This paper traces the historical experiences of European Jews from the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War through the rise of Nazism, examining how Eastern and Western Jewish communities diverged in response to shifting political landscapes, legal restrictions, and social pressures. Drawing primarily on Michael Cohn's Jewish Bridges: East to West and the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, the paper covers the partitions of Poland, the Pale of Settlement, the Hasidic movement, Jewish emancipation, the Haskalah, Zionism, and the mass migration westward. It argues that the two communities developed contrasting survival strategies — religious intensification in the East versus secularization and assimilation in the West — and that both paths ultimately left Jews vulnerable to the racial ideology of the Nazi regime.
In the history of the Jewish people there are many transitory themes. The reasons for this follow the trend of the relative fluidity of place for the entire culture. Jews have spent much of their time on the move, changing locations according to the perceived or real advantages of the regions in which they chose to settle. Though they were always set apart, their cultures changed and altered as the needs and standards of the majority culture demanded change of the individual and community.
There were never any physical obstacles to travelling on the great plain that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the North Sea. There are neither mountains nor deserts, only some wide rivers to cross — and these serve as much as highways of transportation as obstacles to travel. National borders and their guards posed no barrier either, for the guards could be evaded or bribed, something that has happened with border guards of all nationalities throughout history. It is not surprising that Jews, as well as other groups, travelled across this plain. Sometimes they travelled in small caravans of traders; at other times they moved as massive waves of immigrants several million strong (Cohn ix).
Within the years just preceding the French Revolution beginning in 1789 and the early 19th century, there were many cultural and societal changes for Jews in both Eastern and Western European communities. The outlook for Jews in Western Europe was improving even as the outlook in the East deteriorated. The Thirty Years' War ended in 1648. Although it had begun as a religious controversy, religious enthusiasm in Europe was largely exhausted during that conflict, and once again Jews were permitted to settle where they had once been banned (Cohn 7).
Yet things were often as fluid as the generational movement of the Jewish people during their famed diaspora. Up to this point it was clear in both regions — East and West — that the level of tolerance for the ethnic and religious differences of the Jews was under considerable scrutiny by majority cultures. Just as these regions were gaining greater independence for themselves, Jews were losing rights and privileges and suffering the effects of renewed anti-Semitic sentiment. Europe was, in a sense, returning to much earlier days, but now it was moving toward legislative and legal sanctions that infringed on the rights and movements of the Jews.
Jews were viewed as historical agents of the hated rulers of the past, and many Europeans spread their hatred toward these agents as intensely as they had directed it against former leaders. Each nation then determined the fate of its Jewish population. Laws that had been divisive and restrictive were lifted in some places while they were strengthened in others. Eastern European countries began to offer concessions to long-standing Jewish settlers, but the history of Jewish communities as corporate entities — largely protected by and supportive of old regimes — was not forgotten.
With the dying out of the Jagiellonian dynasty and the transformation of the Polish crown into an elective office, the position of king of Poland became a prize won by bribery on behalf of the tsar, the princes of Saxony, and other European powers. Finally, Poland's three neighbors — Russia, Prussia, and Austria — decided to divide Poland among themselves. There were partitions of Poland in 1773, 1779, and 1793. The attempt by the Poles to resist the Russians, led by Kościuszko, who had served in the American Revolution under Washington, was unsuccessful. The Jews, understanding well that their future was also at stake, had supported the Polish freedom movement.
When the partition was complete, Prussia under Frederick the Great received the province of Silesia, including Wrocław (Breslau) and Poznań (Posen), and the Jews in those provinces were now considered German Jews. Austria under Maria Theresa took Galicia, including the cities of Lwów (Lemberg) and the trading town of Brody. When final adjustments were made after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Russia ended up with the lion's share, including what today is Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and the central part of Poland including Warsaw (Cohn 8).
The alterations in ruling entities always leave the most vulnerable — minorities and the poor — with little or no recourse for redress of wrongs committed against them, and this did not change with the reshaping of national borders across Europe. The Jewish communities survived the change of rulers as best they could, and in many ways — especially in language and customs — maintained a unity of culture in Eastern Europe despite the new borders.
All of the new rulers still treated Jews as a corporate entity rather than as individuals and citizens. Catherine II, the German princess who had become tsarina of Russia, confined her new Jewish subjects to a Pale of Settlement — a territory limited to the old Polish provinces. When Tsar Nicholas I wanted to draft Jews into his conscript army in 1827, he left it to the leaders of the kahillas to choose which unfortunate young men were to put on a uniform and be sworn into the tsar's service with solemn religious oaths and ceremonies. Taxes were levied on the Jewish community at large, and it was left to the elders to apportion the burden. It was not until 1859 that individual wealthy merchants, doctors, lawyers, and other university graduates were allowed to leave the Pale and move to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities — and even then they were prohibited from becoming government officials or rising as officers in the army (Cohn 9–10).
The Jewish communities lived on much as they had in the past, and reform came slowly to them. The secularization of Eastern European Jews was a gradual process, due in part to the historical control the religious establishment exercised over communal life. The kahillas and rabbis continued to control the ghettos, their schools, and their markets. The few attempts to establish government schools for Jews in Russian Poland — with a more modern curriculum and Russian-language instruction — failed, as did similar efforts in Austrian Galicia (Cohn 10).
In Galicia, the situation was much the same as in other politically altered nations in Eastern Europe. The Edict of Toleration published by Emperor Joseph II in 1789 meant exactly what it said: bare toleration rather than any equality of Jews and Christians. Jews were prohibited from living in villages in Galicia unless they were engaged in agriculture or handicrafts. They were prohibited from engaging in trade, operating taverns, leasing mills, or collecting tolls. This edict was not always enforced, but the threat of enforcement always hung over every Jew living in a Galician village (Cohn 10).
In Austria, certain changes made life somewhat more bearable for Jews, or at least allowed them more say in their futures as members of the nations in which they lived. Yet many of the old standards of oppression — taxes and restrictions — remained very much part of the social landscape. The Austrian government did recognize Jews as individuals or households rather than as part of a corporate community when it came to paying taxes. Ritually slaughtered meat was heavily taxed, as were sabbath candles: each married Jewish woman had to pay taxes on two sabbath candles a week, whether or not she had money to buy them, under the threat of forfeiture of all household goods. Leaders of the kahilla were required to prove that they had paid taxes on six or eight sabbath candles rather than just two before assuming office — a regulation that ensured only wealthy Jews could be elected to community leadership. At the same time, restrictions on residence outside legally defined ghettos were introduced in major cities, and Jews were not permitted to live in some towns at all. As in Russia, very wealthy Jews or those possessing university degrees were exempt from these residence restrictions (Cohn 9–10).
Among the most progressive of the nations in this new political landscape was Prussia, which granted full citizenship to Prussian Jews, though the old standards of the region still haunted Jewish life. An edict issued on March 11, 1812, as part of the reforms instituted in Prussia to oppose Napoleon, gave full citizenship to Jews in Prussia together with the formal removal of all residence and professional restrictions. These new laws applied to native-born Jews only; foreign — that is, Russian — Jews still faced restrictions. This division between native and foreign Jews was of importance then and still exists in present-day German law, as it did in the days of the German empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi regime (Cohn 10).
These enduring old standards left the door open for new and modern forms of the same archaic segregations and prejudices. When the Nazis rose to power, they revived many of the old evils. Restrictions on Jews owning businesses or entering certain professions were instituted, ghettos were reestablished, and special taxes were placed on the Jewish community at large rather than on individuals. The new ghettos were governed by Nazi-appointed Jewish officials, the Judenrat, right up to the point when entire ghettos were "cleansed" and their inhabitants either shot or deported to extermination camps. Like the tsars a hundred years earlier, the Nazis made Jewish officials choose who was to be deported first. Eventually the Jewish councillors and policemen shared the fate of their ghetto, but each of these officials had to make the difficult choice between cooperating with the Nazis in the hope of saving some lives or preparing to go down fighting (Cohn 11).
"Hasidic movement as spiritual and communal response"
It was through this movement and others that the internal strength of the European Jew was formed. Developed as an attempt to protect the community from both outside and inside strife, the movement served to reinvigorate the group as one defined by faith and not merely by ethnicity. The effect of Hasidism on Jewish life in Eastern Europe was enormous, even on those who were not followers of the zaddikim. Because Hasidism placed emphasis on the spirit of worship rather than on the details of ritual, the poor Jew who did not know all of the prayers and ritual could now feel himself the equal of synagogue leaders or those wealthy enough to be formal yeshiva students. Wealth was no longer the sole factor that made a "good Jew," and partly for that reason Hasidism had its strongest appeal among the Jewish lower classes (Cohn 11).
Yet, as can be seen from the above, the Eastern traditions were far more adherent to the Hasidic movement, and the public declaration of faith based on strict adherence to religious law left many of these Jews with even greater personal distinctions from majority populations than they had possessed before. It became almost impossible for Jews of this particular movement to blend into the surrounding culture — a circumstance that strengthened their internal frameworks but made them vulnerable to criticism from both more moderate Jews and majority cultures. In the modern sense, this group's adherence to tradition still sets them apart from nearly every surrounding group while preserving an idealized and historically rich heritage.
Some would say that Western European Jews did the opposite: in their quest to protect their culture from further political and social challenges, they stressed the importance of their history as an ethnic entity and downplayed the importance of faith as their uniting force. This resulted in the secularization of Western European Jews, much as other cultures were seeking a separation of politics and diverse faiths. The Jews of Western Europe attempted to separate their faith from civic life, in most cases trying to blend into surrounding cultures by accepting their responsibility to follow the secular laws of the nations and localities in which they lived.
Modern political emancipation of the Jews began with the American and French revolutions. In Germany and Austria, emancipation was proclaimed after the Revolution of 1848. Simultaneously, the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment — encouraged the secularization of Jewish life and the integration of Jews into the societies in which they lived. Especially in Western Europe, this led to considerable acculturation, and even assimilation, of Jewish communities. The religious Reform movement advocated a form of Judaism stripped of its national elements and emphasizing ethical content rather than adherence to traditional Jewish law (Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed.).
Eastern and Western Jews thus developed two divergent responses to external pressures, leaving the two regional communities divergent in their faith and expressive practices and paving the way for potential conflicts associated with the continued fluidity of their movements. In many places, at the height of anti-Semitic strife, those who had acculturated identified themselves first with the nation in which they lived and second with their Jewish heritage. Once Europe's movement toward greater sanctions began in earnest again, many of these acculturated Jews resented their designation as Jews to be scorned and segregated. In contrast, those who had not assimilated and defined themselves as Jews first were often in greater peril and faced constant prejudice and pressure — sometimes resulting in further migration westward, placing them in conflict with both the mass culture of their new homes and the reformed secular Jews wherever they settled.
There is a modern movement in Europe, present even today, that employs some of the same ideas of inferiority to deem Jews lesser than others — regardless of their level of assimilation or secularization and regardless of the length of time they have lived within their chosen communities. As Cohn notes, "From 1648 to 1933, the advantages of living were all in the West, and the Jews followed the available advantages" (Cohn ix). These advantages were associated with economic and religious freedom and tolerance, yet they were short-lived, as the more the Jews moved, the more dangerous their new homes became.
The Jews who came from the East did not arrive in the West empty-handed. They brought their culture, their folktales, and the Yiddish language. They brought their political skills, sharpened in the ghettos, and their flexibility in commerce, and they applied these to the economies and politics of the West, giving many industries and ideas an Eastern Jewish character (Cohn ix–xi).
"Zionist movement and mass emigration to America and Palestine"
The challenges to Eastern and Western Jews in Europe are still present today, and other groups have joined their ranks as targets of hatred, yet anti-Semitic principles continue to challenge the ideals of a new global community.
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