Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia. Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging by Tatjana Lichtenstein

Abstract

Reviews 278 Bahr’s increasingly fervent post-war ‘conversion’ to Austro-Bavarian Roman Catholicism, this being the subject of Primus-Heinz Kucher’s painstaking essay on Bahr’s ‘Kathokult’ as expressed in his contributions to various campaigning Catholic journals. Appropriately for a work conceived in Croatia, the volume ends with Kurt Ifkovits’s ‘textgenetisch’ examination of the Dalmatinische Reise (1909), one of Bahr’s best-known and most enduring works, albeit one cobbled together in haste and lacking thematic coherence. Ifkovits reveals how Bahr’s real concern here is not Dalmatia but Austria as a whole, his aim being to suggest that Austria is most truly itself at the periphery and among its Slavic peoples (and in this, it may be noted, he anticipates by more than twenty years a central theme in Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch). In this essay, as elsewhere, Traditionsbrüche maintains a high scholarly level not always associated with conference proceedings. It reveals Hermann Bahr as a writer whose instant responses to Modernism’s complexities still offer much to dispassionate scholars in the age of ‘cultural studies’. Andrew Barker University of Edinburgh Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia. Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Belonging. By Tatjana Lichtenstein. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016. 472 + xiv pp. $50. ISBN 9780253018670. Understanding Zionism is important today. If the far-right is easily identified as antisemitic, then the resurgence of left-wing antisemitism has rested on a sense of finding Zionism a bit iffy. Tatjana Lichtenstein’s book, Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia, is a powerful study of interwar Zionism in Czechoslovakia that both complicates the picture and draws simple and useful parallels to contemporaneous developments in Europe. Both the introduction and chapter 1 (‘The Jews of Czechoslovakia: A Mosaic of Cultures’) make sense of the intricate relationship between Jewishness, Zionism, language and religiosity. Who was what depended very much on who was doing the counting. For Austrian, Hungarian and Czechoslovak authorities, Jews were a religious group and were identified as ‘Israelites’ in censuses (pp. 42, 43), which in turn did not do justice to the diverse patchwork of beliefs held among Jews in the region. Equally, language as a common marker, which some Zionists promoted as quintessentially Jewish, proved elusive (pp. 44–48). Jewish multilingualism led to odd constellations where Czechs would identify German-language Jewish schools as ‘German bastions’ (p. 46) while Zionists identified their linguistic versatility as a ‘national trait’ for the new Czechoslovak state (p. 48). Zionists also successfully lobbied Czechoslovak authorities to include ‘Jewish’ as a national category, which would play to the strength of the Zionist movement in the country (p. 91). Data and statistics mattered to both the Czechoslovak authorities and the Zionist leadership, but this collaborative spirit put pressure Reviews 279 on Czech-Jews who were less enthusiastic about being mapped out as different (pp. 104–23). Zionism in interwar Czechoslovakia was part of the modernization enterprise of the nation-state and more traditional communities, for instance in Subcarpathian Rus’, would react hesitantly towards Zionists’ efforts at conquering the community. Lichtenstein’s analysis forces readers to rethink Zionism not as a straightforward ‘exit strategy’, but as a way of being admitted to society and politics (p. 3). What had marked Jews out as indeterminable in the maelstrom of national competition in the Habsburg Empire (the uncertainty about their religion, their seemingly unpindownable linguistic identity) was turned into a virtue for integration in Czechoslovakia. In this way, Zionism gave space for Jewish ‘national difference’ while making the case for Czechoslovak loyalty (p. 8), and the image of the benign Czechoslovak state, which tolerated Jewish difference, hinges on this key element. Lichtenstein’s study continuously tries to expose this myth. Some examples are quite compelling, such as Edvard Beneš’s continued insistence that Jews effectively assimilate or leave (pp. 54, 70–72). But perhaps Lichtenstein overeggs the extent to which scholars see Masaryk and Beneš uncritically as progressive and tolerant. Comparatively speaking — as this study shows too — being Jewish in interwar Czechoslovakia was still easier than being Jewish elsewhere in interwar Europe. Yet Lichtenstein’s scepticism towards Czechoslovak democratic exceptionalism also brings out the strength of the book. In a careful and considered way, the...