European Jews Research Articles

Writing Indigenousness

Abstract When Central European Jews underwent massive urbanization during the nineteenth century, their German-language narrative fiction retold this experience in a historical garb. Based on six literary examples, this article argues that during the 1850s, Jewish writing radically changed from an outsider to an insider perspective, while nonetheless emphasizing the precarious position of Jews in the city. The first three examples, The Rabbi of Bacharach (c. 1825) by Heinrich Heine, “Letters and Walks of a Jewish Student” (1850) by Ludwig Philippson, and “Franzefuß” (1855) by Leopold Kompert, retrospectively evoke the anguish of Jewish migrants in the urban labyrinth. Three later novels, The Girls of Khaybar (1859) by Salomon Wassermann, The Y Aguilar Family (1873) by Markus Lehmann, and Jettchen Gebert (1906) by Georg Hermann, imagine Jewish elite families rooted in idyllic cityscapes of the Arabian, Spanish, and German historical pasts, where they must confront the threat of barbarous invaders.

The construction of dual ethnic identity among multi-ethnic adolescents

This article examines the relationship between intermarriage and integration in a novel context, centering on Israeli adolescents with ethnic origins from both Europe and Middle Eastern and North African countries. Current analyses explore this relationship mainly through the self-identification of multi-ethnic individuals. One line of studies shows that intermarriage enlarges social networks and lowers social differences thereby weakening ethnic identification among multi-ethnic adolescents; another line points to the continuation of ethnic boundaries within multi-ethnic families and close environments that lead adolescents to identify themselves as ethnic. In contrast to these lines of research, that examine the relationship between intermarriage and integration among different ethnic groups, this article analyses this relationship between two subgroups – Middle Eastern and North African and European Jews – from the same ethnic group: Israeli Jews. Interviews with Israeli multi-ethnic adolescents show that they develop a dual ethnic identity that comprised two opposing elements. The first is a ‘thin’ identity, which enables them to choose and switch between ethnicities, thus blurring ethnic boundaries; the other, a ‘strong’ identity, creates an inner experience of two opposing ethnicities, thereby maintaining a hierarchy between the groups. This article demonstrates that in specific structural conditions, intermarriage does not influence integration in one direction only, but facilitates and impedes this process simultaneously in both directions.

György Ligeti, Friction, and the Uncertain Image

The current succession of centenaries of members of a significant group of European composers who made their work in the second half of the twentieth century gives us cause to think again about the historical situation they faced, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the ways in which their responses to that situation shaped both their creative output and the culture of the times. Using Anna Tsing’s notion of friction, as a productive force emanating from the unresolved co-presence of differences, this article examines the work of György Ligeti, and considers how his experience of multiple displacements, as a European Jew who experienced both Nazi and Soviet invasions, contributed to the formation of an aesthetic of mystery and irony, formulated here as the production of the uncertain image. Keywords: Ligeti, friction, Lowenhaupt Tsing, modernism, imperfection.

Archival Review: A showcase of the German Historical Knowledge Landscape – The Library of the German Historical Institute (GHI) Warsaw

The DHI Warsaw library is a specialized academic and reference library. Its collection spans the history of Germany and Poland, the history of German-Polish relations in a European and international context, and the history of Eastern European Jews.

Willy Haas in Bombay

This archival piece presents an excerpted translation from the memoirs of Willy Haas, Die Literarische Welt (1958). Haas was a Czech-German writer and scenarist who migrated to Bombay during the Nazi purge of European Jews. The translation, by Xan Holt, offers rich atmospheric and technical details about an underdocumented period in Indian film history. The framing commentary by Debashree Mukherjee goes deeper into the histories coded in the excerpt: of Bhavnani Productions, a studio founded by film director Mohan Bhavnani, and the first film that Haas wrote for him, a controversial adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts, released in India as Jhoothi Sharm (1940).

Raising the Jewish nation: prescriptions of modern motherhood in folksgeszunt to Jews in interwar Eastern Europe

The Society for the Preservation of the Health of the Jewish Population (OZE) was an organisation dedicated to providing medical aid to Eastern European Jews ravaged by war, revolution, poverty...

1914 as an inflection point: Arabic teaching in the Jewish community in Palestine

The late Ottoman period in Palestine witnessed the establishment of some prominent Hebrew educational institutions which, in addition to Hebrew, taught Arabic and other languages. Arabic was primarily taught in Arabic by native speakers – either Palestinians of Muslim or Christian origin, or Jewish-Sephardic teachers (from Palestine or neighboring countries) who were fluent in both the language and the culture. In light of pedagogical developments in the field of Arabic studies in the Middle East, and the widespread instruction of Arabic in Jewish schools, an Arabic-language pedagogical and educational elite developed in Jewish schools in Palestine, composed of Jewish and Arab natives to the region. Yet political and demographic changes transformed Arabic-language study at the start of the century. Whereas at the close of the 19th century, Jews constituted 3% of the population, they had increased to 10% by 1914, and included more and more European Jews as well as Jews who immigrated to Palestine as part of the Zionist movement’s efforts. In other words, for the first time in history, on the eve of World War I most Jews in the country were immigrants from Europe who represented new national Zionist ideologies. Their attitudes toward Arabic instruction were different, their pre-school capabilities in Arabic were nonexistent, and their presence transformed relations between Jews and Arabs alongside Arabic pedagogy in the Jewish school system. Thus, 1914 symbolizes the end of an era of Arabic-language instruction dominated by individuals intimately familiar with Arabic language and culture and ushered in the demise of the Arabic-Sephardic Jewish leadership that had been instrumental to Jewish Arabic-language instruction until that time.

Utopia, Modernism, and Failure: On Franz Kafka’s Impossibilities

Abstract: With few exceptions, Franz Kafka’s work has been read as deeply dystopian. This essay undertakes an examination of Kafka’s references to the utopian imaginary, from his Diaries to the Zürau Notebooks, and from the story “Fellowship” to Amerika and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”, demonstrating that Kafka was both conscious of and interested in the rhetoric associated with utopian (or “intentional”) communities and in the parameters of utopia as a genre of writing. Rather than either advocating or rejecting utopia/nism, Kafka uses it as a means through which to develop, within his writing, a way of investigating the social and ideological problem of community—particularly acute for him as a multiply estranged European Jew—and the aesthetic problems of impossibility and failure.

The American Haskalah: Sanctifying Education in Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers

Abstract Much has been written about European Jews’ attitudes toward secular studies. The Jewish Enlightenment, which began in Europe in the early eighteenth century, caused some Jews to broaden their knowledge by learning subjects such as geography and science. However, most Eastern European Jews remained loyal to the rabbinical authority. When many immigrated to the United States during the Progressive Era, they had to choose between maintaining the old approach toward secular education and learning secular subjects. Analyzing three Jewish immigrant texts, Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912), Abraham Levinsky’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925), this essay argues that these books present Eastern European Jewish immigrants as treating secular education similar to the European maskilim. Exploring Biblical allusions and imagery used to portray Torah learning, this paper determines that these texts sanctify nonreligious studies. Following a centuries-old heritage of learning, they glorify the knowledge obtained in American institutions. Although the protagonists feel they are betraying their tradition, they participate in establishing a Jewish American culture based on the value of studying. While these texts often praise American education, they portray a clash between American and traditional Jewish education, suggesting that disavowing one’s traditional education is challenging.

Prawnicy tylko dla Żydów. Konsulenci z okręgu Wyższego Sądu Krajowego w Katowicach

The article is devoted to the issue of consultants, an institution introduced in the Third Reich to represent Jews in legal matters. Some of the Jewish lawyers excluded from the German bar became consultants. The article presents the legal regulation, the reasons for its issuance and its effects. Based on the personal files of three consultants from the district of the Higher National Court in Katowice, the procedure of admitting them and the conditions of their activity were presented. On the basis of court files, the manner in which they conducted their work in criminal cases was analyzed and assessed.
 A significant amount of anti-Jewish legislation was passed in Germany after Hitler seized power. Some of the newly introduced regulation also targetted lawyers of Jewish origin, whose professional activities were hindered, and eventually banned. In 1938 Jews were definitively removed from the German bar. At the same time, it was ensured that Jews would be provided with legal assistance and represented by consultants, i.e. lawyers of Jewish origin. There were clearly fewer consultants than Jewish lawyers (several in the districts in which individual higher national courts operated). Their admission was discretionary. According to sparse findings in the literature, consultants were treated adequately by the German courts and were not hindered in their access to court files, contact with clients or the possibility of submitting lawsuits. Three examined cases of consultants from the district of the Higher National Court in Katowice indicate that they enjoyed similar freedoms while performing their functions in the courts, as described in the literature. In their daily activities, however, they had to struggle with difficulties of an administrative or factual nature, which were a manifestation of discrimination and bans against Jews. Based on these three cases, it could be concluded that they were admitted to consular activity due to positive opinions among the population, the judiciary and the Gestapo, as well as their patriotic attitude during the First World War and during the Silesian Uprisings. Their exemplary professional conduct, war decorations, and even injuries sustained on the front of the Great War did not prevent the consultants from sharing the tragic fate of European Jews.

The Extermination of Red Army Soldiers in German Captivity, 1941–1945: Causes, Patterns, Dimensions

ABSTRACT Captive Red Army soldiers made up the majority of victims of Nazi Germany’s starvation policy against Soviet civilians and other non-combatants and thus constituted the largest single victim group of the German war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. Indeed, Soviet prisoners of war were the largest victim group of all National Socialist annihilation policies after the European Jews. Before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, it was clear to the Wehrmacht planning departments on exactly what scale they could expect to capture Soviet troops. Yet, they neglected to make the necessary preparations for feeding and sheltering the captured soldiers, who were viewed by the economic staffs and the military leadership alike as direct competitors of German troops and the German home front for precious food supplies. The number of extra mouths to feed was incompatible with German war aims. The obvious limitations on their freedom of movement and the relative ease with which large numbers could be segregated and their rations controlled were crucial factors in the death of over 3 million Soviet POWs, the vast majority directly or indirectly as a result of deliberate policies of neglect, undernourishment, and starvation while in the ‘care’ of the Wehrmacht. The most reliable figures for the mortality of Soviet POWs in German captivity reveal that up to 3.3 million died from a total of just over 5.7 million captured between June 1941 and February 1945 — a proportion of almost 58 percent. Of these, 2 million were already dead by the beginning of February 1942. In English, there is still neither a single monograph nor a single edited volume dedicated to the subject. This article now provides the first detailed stand-alone synthesis in that language addressing the whole period from 1941 to 1945.

A Voice Behind the Headlines: The Public Relations of the Canadian Jewish Congress During the Holocaust

ABSTRACT The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), the main lobbying group for Canadian Jews during the Holocaust, advocated on behalf of both Canadian and European Jewry by employing a sophisticated public relations strategy. This article investigates three intertwined campaigns to publicize Canadian Jewish war efforts, to raise awareness of the extermination of European Jews, and to advocate that Canada accept refugees. It argues that the CJC used data-driven publicity to demonstrate Jewish loyalty to Canada, which subsequently allowed them to bring attention to Jewish extermination in the non-Jewish press and spurred sustained coverage of the topic. After Jewish extermination became clear, they worked behind the scenes with their allies and used the press to convince the Canadian government to rescue several hundred refugees. By showing the hidden efforts and unknown successes of Jewish organizations, we learn that, while still limited in power, their advocacy methods achieved more than is usually acknowledged. This article breaks with the methodological approach of asking only ‘who knew what and when?’ in press responses to the Holocaust. Instead, it asks how and why stories about the Holocaust made the news. In so doing, it de-emphasizes the decisions of journalists, editors, and publishers and demonstrates the Jewish voice behind stories in the non-Jewish press.

Research Protocol: A Transdisciplinary Multi-Case Study Research Design Using Mixed Methods to Evaluate the Long-Term Impact of Holocaust Museum Education in Australia

Holocaust museums around the world are distinctive in their emphasis on educational missions premised on the idea of “never again”, a deep belief that increasing public awareness of the history and contemporary significance of the Holocaust – the mass murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi regime during World War Two – can prevent the future recurrence of such events. In the Australian context, tens of thousands of school students visit Holocaust museums every year to participate in learning programs designed to impart powerful historical and moral lessons about the Holocaust, its antecedent conditions, and its ongoing relevance. The aspirations attached to these programs and the scale at which they are delivered stand in stark contrast to the lack of empirical evidence to support their efficacy. This research protocol describes an extensive four-year research study designed to evaluate the presumed linear relationship between Holocaust education programs and ethical, moral, and affective learning that leads to durable attitudinal and behavioural change. Funded through the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects scheme, the study will assess the impact of Holocaust museums’ education programs on high school students from diverse demographics, including the extent to which participation influences the views and actions of young people in relation to racial and identity-based discrimination. The research design is longitudinal and transdisciplinary, integrating qualitative, quantitative, and participatory techniques across three case studies. By strategically employing rapid ethnographic assessment procedures, archival research, analysis of museum representational practices, surveys, and visual research methods, we will examine both the educational intent behind Holocaust education programs and their actual impacts on a large sample of Australian Year 10 students. We expect the results of the research to be used by our project partners to develop Holocaust education programs that effectively engage students on cognitive and affective levels.

Recognition and Frustration: Raul Hilberg and the German Edition of The Destruction of the European Jews

Recognition and Frustration: Raul Hilberg and the German Edition of The Destruction of the European Jews

Hitler’s Error of Memory: Symptom or Propaganda Ploy?

The purpose of this paper is to use the psychoanalytic understanding of parapraxes to explore the meaning of apparent errors of memory made by Adolf Hitler in speeches ‘prophesying’ the destruction of European Jews. Because historians have suggested the likelihood that these errors were deliberate, the concept of intentional parapraxes is explored and utilized. Whether deliberate or not Hitler’s errors, it is argued, were a product of a psychological conflict between the wish to take public credit for the mass murder of Jews and the need to keep these crimes secret.

Notes toward a Demographic History of the Jews

As an essential prerequisite to the genealogical study of Jews, some elements of Jewish demographic history are provided in a long-term transnational perspective. Data and estimates from a vast array of sources are combined to draw a profile of Jewish populations globally, noting changes in geographical distribution, vital processes (marriages, births and deaths), international migrations, and changes in Jewish identification. Jews often anticipated the transition from higher to lower levels of mortality and fertility, or else joined large-scale migration flows that reflected shifting constraints and opportunities locally and globally. Cultural drivers typical of the Jewish minority interacted with socioeconomic and political drivers coming from the encompassing majority. The main centers of Jewish presence globally repeatedly shifted, entailing the intake within Jewish communities of demographic patterns from significantly different environments. During the 20th century, two main events reshaped the demography of the Jews globally: the Shoah (destruction) of two thirds of all Jews in Europe during World War II, and the independence of the State of Israel in 1948. Mass immigration and significant convergence followed among Jews of different geographical origins. Israel’s Jewish population grew to constitute a large share—and in the longer run—a potential majority of all Jews worldwide. Since the 19th century, and with increasing visibility during the 20th and the 21st, Jews also tended to assimilate in the respective Diaspora environments, leading to a blurring of identificational boundaries and sometimes to a numerical erosion of the Jewish population. This article concludes with some implications for Jewish genealogical studies, stressing the need for contextualization to enhance their value for personal memory and for analytic work.

Ferramonti, not Palestine: The Failed Aliyah bet of the “Benghazi Group,” 1939–1943

Abstract This article focuses on the journey of “the Benghazi group,” three hundred European Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism, who, for several months in 1940, were stranded in Benghazi, then part of the Italian colonial empire. They organized and attempted to sail from Italy to Palestine in an Aliyah bet voyage, but were eventually forcibly returned to Italy and interned in the Ferramonti camp in the south of the country. Even though the British liberated Ferramonti in 1943, in 1941 and 1942 many Jews had already been transferred to internment locations further north. When Germany occupied Italy in fall 1943, many members of the Benghazi group thus fell victim to the Holocaust. This article examines the possibilities and limitations for self-help and agency among Jewish refugees in Fascist Italy. It describes their experiences in the context of Fascist Italy’s antisemitic policies and the history of Aliyah bet operations, which did not treat Jews in Italy as a high priority for rescue. At the core of this article lies the story of an encounter between central European Jews and the North African Jews of Benghazi. Having spent their last remaining financial means on the journey to Palestine, the members of the Benghazi group became dependent on the extraordinary hospitality of the Libyan Jews, making Benghazi a temporary sanctuary for European Jewish refugees.

Zuhause in der Weltsprache der modernen Poesie

Paul Celan is probably the internationally best-known poet writing in German since World War 2. Coming from the former Romanian province of Bukovina, which had previously been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was originally regarded with scepticism by German literary critics who attributed the novelty of his work to his exotic Eastern European Jewish origins. This paper argues that after years of fascist isolation the critics initially failed to recognise that Celan’s work, far from being strangely exotic, actually represents mainstream modernity and should be seen in the context of a “World language of modern poetry” as defined by Hans Magnus Enzensberger with his anthology of international poetry Museum der modernen Poesie published in 1960. The anthology, to which Celan contributed with translations of Osip Mandel’štam, proved a landmark in the work of reconnecting West Germany with the international literary scene. The paper emphasises the importance of dialogue in Celan’s work and of his links to the tradition of international modernism.

Periphery of a Genocide: Finland and the Holocaust

Abstract By scrutinizing Finland’s complex position as an Axis ally during the Second World War, this article explores the degree to which the country contributed to the destruction of European Jews. Though historians within Finland continue to debate these issues, the author argues that neither exculpation, nor exclusion from the general framework of Holocaust history are tenable historical approaches. While the extent to which Finland willingly participated in the mass murder of the Jews and other perceived enemies remains an unresolved question, this article reveals how key individuals and lower-level authorities nevertheless knowingly contributed to lethal practices and outcomes. Thus, this article challenges current interpretations of Finland’s involvement in the Holocaust.

Palestine between Reasonableness of Zionist Claims and the Legitimacy of the British Mandate

This study aims to study the legal nature of the British mandate over Palestine after World War I, in addition to studying the claims of the Zionist movement regarding its connection to the land of Palestine, thus determining the correct legal concept of the Question of Palestine in accordance with international law. The methodology of the study is the legal analytical and critical method and the Statute approach. In it, the author used Zionist, Jewish, Arab and foreign references. The results showed that the Zionist movement was established to unite the efforts of the Jews in Europe with the aim of establishing a national home for them in Palestine with the help of the colonial European countries under historical and religious arguments that completely contradict the facts and discoveries in Palestine. On the other hand, Britain's goal from the Balfour Declaration was to support the Zionist project in Palestine, thus helping to dismantle the Ottoman Empire and colonize the Arabian Peninsula with the participation of France. In addition, the British Mandate Deed for Palestine was only ratified by the Principal Allied Powers in World War I. Therefore, it did not reflect a real international will and thus was a violation of the provisions of international law.