Success?

Abstract

Abstract Nothing would be easier than to chronicle the many failures of the three schools of interwar Jewish politics in their efforts to impose their visions of the Jewish future on Jewish society and on the world. Consider the fortunes of the national camp. Diaspora nationalism, championed by the Bund and the Folkists and supported, for tactical reasons, by East European Zionists, was a definite flop. In Poland the state refused to fund Jewish national cultural activities. The modern Yiddish and Hebrew schools were funded by the Jews themselves, and the fact that they were forced to charge tuition naturally limited their appeal. Only in the Baltics was some regular state aid for national Jewish education forthcoming, but even in these ideal environments for Jewish nationalism the more grandiose demands of the Diaspora nationalists—a guaranteed number ofJewish representatives in parliament, the appointment of a minister for Jewish affairs to represent Jewish national interests in the government, a government-recognized and government-supported democratic Jewish national council speaking for the Jewish nation—were ultimately dashed. In a region characterized from the beginning by integral, intolerant nationalism and in the 1930s by the rapid decline of democracy, such schemes were doomed to failure, and the lack ofJewish unity, which made the establishment of all-Polish or all-Lithuanian Jewish national organizations very difficult, if not impossible, was no help either. Nor should one ignore the fact that even among the poverty-stricken Jewish population of backward Poland Yiddish was being replaced by Polish as the main spoken language of the young. True, its decline was much less striking in Eastern Europe than in America, but it was a fact nonetheless, with serious, even fatal consequences for the partisans of Yiddish-based Jewish nationalism.