paper). Nearly 80 percent of the editorial staff in the interwar period was Jewish. Sigmund Freud read it every day. The Viennese joke went that one Jew said to another: “So you no longer observe Shabbes or any of the holidays. Do you subscribe to anything Jewish anymore?” “Why certainly,” came the reply, “to the Neue Freie Presse.”
Such papers did not, however, see themselves as Jewish publications. Notwithstanding their heavily Jewish ownership, staff, and readership, they held to a universalist, liberal outlook, sought a general audience, and bent over backward to avoid making special claims on behalf of Jewish interests. Herzl’s involvement with the paper led Benedikt to take extra care to avoid any pleading in its columns on behalf of Zionism.
The Neue Freie Presse nevertheless became a prime target not only for anti-Semites but also for the satirical poison pens of Kraus and Tucholsky. They charged Benedikt with hypocrisy, cowardice, self-satisfaction, and complacency and accused him of bearing partial responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War. Kraus’s dramatic masterpiece Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Humanity) consisted in large measure of verbatim clippings from the newspaper.
The collapse of the Habsburg dual monarchy and the demotion of Vienna from a great imperial Weltstadt to the capital of a minor, central European rump republic deprived the Neue Freie Presse of much of its earlier importance. Like other papers it lost circulation and advertising in the Great Depression and in 1934 the owner-editor, Ernst Benedikt, son of Moritz, was forced to sell it to the Austrian government. Thereafter it dwindled into an official propaganda mouthpiece and in 1936 its new owners truckled to the Nazis by offering to dismiss all their Jewish employees.
In Budapest the venerable German-language Pester Lloyd occupied a position analogous to that of the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna. Although it appeared in German, the Lloyd was the leading newspaper of Hungary and a respected liberal political voice. After 1933 it published a number of anti-Nazi German writers, including exiled German Jews. But in 1937 the Lloyd’s editor, Josef Vészi, a member of the upper house of the Hungarian parliament, was forced, on account of his Jewishness, to relinquish his direction of the paper.
These papers, and others like them throughout east-central Europe, were more than just liberal mouthpieces. In states in which the greater part of the press was government-controlled and/or highly colored by party-political considerations and/or corrupt, and in which broadcasting was entirely under the direction of the state and the airwaves closed to unconventional opinions, the existence of independent, pro-democracy papers was of great importance to those who sought objective news coverage. Precisely for this reason, such papers became hated targets of right-wing, nationalist forces, whose animosity extended beyond the producers of the newspapers themselves to Jews in general.
What Goebbels called the “Judenpresse” therefore had a certain basis in reality. And nowhere more so than in Germany itself, where, as Joseph Roth wrote in 1933, “the magazines and newspapers were edited by Jews, managed by Jews, read by Jews.”3 And in Germany too, precisely because they did not wish to be identified, or rather stigmatized, as Jewish papers, the great liberal organs refrained from taking overly strong positions on issues of Jewish concern.
The Frankfurter Zeitung, long regarded as Germany’s most serious newspaper, had enormous influence, although its circulation was no more than seventy thousand, mainly among businessmen and professionals. For most of its history the paper had been owned and run by the Sonnemann-Simon family. Heinrich Simon, grandson of the founder of the paper, had been baptized as a child but subsequently left the church, without, however, returning to Judaism. A cultivated patron of the arts and a convinced liberal, he maintained the paper’s formidable reputation. But in the face of severe financial difficulties in the 1920s, the family’s control weakened. In 1930 they were compelled to surrender 49.5 percent of the shares in the newspaper to a front for the I. G. Farben chemical combine. After January 1933 the paper quickly kowtowed to the new order. On March 27, 1933, Goebbels crowed in his diary: “The Jewish press is whimpering with alarm and fear. All Jewish organizations are proclaiming their loyalty to the government.”4 In June 1934 Simon was forced to sell the family’s remaining shares in the newspaper.
Hans Lachmann-Mosse, head of the Mosse press and advertising conglomerate, which owned several major papers, including the liberal Berliner Tageblatt, left Germany shortly after Hitler attained power. He was enticed back a few weeks later by a personal assurance of safe conduct from Hermann Goering. When he returned to Berlin, the press baron was forced at gunpoint to sign over all his German assets to a supposed foundation to benefit war veterans. He was then escorted to the French frontier by the chief of the Gestapo.
The Ullstein family was similarly forced out of its dominant position in its company, the largest publishing business in Germany. Among the leading titles in the Ullstein group were the Berliner Zeitung, the Berliner Morgenpost, the loss-making Vossische Zeitung (nicknamed “Tante [Aunt] Voss,” the country’s oldest newspaper), and the immensely profitable Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, which, with a circulation of 1.5 million in the late 1920s, was the bestselling illustrated paper in Germany.
These papers catered to a broad non-Jewish as well as Jewish market. All of them were committed to a liberal worldview and supported the Weimar constitution. They did not lose significant market share to Nazi papers prior to Hitler’s assumption of power. In 1933 the Nazi press in Germany reached barely 2.5 percent of newspaper readers. But as Hermann Ullstein later wrote: “Although our readers seemed superficially to remain loyal to us, there was little doubt that in their hearts they were no longer on our side. Inwardly a good half of them, persuaded that ‘things cannot go on as they are,’ were already in Hitler’s camp. Day after day we criticized their idol … and it had not the slightest effect on them.”5
In truth, quite apart from its personnel and audience, the German-language liberal press in central Europe was Jewish in another and deeper sense. For all the protestations of its proprietors, their papers’ adhesion to democratic values represented a commitment to the type of society in which Jews could best prosper, one based on the rule of law, in which minorities need not fear the tyranny of the majority, in which social mobility could proceed on a meritocratic basis, and in which the rights of freedom of expression, association, and conscience were respected. The failure of the liberal press to stand up and fight for those values was what earned them the contempt of Kraus and Tucholsky. The pusillanimity of these newspapers in their death throes was far from impressive. It was part and parcel of the larger failure of German and European liberalism in the 1930s in a struggle that Jews could not hope to fight and win alone.
In October 1933 a decree law in Germany excluded Jews from employment in journalism, save on Jewish papers. But even before that, most Jewish journalists had been dismissed. Many writers fled abroad, initially to other German-speaking lands, then, as the Nazi empire expanded, to Moscow, Paris, London, New York, Tel Aviv, or Mexico City. Among the exiles were several of the big names of contemporary German literature such as Lion Feuchtwanger and Arnold Zweig. They could no longer publish at all in Germany, unless they did so using noms de plume in Jewish publications or in the few remaining periodicals not directly under Nazi control. If they still wished to appear in print in their own language, they could do so only in exile newspapers or German publishing houses in Switzerland. But their sales were greatly reduced and the fees or royalties they could hope to command were likewise slimmed down.
The exile German-language press in cities such as Prague and Paris was endowed with fine, experienced writers but lacked much of an audience. “Today we are writing in a vacuum. The people who read us are of our own opinion to begin with, and we don’t reach those who have no opinion or who are vacillating,” laments a German-Jewish journalist in Paris in 1935, a character in the novel Paris Gazette by Feuchtwanger.6 Save for the refugee publications, the German-language press not just in Germany but throughout Europe had been largely “Aryanized” by 1939.
The first Jewish newspapers, among the earliest of any kind, had appeared in Amsterdam: the Gazeta de Amsterdam, published in Judeo-Espagnol between 1675 and 1702, and the Yiddish Dinstagishe un Fraytagishe Kurant in 1686–87. Their modern successors, especially the Nieuw Israelitisch Weekblad, penetrated most Jewish homes in the Netherlands and provided a forum for the fierce controversies that characterized this and all European Jewish communities.
In the early twentieth century the Jewish press played a vital role as a glue joining together scattered communities, as a mobilizing force for political and religious movements, as a means for the importation into Jewish discourse of ideas from the non-Jewish world, and as a source of entertainment, solace, and news of special interest to Jews, for example from Palestine.
The dispersion of the Jews rendered newspapers a necessary tool of cohesion but at the same time weakened the ability of the press to survive financially. Jewish newspapers proliferated but, like day lilies, often flowered briefly and then withered. Censorship and frequent government harassment throughout central and eastern Europe added to their difficulties.
Despite all this, the Jewish press was a vibrant, multilingual reflection of the lives of its millions of readers in every country in which Jews lived. At least 854 publications, ranging from daily newspapers to specialized periodicals, were published in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Judeo-Espagnol, as well as in the national languages of every country between the Urals and the Pyrenees.7
The Yiddish press was an important force in the Jewish community. In Warsaw eleven Yiddish dailies competed strenuously for readers in the mid-1930s. They ranged from sensationalist afternoon papers, such as Der varshever radio (Warsaw Radio) to Haynt (Today), a morning paper that was close to the General Zionists, and Der moment, which, in its final period, tended toward the Revisionist Zionists.
Haynt was a serious paper, with high intellectual standards and a cosmopolitan outlook, that managed to achieve a mass circulation. Its editor until 1933, when he emigrated to Palestine, was the leading Zionist politician Yitzhak Gruenbaum, who helped build it into the most influential Yiddish paper in Europe. Haynt published not only articles by Yiddish journalists but also syndicated features by such figures as André Maurois and Winston Churchill. Yet, like most Yiddish papers, it depended on serialized novels as circulation boosters and it often printed sensational stories under headlines such as “Four months ‘after his death’ the man suddenly returns” (an old journalistic standard), or (inserting a Jewish angle) “Who is the young hasid who killed himself?”8
Noyekh Pryłucki, editor of Der moment, was a well-known and popular figure in Jewish Warsaw. A Yiddish philologist, ethnographer, and bibliophile (he owned the largest private library of Yiddish books in the country), he was elected to the first Sejm as a representative of the Folkist Party. He also served on the Warsaw municipal council for several years. Der moment was the first Yiddish daily to publish regular sports reports. Its sports reporter, who came from a Hasidic family, was conspicuous on the press bench at sporting events (sport was an unusual avocation in Hasidic circles).
Both Haynt and Der moment claimed to sell over 100,000 copies at their peak but in the late 1930s the circulation of both was in decline. According to Polish police records, Haynt sold an average of only 27,000 copies in 1932–38 and Der moment 23,000. By the summer of 1939 both papers were in serious financial trouble. Haynt had to appeal to the Zionist Organization for a loan to wipe out its debts.9
Official interference and economic pressures undermined the stability of the Yiddish press. Several smaller papers, particularly those suspected by the authorities of Communist inclinations, led a fly-by-night existence. The big Warsaw titles were close to being national newspapers: in the 1930s as much as half of their circulation was outside the city. In many cases special editions were published for provincial cities. Independent Yiddish dailies were published in some provincial cities, such as Vilna and Lwów. Weeklies appeared in smaller towns.
Polemics in the Jewish press, especially in Yiddish papers, were waged without gloves and with red-hot pokers. Sometimes the conflicts were ideological. Often, in what was largely a commercial press, they were viciously competitive circulation battles. Even in a shtetl such as Baranowicze, no holds were barred in the struggle between the Baranovitsher kuryer and the rival Baranovitsher vokh. In 1936 the two papers conducted a bitter war of words over whether a Jewish-owned press agency, apparently connected with the Vokh, should distribute a Polish anti-Semitic paper and over whether the local Jewish gymnasium should teach German, “the language of Hitler and Goebbels.” The editor of the Kuryer might deplore the “lack of culture and tact” of participants in the public arena and condemn the personalization of conflicts.10 But the same writer had no compunction in a subsequent issue about launching into a vituperative tirade against the “vile, ugly, lying, and malicious stammerings and insinuations from that person [his competitor] with his unhealthy ambition to be a ‘supporter of culture’ in spite of his more than semi-illiteracy.”11 Baranowicze (Jewish population at the time ten thousand, about half the total) was small enough that the protagonists in this epic struggle would, no doubt, pass each other regularly in the central square.
Ideological divisions seem, at least in some instances, to have been more easily set aside than personal ones. When it came to practical matters there could be remarkable cooperation across political boundaries. Thus Warsaw’s Agudist Togblat was printed on the machines of the Bundist Folks-tsaytung, even as the latter waged a war of words against the frumakes (orthodox)—who responded with no less acerbity against the apikorsim (heretics). The Togblat always appeared with the Hebrew letters 
(signifying “with the help of the Almighty”) at the head of the paper; the Folks-tsaytung was wont to appear with slogans such as “Down with clericalism.” On one occasion a printer’s error (or practical joke) led them to switch the two, causing consternation and merriment.12
The Yiddish press, more than the Polish, was subject to official censorship, as in many other countries, after rather than before printing of the paper. Presses were closed down on the ground that “the machinery is defective” or for no stated reason at all. Editors learned to anticipate the official blue pencil and exercise a measure of self-censorship. The Folks-tsaytung, in particular, occasionally appeared with blank spaces and found it prudent to change its name several times. In 1937 the entire press run of the paper was confiscated eighty times. The three censors of the Yiddish press in Warsaw were two right-wing Zionists, “pathetic timeservers who would beg the editors to accede to their requests and save everybody hartsveytok (heartache),” and a permanent inebriate, who gave the least trouble.13
The popular Yiddish papers published plenty of sensational news items, especially on crime and underworld activities, often with a Jewish twist: typical items included Goering’s alleged marriage to a Jewish woman, a brothel that employed fourteen-year-old girls, and Hitler’s supposedly incurable illness. These papers also devoted considerable space to competitions, raffles, jokes, puzzles, and columns on graphology.14 But the chief selling point for the whole of the Yiddish press was fiction: nearly all the major papers published short stories and episodic novels, often featuring one or more of these cliffhangers in each issue. Some were major works of literature; most were what came to be called shund—the uncomplimentary term derived from a German word used in abattoirs to denote the stench of a skinned carcass. Serious writers often wrote fiction at speed on a formulaic pattern, publishing under assumed names, concerned lest their reputations suffer from association with literary junk. Among these pseudonymous writers was the at the time little-known Isaac Bashevis Singer. The popularity of such potboilers aroused concern and earnest debate among Yiddish writers.
Kadya Molodowsky was one of those who called for sanctions against writers who debased Yiddish literature by churning out shameless trash. The Yiddish reader, she insisted, must be saved from “choking in the stinking sea” of shund that rendered him “incapable any longer of picking up a good book.” Surely the profit-seeking press could find room for serious literary novels, even perhaps for the occasional poem? At least, she pointed out, they published no shund poems: “all honour to the poets!” Exactly how one might determine the fine distinction between what passed for literature and shund, she disdained to explain.15
A large number of special-interest Jewish publications, mainly in Yiddish, sprouted up in interwar Poland. Almost every profession and occupation had its own paper, such as the Leder un shikhtsaytung (the newspaper for the leather and shoe industry). Several Yiddish satirical magazines came and went in Warsaw. Even the orthodox, fearing pollution by the secular press, felt compelled to found newspapers; some yeshivot produced their own journals.
Publications for women included a Polish-language weekly offshoot from Nasz 
, entitled Ewa: Tygodnik, which began appearing in Warsaw in 1928. Mildly feminist in tone, it campaigned for women’s suffrage in kehillah elections and for family planning, the right to abortion, and against prostitution.16 But its circulation reached only about two thousand and it closed after five years. The strategy of injecting feminist ideas into the popular mix of serialized fiction and features on home and family was tried by, for example, Di froy, published in Vilna in 1925—but that paper lasted only for a few issues.17 In Holland Ha’Ischa (The Woman, and in spite of its Hebrew name, a Dutch-language paper) was the organ of the Council of Jewish Women. Unlike many women’s periodicals, it did not restrict its content to matters relating to the domestic sphere but printed articles on a broad range of Jewish political, religious, cultural, and social issues.
The Bundist Folks-tsaytung was the only Yiddish daily with a regular children’s section. Yiddish children’s publications included Grininke beymelekh (after a poem of Bialik). For older children, Der khaver, a monthly magazine published in Vilna, offered stories, poems, songs, and jokes. Both of these were aligned with the Yiddish secular school system. The rival Tarbut educational network published magazines in Hebrew. Each youth movement issued its own magazine, for example, the Bundist Der yugnt-veker (The Youth Sentinel). But these publications, for all their openness to juvenile self-expression, were largely controlled and edited by adults. Janusz Korczak’s children’s paper, Maly , published from 1926 to 1939 as a weekly supplement to Nasz , took a different tack: it was written exclusively by children themselves and published stories, articles, notes, and letters.
At the heart of the Yiddish cultural-journalistic scene was the weekly Literarishe bleter, published in Warsaw from 1924 to 1939. Under the editorship of Nakhmen Mayzel, it became the main organ of Yiddish literature in its final years of flowering. With excusable self-puffery, the paper claimed to be the “veritable, pulsating center” of Yiddish cultural endeavor.18 It was open to the world. Contributions were drawn not only from Poland but from the United States, Canada, Palestine, Belgium, France, Germany, and Romania. At first some Yiddish writers from the USSR appeared there, too, but after a while Soviet officials discouraged them from writing in a non-Communist publication. In 1929 one such contributor confessed: “While living in a provincial town, I didn’t realize what the Liter-arishe bleter is. … But now [I know] that the Literarishe bleter is a bourgeois publication, which is certainly not the place for our sort of people, I admit my error.”19 Subscribers were to be found as far afield as Grenoble, Czernowitz, Tel Aviv, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Montreal, Vienna, Buenos Aires, and Chicago. There were hardly any in the USSR, save for a handful in Moscow and Minsk (probably institutions rather than individuals).20
Nonparty, although sympathetic to the left in the 1930s, Literarishe bleter was an important microphone for Yiddish poetry from all over the world. In 1936, 79 Yiddish poets were published in the paper, of whom 42 were from Poland, 12 from the USA, and the rest from elsewhere. The following year 38 were from Poland, 22 from the United States, and 4 each from Palestine, Romania, and the USSR (in the last case whether with or without the writers’ consent is not clear), as well as a few others from elsewhere. The growing number of American bylines, reflected also in prose contributions, was a further sign of the extent to which, by the late 1930s, New York was replacing Warsaw as the fulcrum of Yiddish cultural vitality. Mayzel moved to New York in December 1937. The paper limped along without him until its last issue in July 1939.
In spite of the growth of support for Zionism, the Hebrew press in Europe led a checkered existence. The Warsaw paper Hatsfirah, founded as a weekly in 1862, became a daily in 1910, ceased publication in 1914, and was revived in 1920, but did not last. It appeared again as a daily from 1926 but found only a modest audience and finally collapsed altogether in 1931. The weekly Baderekh was made compulsory reading in Hebrew-language schools but even with such a guaranteed base it failed to make ends meet. With its closure in 1937 the spluttering Hebrew periodical press in Poland came to an end.
More formidable was the Jewish press in the Polish language, particularly the daily papers Nasz , published in Warsaw, which, according to police figures, sold an average of twenty-two thousand copies in the 1930s, Chwila in Lwów, and Nowy Dziennik in Cracow, the last two with smaller circulations. All three were moderately Zionist in orientation. Unlike most of the Yiddish press, these papers appeared on the Sabbath. They were founded with the intention of fostering good relations between Jews and non-Jews and, at least initially, were aimed at both. Their audiences, however, were mainly Jewish, generally from the assimilated middle class. Circulation of Polish-Jewish as of Yiddish dailies declined in the late 1930s, whereas that of other Polish papers rose sharply, suggesting that Jewish readers were turning from a Jewish to a general press.
The content of the Polish-Jewish press was geared toward Jewish interests, about which, unlike the German liberal papers, they were quite outspoken. Bernard Singer, who wrote for the Polish as well as for the Yiddish press under the barely disguised pen name Regnis, was one of the most influential political commentators in Poland. An anti-Zionist former Folkist but sympathetic to the left, he set aside his private opinions when writing in the bourgeois press. The Polish-Jewish papers did not, however, achieve much by way of improving Polish understanding of Jews.
Instead one of their main effects, though by no means their original intention, was to wean their Jewish audience from Yiddish to Polish. So much so, indeed, that in 1929 the editor of Literarishe bleter, Nakhmen Mayzel, complained that these papers in Lwów and Cracow had “displaced Yiddish.” The Galician Jews were not “nationally” more assimilated than before the First World War, he claimed. Nevertheless, “Polonization ha[d] made rapid strides over the past ten years—and this thanks to the Jewish-Polish press.” Mayzel recalled that the founder of Chwila, Dr. Gershon Cyper, who was also one of the founders of the Yiddish Lemberger togblat, had said, “After the Lemberg pogrom [of 1918], I founded Chwila as a sign of mourning. When times became better and Jews felt more free, I would shave off the beard and return to the Jewish press.” But the “temporary sickness” that gave birth to the Polish-Jewish press had become a “permanent illness.” Before the war only a few Jews had been polonized. Now “not only the intelligentsia but even the Hasidic Jew, the merchant, the businessman, the pedlar and the worker read and trust the Polish paper as a Jewish one.”
Warming to his theme, Mayzel lamented that the result was the polonization of the whole of Jewish social life. Jewish institutions in Galicia now conducted their affairs largely in Polish, even though their central offices in Warsaw might still use Yiddish in communication with individuals and organizations. The Polish-Jewish press, he concluded with a flourish, was thus not only folksfeyntlekh (an enemy of the people), it was tearing off living limbs from the Jewish masses.21
Over the following decade the process of linguistic decline accelerated. At a conference of Yiddish journalists in 1937, Zalmen Reyzen, editor of the Vilner tog, proposed that staff members of the Polish-language press should be excluded from membership in the Jewish journalists’ union. Shortly afterward another Yiddish writer, Yoshue Perle, issued an unrestrained philippic against the Polish-Jewish press. It amounted, he wrote, to nothing less than “a disguised means of destroying the whole of modern Yiddish culture.” The leaders of this press were not drawn from the heart of the people but from the “semi-assimilated or wholly assimilated salons.” They wore “top hats and white gloves.” They were not fit exponents of Jewish thinking. They barely printed Yiddish writers and when they did so they paid them only a humiliating pittance. They employed “semi-converts, actual converts, and goyim, yes, yes, there are no Yiddish writers working in the Polish-Jewish press today, just goyim!” And so on.22
The Polish-Jewish newspapers, however, insisted that they represented a social necessity. “It is not possible,” one of their writers declared, “to fight the laws of nature. … A Polish Jew is doomed to knowledge of three languages: Yiddish, Hebrew, and the language of the state.”23
The Soviet Yiddish press (there were hardly any Jewish publications in other languages of the USSR) was a pale shadow of the Polish, whether measured by circulation or number of publications. Already in the 1920s official reports noted that, even in shtetlakh, readers showed a preference for Russian over Yiddish papers, the former being regarded as more authoritative.24
After an initial flurry of activity in the early 1920s, Soviet Yiddish newspaper publishing declined fast in the remainder of the interwar period. In 1931 the total circulation of the seventeen main Soviet Yiddish newspapers and periodicals was under 150,000.25 Some copies no doubt had multiple readers. On the other hand, some subscribers, particularly the many institutional ones in the USSR, probably took multiple papers. By 1935 a total of only forty-one Yiddish newspapers and periodicals appeared in the Soviet Union. It is clear, therefore, that in the 1930s only a small minority of Soviet Jews were regular readers of the Yiddish press. Even in Minsk, the most concentrated center of Yiddish speakers, the circulation of the local Yiddish newspaper declined to just 8,350 by late 1933.26 In the Soviet Union circulation levels were set centrally but there is little doubt that demand for Yiddish newspapers in the USSR, as elsewhere, was falling rapidly.
Minsk was meanwhile yielding preeminence as a Soviet Yiddish cultural hub to Kharkov and Kiev. Kharkov, which had not fallen within the Tsarist Pale of Settlement, had not hitherto been a significant Jewish center. But as capital of Ukraine from 1919 to 1934 its Jewish population, just 11,000 in 1897, grew fast, reaching 130,000 by 1939. A Yiddish daily, Der shtern, appeared there from 1925, with a circulation of twelve thousand, the highest for any Soviet Yiddish paper at the time.
A number of other Yiddish papers and magazines appeared in Kharkov over the next decade, including a literary journal, Di royte velt. Although this had a small print run (never more than two thousand, except for a special issue on collectivization in 1930), it attracted contributions from several important writers. In 1925 it declared the outbreak of a “civil war” in Soviet Yiddish literature.27
While characterized by much ideological posturing, the conflict seems to have been essentially a struggle between different cliques in Moscow, Kiev, Minsk, and Kharkov for dominance in the little world of Soviet Yiddish literature. A low point in the war of words was the portrayal by the poet Leyb Kvitko of the editor of the Moscow daily, Emes, Moyshe Litvakov, as “stink bird Moyli,” sitting on a roof and poisoning surrounding lives.28 Kvitko was subsequently reprimanded for his “anti-Communist pasquinade” and sent to work in a tractor factory. Litvakov gave as good as he got, denouncing “literary mutinies against Communist guidance.”29 Kvitko, however, survived and his books, mainly for children, sold millions of copies in translation.
In 1933 Di royte velt was incorporated into a journal published in Kiev. The following year the capital of Ukraine was moved to Kiev and many Yiddish writers from Kharkov, among them Kvitko, moved there, too. But in 1936 the Kiev Yiddish institute, like other Jewish institutions in the USSR, including the institute in Minsk, fell victim to the purges and closed down. Der shtern continued to appear but by 1939 it was one of only a handful of remaining Yiddish papers in the Soviet Union.
The Moscow Yiddish daily, Emes, was always dependent on the vagaries of Soviet policy toward national minorities. Its circulation, only twelve thousand in 1927–28, was limited by the relatively small proportion of Yiddish speakers in the capital and by difficulties of distribution to more distant subscribers. In 1937 the editor, Litvakov, was arrested, accused of terrorism and of being a Gestapo agent, and shot. The paper closed in 1938.
The fate of Litvakov and his paper may have been linked to a general assault on minority cultures at the time. But in spite of the sinister political atmosphere, the death of Emes need not be attributed to anything other than market forces, which operated to a residual degree even in the socialized economy. Toward the end, demand for the paper was so small that it was impossible to find on newsstands. Yiddish dailies continued to appear in Minsk, Kiev, and Kharkov for a little longer but by 1939 no more than seven Yiddish newspapers, with a combined circulation of just 38,700, remained in the USSR.30
Wolf Wieviorka, a writer in the Parizer haynt, penned a sardonic but not unjust obituary for Emes, which, he predicted, would not be much mourned. It had been a “Bolshevik crown rabbi” (referring to the officially appointed rabbis in Tsarist Russia) or a “red Kelmer Magid” (after a famous nineteenth-century “terror magid” who had fulminated against all manner of vices). Emes had “unmasked” Trotskyists and other “enemies of the people.” It had been written in a rebarbative (otz-kotzik) style and did not “dream the dreams” of the Jewish masses in the USSR. On the contrary, Wieviorka alleged, its main task had been to enable its readers to “work through” Stalin’s latest speeches and letters. But “that in itself was enough for the Yiddish world to turn away” from Emes. After all, there would soon be no Jews in the USSR who didn’t understand Russian and, if they wished, they could “work through” Stalin’s teachings in the original without the help of a Yiddish nursery school teacher. In the end, according to Wieviorka, the paper had become little more than an echo chamber for the party line, which it propagated to Yiddish Communist papers throughout the world. From Emes they learned how much dirt to fling in this or that direction and “how much poison and bile to mix into their lampoons.”31
This last accusation was implicitly aimed at a target closer to home. In Paris there were three Yiddish dailies catering to the immigrant community. All were financially precarious and relied heavily on contributions from supporters. The smallest and shortest-lived was the Bundist Unzer shtime, which appeared between 1936 and 1939. The pro-Zionist Parizer haynt, founded in 1923 and a daily from 1926, was an outgrowth of the paper of the same name in Warsaw. Its first editor, Shmuel Yatzkan, had been the editor and proprietor of Haynt in Warsaw. A lively little paper that, like its parent, syndicated many big-name writers, Parizer haynt sold ten thousand copies daily.
Its main competitor was the Communist Naye prese, founded as a weekly in 1923. It was obliged to change its name ten times to beat the censor before settling down as a daily in 1934. The daily’s first editor, Leo Katz (whose pseudonyms included Joel Ames, Franz Wich, Leo Weiss, and “Maus”), was the former feuilleton editor of the German Communist Party’s organ Rote Fahne (Red Flag). His wife meanwhile worked as a Comintern agent in Paris. After his expulsion from France in 1938, he was succeeded by Louis Gronowski (writing under the pen name Lerman) and Abraham Rajgrodski (Adam Rayski), refugees respectively from Radziejów (central Poland) and Białystok. The paper took its editorial line directly from the party’s French organ, l’Humanité, at the daily editorial meetings of which the editor of Naye prese or one of his staff was generally present. Naye prese’s circulation may have reached eight thousand at the height of public enthusiasm for the Popular Front in 1936 but later declined to five thousand or less. Still, here as elsewhere, the influence of the Yiddish papers was probably greater than their circulations might indicate.
Thanks to the large Polish-Jewish immigration to Paris in the 1920s, the Yiddish press in Paris held out longer than in any other European city. But its audience aged and shrank as the second generation, educated in French schools, abandoned the language and embraced French culture.
At the other end of Europe, in the Sephardi communities of the Balkans, French influences wrote finis to four centuries of Judeo-Espagnol cultural experience in the region. Judeo-Espagnol newspapers had never attained the importance or influence gained by the Yiddish press elsewhere in Europe. Most had already died out before the First World War. One reason was the comparatively smaller concentrations of Sephardic Jews in Europe. Only in Salonica was there a critical demographic mass that might support a Jewish press in a Jewish language.
By the 1930s, however, the Judeo-Espagnol press in Salonica was being overtaken by French papers. Three Judeo-Espagnol newspapers, the anti-Zionist El Tiempo, the socialist Avanti, and the Zionist El Pueblo, had all closed by 1935. Two daily papers in the language remained in the late 1930s. Acción, which appeared from 1929 to 1941, was initially leftist, later Zionist. Its peak circulation was three thousand (plus another one thousand to overseas subscribers). El Mesajero, the last Judeo-Espagnol newspaper in the city (and the last anywhere to appear in Rashi Hebrew characters) was founded in 1935 and lasted until 1941, but with a small and declining circulation. In 1939 the combined circulation of the remaining Salonican Jewish newspapers, L’Indépendant and Le Progrès in French and Acción and El Mesajero in Judeo-Espagnol, had shrunk from over 25,000 in 1932 to around 6,000.32 The fashion among the younger generation was now to speak French or, among the very youngest, Greek, not Judeo-Espagnol. Disapproving elders scoffed at the frankitos (little Frenchies) or musyús (messieurs).33 But by 1939 in Salonica, as in Paris, the drift away from Jewish languages seemed inexorable.
Before 1933 German Jewry had had a flourishing press. Its finest moment, perhaps, came shortly after the advent of the Nazis to power, in the twice-weekly Zionist organ, Die Jüdische Rundschau. Its editor, Robert Weltsch, was at first not exactly an anti-Nazi militant. A few months earlier his paper had even suggested that Zionists might, in spite of everything, be able to find a common language with so-called Edelnazis (“noble Nazis”): “Jewry with its national consciousness will be able to find the way to a modus vivendi with a German nationalism strengthened from within and relieved of the dross of mob anti-Semitism.”34
Yet in April 1933 Weltsch gave heart to German Jews with what became a famous front-page article under the challenging headline: “Tragt ihn mit Stolz, den gelben Fleck!” (“Wear it with pride, the yellow star!”) It concluded: “They remind us that we are Jews. We say yes, and we bear it with pride.”35 The piece was written in response to the Nazis’ boycott of Jewish businesses, when yellow stars were ordered to be affixed to the fronts of Jewish-owned stores. This turned out to be one of the rare moments between 1933 and 1939 when Hitler suffered a setback, since the boycott proved abortive. For all the Führer’s savage utterances, it still seemed inconceivable at that stage that within a decade German Jews would be forced to wear such a badge of humiliation on their own persons. The article created a sensation and the paper had to print an extra edition. The Rundschau’s circulation rose from 5,000 to 38,000 by the end of 1933. Weltsch and his paper are today chiefly, if at all, remembered for this single, brave declaration—which he subsequently regretted.36 As he later recollected, the reaction was a “remarkable, unique manifestation of psychic euphoria in a tragic situation.”37
Unlike the great regional and national newspapers formerly owned by Jews, the specifically Jewish press was neither taken over nor closed by the Nazis in 1933. Apart from the Rundschau, two other main papers, both weeklies, sought to uphold the spirits of German Jewry between 1933 and 1938: the C.V. Zeitung, organ of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (before 1933 an assimilationist body—but now there was not much left to assimilate to), and the independent, Hamburg-based Israelitisches Familienblatt, which had been the most widely read Jewish paper in pre-Hitler Germany.
Altogether the German-Jewish press in these years consisted of some 120 publications. It is interesting to compare this number with the grand total of 47 Jewish newspapers and periodicals appearing at the time in the Soviet Union for a community five times the size of German Jewry. As an index of the comparative degree of repression, these raw statistics should not be taken altogether at face value. Nor should the hundreds of papers appearing in Poland be regarded, merely by virtue of their number, as a measure of freedom for Jews in that stunted democracy. Still, it can be said that, thanks to its press, German Jewry between 1933 and 1938 retained a limited area of public debate and, within certain boundaries, the capacity to voice authentic expressions of individual and collective opinion.
Jewish papers, of course, like all others in Nazi Germany, had to bow to the censor’s blue pencil—strictly speaking to postpublication Nachzensur. In 1935 the Jüdische Rundschau went too far and had the temerity to respond to an anti-Jewish tirade by Goebbels with an article entitled “Der Jude ist auch ein Mensch.”38 The Rundschau was banned for six weeks and the authorities administered a stern warning to Weltsch. Four weeks later the Propaganda Ministry ordained that Jewish publications must no longer be sold from news kiosks.
In November 1938 the ultimate form of Nachzensur was imposed: the official seal on the door. The Jüdische Rundschau, together with the whole of the German-Jewish press, was summarily closed. Almost the only permitted Jewish periodical in Germany thereafter was a thin, twice-weekly information bulletin, the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt. This was published from the former office of the Rundschau but issued under the auspices of the Jüdische Kulturbund, one of the few Jewish organizations still permitted to function. The first issue, delayed for a day because of intervention by the censor, appeared on November 23, 1938. The editor, Leo Kreindler, had earlier been editor of the Berlin edition of the Israelitisches Familienblatt. The paper’s two main functions were to diffuse official orders affecting Jews and to provide information about opportunities for emigration. The paper also published personal advertisements and reviews of events organized by the Kulturbund. It was like a prison bulletin with the difference that, until October 1941, the prisoners were being urged to escape. Its print run of seventy-six thousand was distributed to subscribers of the closed-down papers, whose former staff members furnished its staff of forty.
If the Jewish press had, since 1933, helped maintain the morale of German Jews, the sudden abolition in November 1938 of this semi-autonomous area of semi-free speech had a depressing effect and heightened feelings of disorientation and helplessness. With their newspapers gone, German Jews who valued the written word (and taken as a whole they were probably the most culturally sophisticated and literate part of the population) were driven back to the last refuge of a persecuted intelligentsia—the book.