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This chapter examines how the initial efforts by both international and local Jewish leaders to strengthen and streamline communal institutions and policies in the first decade and a half after the war became instrumental in ensuring the stability of west European Jewry and in shaping its emerging self-consciousness. With the restructuring of several important aspects of community activity in western Europe, it quickly became apparent that there was a need for long-range planning. New techniques in social work and fundraising meant that community leaders needed a clearer sense of the nature and the needs of their constituents. By the late 1950s, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) was sponsoring conferences to bring together social workers and leaders of Jewish welfare organizations from western and central Europe to discuss common problems and share solutions. In 1960, it helped to establish a permanent Standing Conference on European Jewish Community Services. The restructuring of health care within the French, Belgian, and Dutch communities also eventually led to the integration of Jewish communal service into the national social-welfare network. With the decline in distinct programmes to aid refugees and immigrants and the movement away from dependency upon international Jewish organizations, Jewish agencies in western Europe were beginning to receive government subsidies.

It is important to note that during the expansion of the European Jewry, the diaspora undergone by the Jewish population – especially in central Europe, Spain, Poland, and Italy – veered away from the general demographic trends across Europe, since other populations either experienced declines or remained stagnated. This pattern was evident not only among the Jews across Europe in the seventeenth century, but also in other such places wherein their growth and expansion were not inhibited. This chapter, however, discusses how the period between 1713 and 1750 marked a significant decline in the demographic position of the European Jewry, wherein the growth of the population was evidently slower that the proliferation of other societies, the society being seemingly incapable of facilitating growth during this particular period.

This chapter explains that the period 1713–50 was one of sharp deterioration in European Jewry's demographic position. It is true that a steady increase persisted in many parts, but, from the second decade of the eighteenth century onwards, the population of Europe as a whole began to burgeon once more so that, other than in the eastern territories of Poland, Jewish population growth now lagged well behind that of the rest. Moreover, and a more immediately relevant factor in the economic and cultural decline of European Jewry during the eighteenth century, practically all the leading Jewish urban centres displayed a marked incapacity for growth. Previously, from 1570 down to 1713, the economic policies of the European states, concentrating on the promotion of long-distance commerce, had encouraged the increasing integration of the Jewish trade network into the European economy as a whole, and this had laid the basis for the revival of Jewish life in progress in central and western Europe since the late sixteenth century. After 1713, however, a less favourable trend set in. Whilst the European states were still ruled by mercantilist notions, they now adopted more comprehensively protectionist policies, concentrating on the promotion of manufacturing activity rather than long-distance trade.

This chapter investigates how pictures taken by photographers from outside the east European Jewish community became widely familiar throughout the post-war period, none more so than the work of one photographer, Roman Vishniac. Taken during a series of trips he made to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania from the mid-1930s until the start of the Second World War, some of these photographs have been republished frequently, including in five books devoted solely to the photographer's work. Vishniac's images figured prominently in the first exhibitions and books of photographs of pre-war east European Jewish life to appear in the United States after the Second World War, and not a decade has passed since without some of these photographs being published or exhibited there, as well as abroad. Although these pictures are the product of a limited phase in Vishniac's career, they are his best-known accomplishment. For many post-war Americans, in particular, some of his images have served as key visual points of entry into the culture of pre-war east European Jewry.

This chapter talks about the massacre of two-thirds of European Jewry in the Holocaust, which, combined with the economic modernization of postwar Europe, has eliminated the Jews from their previous position as a prominent urban elite in what had been the largely agrarian societies of east-central and eastern Europe. Even before the war, German and Austrian Jewry had been pauperized by the expropriation of Jewish businesses, property, and capital. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when capitalism's transfiguration of Europe was the guiding star of the social thought, speculation about the position of Jews in Europe (the Jewish Question) could not be separated from anxiety about the new industrial order (the social question). Jews continue to have grave, even existential problems, but for the vast majority of world Jewry, the “Jewish question” as it was understood throughout modern European history has ceased to exist.

This chapter focuses on the Thirty Years War (1618–48), which marked a new phase in the interaction between Jews and European society in several respects. Especially in central Europe, the long and terrible conflict accelerated the reintegration of Jewry in progress since the 1570s, preparing the way for the ‘Court Jews’ of the later seventeenth century. While significant changes had already taken place in the period from 1570 down to the commencement of the Thirty Years War, care must be taken not to exaggerate the extent of central European Jewry's gains by 1618. The expansion of Jewish activity and communities was then still at a comparatively early stage. The first point to take into account in explaining the proliferation of Jewish communities in Germany, the Czech lands, and Alsace during the Thirty Years War is the special relationship between German Jewry and the Emperor. It had long been a fact that the chief protector of the Jews of the Holy Roman Empire was the Emperor. The chapter then looks at the role of Jacob Bassevi, the financier who was at the centre of the efforts to raise Jewish subsidies for the Emperor, during the Thirty Years War.

For the European Jewry, the eighteenth century marked another significant event in history, as this was the period in which the community experienced a ‘decline’; somewhat contrary to previous accounts, in which the Jewish integration was initially proceeded with acceleration. Ellis Rivkin, a contemporary historian, expressed how such was to be viewed as a shift from emphasizing ‘liberating ideas’ to what he termed ‘developing capitalism’. As he too believed that the eighteenth century was a period of economic growth across the west, he emphasized the notion of increasing freedom in terms of economic movement and opportunity. In this chapter, although the decline in the eighteenth century is rather doubtful, we look back at the significant impacts of the Jewish influence on early modern European life.

This chapter studies the response of the Western Allies to the Holocaust. The response of the United States to the successive stripping of the dignity, freedom, and the lives of six million European Jews has been revealed as one of indifference, and perhaps even of complicity, in what the Nazis termed the ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish question. Meanwhile, a 1973 study showed the British Government's attitude toward assisting Jewish refugees from Nazi rule between 1933 and 1939 to be ‘comparatively compassionate, even generous’ when contrasted with that of the United States and other countries. Another study detailed, among other things, the manner in which both major Western Allies' thinking on the Jewish question actually served to reinforce each other's unwillingness to respond positively to European Jewry's cries for help. Whatever the case, the notion that many Jews' lives might have been saved, had the two chief Western Allies been especially interested in seeing this happen, appears firmly established by historical investigation.

This chapter explains that the experience of Jewish modernity tends to be seen as a process of secularization; an arc starting with the Jews living under static corporate structures and ending with their becoming citizens of nation-states, congregants of reformed synagogues, and acculturated members of civil society. It notes that this shift was inaugurated by Moses Mendelssohn and his Berlin-based followers. The farther modernity travelled across Europe, the more it barely registered in eastern European Jewry's religious expressions, intellectual institutions, and political movements.

This chapter discusses the construction of new identities by examining how European Jews understood the purposes and meanings of Zionism in Zion. Pioneers built Zionism on a rejection of Europe and an anticipation of creating an alternative modern Jewish personality. The analysis presented in the chapter rests on a study of the largest social institution established by Zionist society: a secular, public school system. Through it, Zionist ideologues, public officials, and educators attempted to transform European Jewry. Willing to preserve what they admired in the culture of the shtetl, they rejected its passivity in the face of physical threats and actual violence. These educators insisted on a new national, educational, cultural ideal. The chapter reveals that in turning away from the traditional orthodox schooling of the shtetl, Zionists developed a new curriculum to produce modern, secularized Jews who were capable of defending themselves and their homeland.

This chapter shows that the stigma of Jews as criminals was one of the most resilient and widespread perceptions among Germans as they confronted the remnant of European Jewry in post-World War II Europe in what came to be known as the DP, or “displaced-persons” problem. Because racial anti-Semitism was a possibly questionable way to express opinions in postwar Germany, especially in the U.S. zone of occupation toward which most Jewish DPs migrated, Germans' view of Jews as criminals was a major factor in the dynamic between Jews, Germans, and the U.S. Army. The chapter also notes that the presence of a thriving black market certainly abetted the perception of DPs as a “criminal element,” and a number of forces combined to ensure that DPs had few other means, outside of the black market, to survive.

This chapter briefly reviews a volume of essays, entitled Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. It provides thumbnail descriptions of some of the articles that shed light on the history of central and east European Jewry from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries. This history is briefly explored through four sections. Along with several other essays that deal with central and east European Jewish themes, the volume contains articles on Sephardi Jewry, Jewish philosophy, and mysticism. It begins and ends with appreciations of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, whose ‘catholicity of knowledge’ it multifariously and impressively echoes.

This chapter outlines the context of British Jewry's response to the Holocaust. It examines the information that was available to the Anglo-Jewish community about events behind Nazi lines and summarises the main conclusions of the existing body of scholarly literature on diasporic response to the Holocaust. In order to assess the response of Britain's Jewish community, the chapter asks what actual facts were known to the community at the time. In the years since the Holocaust, mountains of documentary and photographic historical evidence have emerged. But here the chapter takes the huge mental leap to ask what was known to those who could have only second-hand information at the time.

This chapter talks about the Jewish historians who looked to the German Jewish experience as the paradigm for the transformation of European Jewry. It reviews the pioneers of Reform Judaism and practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums as the key actors in Jewish development. It also explains how Jewish historians constructed a model of change in which new ideas radiated outwards from Berlin and slowly diffused throughout Europe. The chapter considers Jewish historians who looked at developments in Germany from the perspective of liberal states like Britain, France, and the Netherlands, which was problematic as the German states were not in the vanguard of change. It describes the course of Jewish transformation in central Europe that reflected the backward nature of the states in the region.

This chapter examines works on American Jewry written during the 1950s and 1960s that begin with the contrast between the pessimistic evaluations of the state of American Judaism at the end of the nineteenth century. It notes the starker contrast made between the state of American Orthodox Jewry at the time of the Second World War and at the start of the twenty-first century. It also considers Jeffrey Gurock's detailed analysis that demonstrates the first half of the twentieth century as the era of non-observance for American Orthodoxy. The chapter recounts how English-speaking Orthodox rabbinate had suffered somewhat of a reversal and was forced to take stock of its future by the 1940s. It points out the most traditional and Jewishly educated members of east European Orthodox Jewry and rabbinic intellectual elite that were most resistant to migration to the United States.

This chapter examines the tentative readmission of Jewry into western and central Europe from the 1570s onwards that signalled a reversal of trends which had previously prevailed everywhere west of Poland. This post-1570 shift is, without doubt, a historical phenomenon of the first significance. In several ways, it marks the real beginning of modern Jewish history. For, in a matter of a few years, the whole fixed pattern of restricted interaction between western Christendom and the Jews was transformed in a way which continued to shape subsequent development for some two centuries. The transformation in European Jewry's status was rapid, dramatic, and profound, affecting and affected by much else that was then in flux, for at bottom Jewish readmission was merely a symptom of the more general revolution which convulsed and renewed western life and thought at the close of the sixteenth century. Nor did this change in Jewish status occur first in any one place and then spread. On the contrary, it is remarkable that the change of policy toward the Jews is discernible at pretty much the same moment in the Czech lands, Italy, Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. The Haskalah provides an interesting example of one of the Enlightenments of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Europe which also constituted a unique chapter in the social history of European Jewry. It encompasses over 120 years (from around the 1770s to the 1890s), and a large number of Jewish communities, from London in the west, to Copenhagen in the north, to Vilna and St Petersburg in the east. Much scholarship in the past concentrated on the Haskalah's intimate relationship to Jewish modernization: scholars examined the role of the Haskalah in the processes of political emancipation and the integration of Jews into the larger society. A different approach became possible once the modernization of European Jewry came to be viewed as a series of processes that awaited adequate analysis and explanation, the Haskalah being one of the foremost among them.