What futurE for thE EuropEan JEW?


MIchaEl BrEnnEr explores the decl ine of Europe’s role in the Jewish wor ld and suggests how i t might be reversed


In 1947 Samuel Gringauz, a leader of the She’erit Ha-pleitah (the surviving remnant of Jews in postwar Europe) summed up what Europemeant for himandmany others who had escaped Nazi persecution. For these Jews, Gringauz stressed, Europe was not associated withWestminsterAbbey or Versailles, nor the art treasures of Florence, but rather with the violence of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms of Russia and the gas chambers ofAuschwitz. ‘Adieu, Europe’was the title of a dramatic speech he gave to the Jewish survivors in the continent that had shaped Jewish life over the lastmillennium. The Jews whomhe addressed were no


longer Europeans or Poles or Germans but, in the language of the day, ‘Displaced Persons’.Most of themexpressed their desire to leave Europe for Israel or the United States. For some of themthese destinations were not far enough, and South America orAustralia were their favourite options. Europe, which had been a home and a hope formany generations of Jews, had become a horrible nightmare. Fifty years after Gringauz’ speech,


British historian BernardWasserstein wrote a book entitled A Vanishing Diaspora. Just as the once flourishing Chinese diaspora would disappear, European Jewry would one day be but a vaguememory. The statistics appear to support his prediction. In themid- 19th century almost 90%of all Jews lived in Europe, in the 1930s they still constituted two-thirds of the entire Jewish community. And even in 1946, immediately after the catastrophe, every third Jew still lived on European soil. Today, amarginal 10%, or a total of just over 1.5million Jews, remain in Europe.WhileWasserstein’s comparison with China is far-fetched it can hardly be denied that the European age of Jewish history has come to an end. Judaismas we know it today is a


composite of a diverse cultural heritage: its historic homeland Eretz Israel, where its earliest biblical foundations were built; Babylonia, home of the talmudic corpus and the great Jewish academies of higher learning; and Europe, where Judaismhas


been developedmost decisively over the last millenium. In Spain Judah Halevi wrote his acclaimed Hebrew poems; in France Rashi added themost widely acclaimed commentaries to Bible and Talmud; in Lithuania theVilna Gaon became the respected halachic authority of his time; in Poland and Ukraine Chasidismdeveloped as an innovative spiritualmovement in Judaism; in Germanymodern Orthodox and ReformJudaismwere born out of the spirit


European culture for many generations was shaped by the presence of Jews. In an ironic twist of history, today’s European culture might be said to be shaped by their absence.


of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. And beyond the religious realm, secular expressions of Jewish identity were born in Europe by the end of the 19th century. In Vienna, Theodor Herzl founded themodern Zionistmovement, while the ‘godless Jew‘ Sigmund Freud became themodel formany ‘non-Jewish Jews’. Secular Jewish identities of Eastern Europe were based on theYiddish language, as expressed for example by Socialist Bundist traditions. For centuries, European Jews had felt


part of Europe, of the cities and of the countries they lived in.When in the 16th century the Jewish adventurer David Reuveni tried to convince the Jewish banker Ishmael de Rieti fromSiena to prepare himself for themessianic journey to Jerusalem, he received the answer that his only concern was about his hometown in Siena: “Tov li kan be-Siena”. There were German Jews who replaced the traditional phrase of return to Jerusalemin the Passover Haggadah by the wish to remain next year in their hometown ofWorms: “Ba-shanah haba’ah po be-Worms amRhein”.


Whilemany were patriots of their


respective countries, others felt first and foremost Europeans.When Theodor Herzl published his plans to create a Jewish state, theAustrian Jewish critic Karl Kraus caricatured the Zionist endeavour and asked rhetorically if he believed that the Jews had just stayed in Europe for over a thousand years to improve the tourist trade. Standing in the footsteps of themedievalmediators between Christian andMuslimcultures, duringWorldWar I some Jews felt it their mission tomediate between the war-faring nations of Europe. Eduard Bernstein, one of the foremost leaders of German Social Democracy, wrote an essay, ‘The Jews as Mediators’. Somewhat idealising the role of medieval Jews as interpreters of different languages and cultures, Bernstein demanded that Jews don’t try to be “more German than the Germans,more English than the English”. In a global conflict asWorldWar I, Jews as a people scattered among all the nations had, in his eyes, a unique opportunity to rescue the cosmopolitan ideals of Europe. In a similar spirit, the writerArnold


Zweig argued afterWorldWar I that Jews could have played a crucial role as peacemakers: “Had they not been too weak, isolated, left totally alone, peace could have originated fromthem.” This kind of cosmopolitanism, of


course, also served the cause of the antisemites. Jews and cosmopolitans often became synonyms. The name Rothschild sufficed to satisfy the antisemitic stereotypes of international Jewry. Henry Wickem Steed, the foreign editor of The Times, and Lord Northcliff, the proprietor of the paper, called Rothschild’s appeal for peace “a dirty German-Jewish international financial attempt to bully us into advocating neutrality.” It did not help that Rothschild’s great-grandfather had already settled in England, that he himself was a member of the House of Lords, but for the ‘true Englishman’ he remained a “dirty German Jew.” European culture for many


generations was shaped by the presence of Jews. In an ironic twist of history, today’s European culture might be said to be shaped by their absence. After decades of silence, the absence of


Jews, the void created by theirmassmurder, brought about a new, a different Jewish culture – a Jewish culture without Jews. This process culminated in the years before and after the turn of themillennium. The establishment of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline at European universities


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JEWISh rEnaISSancE octoBEr 2011


I d E n t I t y


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